Mimicking Malaparte’s gesture, I have opted to bring into the narrative organisms with the power to exemplify different dimensions of fascism. The choice of technoscientific animals and plants was determined by their historical significance in constituting a fascist alternative modernity, by their ability to embody fascism. They form a bestiary combining historians of science and technology and STS scholars’ organism-centered narratives with political and cultural historians’ more general concerns with the historical nature of fascism.
I Nation
That the survival of the organic nation depended as much on weaponry as on food was the lesson learned from the food crisis of World War I by every radical right-wing movement in Europe. The Fascists’ argument was simple: Not only had dependence on cheap cereals from the Americas impoverished peasants, driving them out of the fields; it had also exposed European countries’ vulnerability in case of war. Geopolitical considerations were intertwined with the concrete bodily experience of hunger to make the case that the organic nation could grow only on the national soil. Characteristically, fascists championed a turn to autarky by increasing domestic production and supporting peasant populations.
What might be perceived as a traditionalist back-to-the-land movement made sense only because of science. As the chapters in this part of the book make clear, technoscientific organisms made the radical nationalism of Mussolini, Salazar, and Hitler plausible. A new class of organisms promised to increase the productivity of the national soil, now allegedly able to feed the organic nation and to free it from constraints imposed by the British Empire or the United States. Large-scale campaigns for food production, the first mass mobilizations of the three regimes, were based on new strains of wheat, potatoes, and pigs. The limits of fascism in improving peasants’ conditions and in countervailing urbanization are well known, but in the three cases considered in this book liberal capitalism disappeared from the countryside and was replaced by gigantic bureaucratic structures controlling the production, the processing, and the distribution of food.. By following the trajectories of new strains of wheat resistant to lodging, potatoes immune to late blight, and fat bodenständig pigs, the narrative explores how campaigns turned into state structures, illuminating the process of making a fascist state. The aim is to understand how fascist alternative modernity first came into being by cultivating the national soil with technoscientific organisms.
Chapters 1 and 2 consider the importance of the geneticist Nazareno Strampelli’s wheat “elite races” for the Italian “Battle of Wheat” (1925) and the Portuguese “Wheat Campaign” (1929) and for the institutionalization of the regimes of Mussolini and Salazar. Chapters 3 and 4 develop a similar argument for Nazism and the “Battle for Production” (Erzeugunsschlacht) launched in 1934, a year after Hitler’s seizure of power. Grain was also important in Germany’s food policy, but the technoscientific organisms through which I will follow the entanglements between standardizing life and Nazism are pigs and potatoes. I argue that these two organisms were at the core of a major effort by the Nazi regime to root Germans in the national soil—an effort that was aimed at transforming German society into a national community, a Gesellschaft into a Gemeinschaft.[1]
This focus on the transition from impersonal social bonds into communitarian ties is in tune with the rich literature dealing with fascism as a modern political religion. In the 1990s, some historians claimed that by looking at the cultural dimensions of the phenomenon we had reached a consensus on its contested nature, defining fascism as a “palingenetic myth of rebirth.”[2] This myth of rebirth of a race, a culture, a nation, or all three together after a perceived period of decadence and degeneracy was taken as powerful enough to produce the internal cohesion of a movement committed to the creation of a “new man” defined as an alternative both to the individualism of liberal ideology and the social classes of Marxism. Countering the uprooting effects of modernization processes, fascism constituted a “third way” that offered its followers the opportunity to participate in an allegedly authentic brotherhood based in a new secular religion of organic nationalism. There is, to be sure, much to commend this interpretation. First, it moved us away from crude approaches, typical of Marxist scholarship, that took fascism as a simple radicalization of the all-encompassing struggle between workers and capitalists, with fascists seen as merely the violent faction of the latter.[3] But perhaps more important, it challenged historians to explain in detail the processes by which the new alternative fascist modernity was built.
Historians who have followed the consensus too closely tend to use, nevertheless, a crude notion of culture. In too many narratives we are left with no more than a set of values and beliefs that are supposed to characterize fascism movements and regimes. Following Durkheim’s research agenda, if the social scientist is able to properly identify those shared beliefs, the collective representations, the actual effects of fascist rule in the world are supposed to follow automatically. In such a dualist approach, one never understands very well how the ethereal realm of ideas and the low sphere of materiality interact, the relation between the two being established through direct correspondence: these beliefs entail those actions. The actual processes through which detached radical worldviews operate in the world are seen as unproblematic. In this book, in order to overcome the Durkheimian dualistic framework, I intend to explore how certain things embody fascism.[4]
Wheat, potatoes, pigs, and all the other things I discuss in this book are not to be understood as mere symbols of fascist ideology. Yes, there was a lot of propaganda about food, but the main question here is how the making and growing of new strains of plants and animals could embody a new political regime. We now know that concrete building and labor practices were attached to the high rhetoric of Albert Speer’s architectural designs, and that Himmler’s SS and its system of concentration camps grew on supplying forced labor and building materials for erecting imposing stadiums and government buildings.[5] The buildings were not just representations of grandeur, community, or hierarchy; they also performed fascism through the violent building processes that brought them into being. More to the point, fascism was performed through the existence of these things. In part I of the book, the things are wheat, potatoes, and pigs, and it is argued they perform fascism and thus are properly considered fascist wheat, fascist potatoes, and fascist pigs.
1 Wheat: Food Battles, Elite Breeds, and Mussolini’s Fascist Regime
The Italian War for Bread Independence
Mussolini’s dream was a clear one: “The Italian land giving bread to all Italians!”[1] Freeing Italy from the “slavery of foreign grain” was a crucial issue in the political economy of the fascist regime that came to power in 1922.[2] Fascists envisaged Italy as an autarkic economy, able to release itself from dependency on the “plutocratic states” that dominated the world economy: the British Empire and the United States. The closing of the gap with industrialized nations and the building of a Great Italy was to be achieved by a nationalistic development policy promoting domestic industries producing for internal markets and making intensive use of the country’s own resources.[3] Early on, two big steps were taken in this direction: the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat) in 1925 and the Battaglia della Lira (Battle of the Lira) in 1926. The latter may be summarized as the stabilization of the lira at the high exchange rate of 90 lira to the pound sterling, making it impossible for Italian exports to compete in world markets. Together with the strong lira came an elaborate new system of tariff protection for national industries, with a proliferation of institutes and committees that allowed the state a degree of control over the economy previously unknown.[4] The Battle of Wheat, on the other hand, was supposed to put an end to the foreign-exchange deficit of the post–World War I years, half of it directly caused by grain imports that made Italy the third-largest wheat importer in the world, behind only the United Kingdom and Germany. The victory would be declared the moment Italian fields would produce 15 quintals per hectare (22 bushels per acre), an increase in productivity by one third in comparison to the post–World War I values and well above the productivity of the US for the years 1923–1927 (14½ bushels per acre). This new mythical number, 15 quintals per hectare, in conjunction with quota 90, allegedly would cover the national deficit in wheat without a need to increase the area dedicated to its cultivation.[5]
1
On the tension between society and community and how it relates to the building of a fascist alternative modernity, see Roger Griffin,
2
Roger Griffin is the scholar who has pushed more insistently for such consensus. See “The primacy of culture: The growth (or manufacture) of consensus within fascist studies,”
3
Nikos Poulantzas,
4
On ways of overcoming the limitations of Durkheim’s approach in the social sciences, see Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay,
5
Paul B. Jaskot,
1
Benito Mussolini, “La Premiazione dei veliti della ‘Battaglia del Grano,’” in Mussolini,
2
For general discussions on the political economy of the Italian fascist regime, the following sources are particularly valuable: Domenico Petri,
3
The turn to more autarkic policies is normally associated in the historiography with the replacement of the finance minister Alberto de Stefani by Giuseppe Volpi in July 1925. Only in 1936, after the invasion of Ethiopia, was Autarky officially celebrated as such by the regime.
4
Petri,
5
Fifteen quintals per hectare corresponds to 1,500 kilograms per 2½ acres, or 600 kilograms per acre, or 22 bushels of wheat per acre. In 1928 the US produced some 915 million bushels of wheat in an area of 58 million acres, corresponding roughly to 16 bushels per acre. That same year Italy produced 228 million bushels from 12 million acres—19 bushels per acre. Source: