Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

For those familiar with Martin Heidegger’s jargon, this chapter entails a major paradox. Bodenständigkeit—rootedness in the soil—is an important concept throughout Heidegger’s work.[116] The term was not coined by him and had been used by the völkisch Right after the Great War to signify a deep spiritual bond between community and soil, landscape, homeland, and native earth. Now, even if Heidegger distanced himself from a biologically racial notion of the German Volk, not following the blood part of Darré’s Blut und Boden, his soil was enough to mark Jews as a threat to the Volksgemeinschaft by virtue of their rootless, ahistorical, urban identity.[117] In spite of his early enthusiasm after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Heidegger would progressively move away from the regime in subsequent years. This was a move dictated less by an acknowledgment of the horrors of Nazism than by Heidegger’s disgust with a regime that was not as revolutionary radical as he had hoped for, a move typical of many first-hour supporters disappointed with regimes that were never as pure as fascist movements promised.[118] Instead of Nazism contributing to a Platonic “collective break-out of the cave,” to the renewal of the Western spirit after God’s death, the mobilization of science in industry-university partnerships and in the service of the Four-Year Plan made it indistinguishable from other isms—bolshevism, liberalism, or (even worse) Americanism.[119] Nazism, Heidegger asserted, became part of the “Machinations” and “Total Mobilization” characteristic of Modernity, with science enlisted in the “domination and regulation of all objects for the sake of their usefulness and breeding.”[120] Breeding, for Heidegger, made life useful, objectified it, forming part of the overarching modern process of uprooting humans from the soil through the forgetting of Being.

The paradox lies in the fact that animal breeders used rootedness in the soil (Bodenständigkeit) as the guiding principle of their activities. Scientists and the Nazi agricultural leadership took technoscientific forms of life as the ones able to root Germans back in the soil. Bodenständigkeit was indeed a property to be measured through performance tests, and could thus be operationalized to root the German Volk in the soil, materializing the Nazis’ reactionary revolution. Animal pedigrees detailing genealogy and performance indicated the contribution of individual breeding animals to the national community. As the ruthless Herbert Backe insisted, those animals that didn’t comply with the standards were to be eliminated; they had no place in Nazi ecology.[121] Not only was Backe responsible for the infamous Hunger Plan that eliminated millions of Jews and Slavs; he also dictated which domesticated animals were part of the national body. Heidegger could have claimed that German breeders such as Frölich and Schmidt didn’t understand that their hogs were indistinguishable from American or British ones: they were just all modern. But in fact they were not: they were fatter, and they were bred to thrive on a potato-based diet. Contrary to many historical references to animals and humans in Nazi times, pigs were not just metaphors calling for comparisons between the way they were bred and the Nazi breeding of humans. It was the particular way they were bred, making them bodenständig, that formed the new ties weaving the German Volk. The animals scientists designed were intended to perform the transition of German society into a national community, embodying Nazi alternative modernity.

II Empire

“Lebensraum” (“living space”), “Grande Italia” (“Great Italy”), and “Portugal não é um país pequeno” (“Portugal is not a small country”) were all well-known formulas of the fascist era. They summarized the imperial ambitions of each regime and the instability of the geopolitical order that came out of World War I.[1] The chapters in this part of the book deal with technoscientific organisms in the imperial territories of the fascist regimes of Mussolini, Salazar, and Hitler. In all three cases, strong claims about the importance of the national soil for the survival of the organic nation translated into imperial expansionism. Each of the three fascist dictators spoke of his nation’s natural right to have colonies. All three shared a radical conviction that without an empire there was no nation. The organisms I deal with in these chapters were, I contend, central in materializing these dangerously murderous imperial visions into concrete projects in the European possessions (Poland and Ukraine) and the African possessions (Libya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola) of the three fascist regimes.