This veteran fighter status for pigs calls for probing other dimensions of fascism in order to make the case that the expression “fascist pigs” is more than blague. The combination of performance tests, fats, and rootedness in the soil may guide us in systematizing the connections between pigs and the fascist nature of Nazism. Militarism, which makes an important part of any proper fascist regime, was not limited to the reference to World War I. As understood by Darré, mobilization for the nutrition of the German people with domestic sources was perceived to be as crucial for the survival of the Volk as having a well-equipped military. More to the point, fatter and rooted-in-the-soil pigs were to contribute to Germany’s preparedness for war, as intended by the 1936 Four-Year Plan. Fat, rooted-in-the-soil pigs were a major asset for waging war, promising to overcome the alleged causes of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Closely associated with fascist militarism was exacerbated nationalism, nurtured by the feeding of the people through produce from the national soil. Pigs fed on fodders imported from the United States or Argentina didn’t have the same nationalizing effects as those fed on tuber crops produced on estates in eastern Germany. Also, fatter pigs ensured that Germans were getting their daily intake of fats from their national soil. By rearing pigs in compliance with the performance standards established by scientists and distributed by the RNS’s extended network, one was contributing to a common national aim and not just to one’s individual profit. Pigs served first and foremost to nurture the national community, not to thrive in capitalist markets. This transcendent nature of pig rearing and feeding was also made present by RNS leaflets urging German women to feed animals on leftovers from their households. The RNS promoted a peasant life organized neither in individualistic liberal terms nor in terms of social class, establishing instead a corporatist structure transcending both. The mammoth state structure of the RNS was built on the implementation of such standards as the animal performance tests developed at Göttingen and Halle. Performance tests ensured that pigs were fat and rooted in the soil (bodenständig), making pigs contributing to the Nazi regime through militarism, nationalism, transcendentalism, and statism. These four dimensions condense much of the phenomenon of fascism, and it is thus reasonable to assert that performance tests selected those pigs performing fascism. In other words, performance tests were designed to produce fascist pigs.
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.
Though Nazism is not commonly dealt in the literature on colonialism, many scholars have emphasized the continuities between colonialism and Nazi rule in eastern Europe.[2] This has been mostly done by searching for ideological connections between Germany’s pre–World War I African empire and Nazi Germany’s occupation of eastern Europe.[3] But although the ever-expanding literature on Nazi ruling practices in eastern Europe doesn’t refrain from using references to colonialism, these tend to be very generic and ahistorical, not confronting the problem of other European colonial experiences of the time directly and systematically.[4] Pointed observations by anti-colonial intellectuals, such as Aimé Césaire’s comments on toleration of Nazism before it was inflicted on Europeans “because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples” or his disciple Frantz Fanon’s description of Nazism as “a colonial system in the very heart of Europe,” haven’t led to systematic scholarship on Nazism in eastern Europe as colonialism.[5]
116
Charles R. Bambach,
117
Robert Bernasconi, “Race and Earth in Heidegger’s thinking during the late 1930s,”
118
Here I follow Rüdiger Safranski’s still unsurpassed biographical study
120
Martin Heidegger,
121
The ultimate aim was to guarantee the nutritional freedom of the German national community, and for Herbert Backe that entailed not only eliminating millions of Jews and Slaves through his horrendous Hunger Plan but also getting rid of pigs that were not bodenständig.
1
On the importance of expansionist ambitions for fascist regimes, see Aristotle A. Kallis,
2
The literature on the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe is enormous. I found the following references especially usefuclass="underline" Mark Mazower,
3
Jürgen Zimmerer,
4
On the problems of being too generic when using the concept of colonialism, see Frederick Cooper,
5
Frantz Fanon,