by Hugh Raffles
23. For a concise account of the politics of this debate, see Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30–38, who points out that antisemites considered Lamarckism a Jewish doctrine.
24. For the detailing of this point in relation to Germany, see Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” Osiris 3 (1987): 193–226.
25. The point here is that the logics of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eugenics could not only bolster anti-militarist agendas (it is the breeding stock of strong young men that is lost in war) but could also underlie welfarist social agendas based on class. On this, see Robert A. Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 687–700.
26. Alfred Nossig, Die Bilanz des Zionismus [The Balance Sheet of Zionism] (Basel, Switzerland: Verlag von B. Wepf, 1903), 21, quoted in Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 9.
27. I am leaving aside here the complex history of shifting relations between German Jews and “eastern Jews,” in which the location of Jewish degeneracy moved gradually from the Ostjuden to the Diaspora more broadly and a Romantic critique of the psychopathologizing impact of modernity on the Jews of the West. For many Zionists, eastern Jews came to stand both as the expression of pathology (triply oppressed by antisemitism, poverty, and the Orthodox rabbinate) and, somewhat later, as the positive site of an authentic Judentum in contrast to the deethnicized modern Jews of western Europe. See Steven E. Aschheim’s groundbreaking Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
28. Though, of course, for many Jews—and not only the religious—statements such as Marx’s “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism” (“On the Jewish Question,” 1843) and Kautsky’s “The sooner … [Judaism] disappears, the better it will be, not only for society, but also for the Jews themselves” (Are the Jews a Race?, 1914) invite a form of extermination.
29. See Alfred Nossig, Zionismus und Judenheit: Krisis und Lösung [Zionism and Jewry: Crisis and Solution] (Berlin: Interterritorialer Verlag “Renaissance,” 1922), 17.
30. See Israel Kolatt, “The Zionist Movement and the Arabs,” in Zionism and the Arabs: Essays, ed. Shmuel Almog (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel, 1983), 1–34.
31. Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 22. Presumably, this offer was made under the Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement, by which 60,000 Jews were able to leave Germany from November 1933 until December 1939 (that is, soon after the SS took direct control of Jewish “emigration”). The agreement permitted the transfer of part of the value of emigrants’ possessions to the Jewish Agency in Palestine in the form of German goods worth an allegedly equivalent amount.
32. Marek Edelman, “The Ghetto Fights,” in The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw, Poland: Interpress, n.d.), 39.
33. Krall, Shielding the Flame, 15. The publication of Edelman’s memoir, in 1977, was an important moment in the Polish reassessment of the Holocaust. The book sold out its initial print run of 10,000 copies in just a few days, and Edelman, who went on to become an activist in Solidarity, found himself a reluctant celebrity.
34. I take the image and its connection to Edelman from Paul Julian Weindling’s magisterial Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. It was Weindling who convinced me that if Himmler’s conflation of Jews and lice was a commonplace among Nazi leaders, it was also both the index to a specific set of regional histories and a recognizable code that summarized a concrete array of racial policies and practices.
35. Alfred Nossig, Die Sozialhygiene der Juden und des altorientalischen Völkerkreises [Social Hygiene of the Jews and Ancient Oriental Peoples] (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1894); Alfred Ploetz, Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen: Ein Versuch über die Rassenhygiene und ihr Verhältnis zu den humanen Idealen, besonders zum Sozialismus [The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak: An Essay Concerning Racial Hygiene and Its Relationship to Humanitarian Ideals, in Particular to Socialism] (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1895). The phrase is from Procter, Racial Hygiene, 15. I do not want to flatten the politics of German racial hygiene by suggesting that it was a straightforwardly racist project from the outset. As all scholars of the period are at pains to make clear, eugenics was sufficiently flexible to appeal to thinkers across the political spectrum. The German variant was initially a more or less conventional eugenics movement that paralleled contemporary tendencies elsewhere in Europe in its concern with “improving” the population in general; that is, it emphasized the human race ahead of specific races. In those early years, the implications of such politics for gender (via reproduction) were more significant than they were for specific racial groups. Nonetheless, in Germany, as in Britain, there was quite clearly a subjugated Nordic tendency—both institutionally organized and theoretically emergent—present in these earliest expressions. Moreover, where Nossig emphasized the positive role of the state in improving health care, Ploetz proposed negative policy logics, such as the withdrawal of medical support from the weak and otherwise undesirable. By 1918, the German race-hygiene movement had been captured by the conservative nationalists who would staff the Nazi medical hierarchy. For thorough accounts, see Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Proctor, Racial Hygiene; Paul Julian Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement”; and Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); in relation to German anthropology, see Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition,” in Bones, Bodies and Behavior: Essays in Behavioral Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer.”
36. Many of these details are now widely available despite the increasing currency of Holocaust denial and revision. See, for example, Uwe Dietrich Adam, “The Gas Chambers,” in Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, ed. François Furet (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 134–54; and Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 301–3. Of the six Nazi death camps, only Auschwitz and Majdanek—which accounted for approximately 20 percent of the Jewish deaths in the Holocaust—used Zyklon B. In the other four camps, prisoners were gassed with carbon monoxide.
37. See Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism?’,” trans. Chris Turner, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), 28n8; see also Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” eds. Bryan Cheyette and Lyn Marcus (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
38. The principal source for this material is Weindling’s exhaustive Epidemics and Genocide, on which I have drawn extensively for the remainder of this section.
39. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 13; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 6.
40. A notion resurrected by Hitler in Mein Kampf; see Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 221.
41. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensible for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1935); Weindling, Epidemics and Geno
cide, 8.
42. Perhaps drawing on the example of the reconcentrado system established by Spain in Cuba in 1896, “concentration camps” became a notable feature of colonial rule in southern Africa. Surpassing Kitchener’s camps for Boer civilians, from which the name originated, the most notorious example was German: the camps established for the Herero in 1906 and abolished in 1908 under pressure from liberal church groups and the Social Democrats in Berlin. A concise account is provided by Tilman Dedering, who is careful—and I think correct—to distinguish between these slave-labor camps and the extermination camps of the Nazis, instead pointing to links between the genocidal actions of the Schutztruppe in Namibia (German Southwest Africa) in 1904–6 and those of the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front during the 1940s. Dedering, “‘A Certain Rigorous Treatment of All Parts of the Nation’: The Annihilation of the Herero in German South West Africa, 1904,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 204–22. Nonetheless, the fondness of the infamous general Lothar von Trotha for the word extermination (Vernichtung) in regard to the Herero echoes the term’s increasing vernacular currency through the popularization of Koch’s applied biology and thickens the connections that tie Europe and Africa as sites of German genocide. For a detailed history of the Herero, see Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890–1923 (Oxford, U.K.: James Currey, 1999). For a similar argument that emphasizes the colonial sites of genocidal practice as a corrective to work that threatens to dehistoricize the Shoah by insisting on its sui generis European genesis, see Paul Gilroy, “Not Being Inhuman,” afterword to Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 282–97.
43. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 19–30.
44. See Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
45. One example of this concern was the German campaign—in which modernizing Jewish doctors also participated—against the mikvah, the Jewish ritual bath. See Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 42–43. Later, however, we see this discourse shift and an emphasis placed on the vulnerability of Germans to contagion and the innate resistance of “eastern peoples,” who, so the argument went, had grown up in the midst of disease.
46. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 63–65.
47. Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 297.
48. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 81–82.
49. Ibid., 102.
50. This reaction was not limited to Germany. The Aliens Restriction Act passed in Britain in 1919 allowed inspection and “decontamination” of arrivals. Winston Churchill’s florid characterization of Soviet Russia in a 1920 speech justifying support for the Whites in the civil war offers something of the flavor of the times: anti-Bolsheviks were defending Europe against “a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia, a Russia of armed hordes smiting not only with bayonets and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by the swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slay the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroy the health and even the souls of nations.” Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 130; Churchill quoted ibid, 149.
51. Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 299. Weindling makes the important observation that the catastrophic Russian epidemic and famine served as a vast experimental station for German tropical specialists recently deprived of colonial medical subjects. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 177–78.
52. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, 226, 228, 236.
53. Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 22–24.
54. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, 103, 104, 226.
55. From the diary of Jonas Turkow, quoted in Zylberberg, “Trials of Alfred Nossig,” 44.
Kafka
1. See David L. Wagner, Caterpillars of Eastern North America: A Guide to Identification and Natural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
2. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 713.
3. Daniel Janzen quoted in Andy Newman, “Quick, Before It Molts,” New York Times, August 8, 2006.
4. Jules Michelet, The Insect, trans. W. H. Davenport Adams (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1883), 111, 112. My thanks to Hylon White for introducing me to Michelet’s wonderful book.
5. Ibid., 111.
6. Ibid., 112.
7. In this and the next two paragraphs, I draw heavily on Lionel Gossman’s excellent “Michelet and Natural History: The Alibi of Nature,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145, no. 3 (2001): 283–333.
8. Gossman convincingly argues that financial difficulties led to Michelet’s shift from history to the more popular natural history. Encouraged by his young second wife, Athénais Mialaret, Michelet authored a series of best-selling natural history titles, including L’insecte. The character of their collaboration is not fully clear. In Gossman’s reading, it was tense and competitive with Michelet consistently asserting the upper hand and the ultimate contribution of Mialaret—who would go on after her husband’s death to achieve a literary reputation of her own—reduced largely to that of a researcher.
9. Letter to Eugene Noël, October 17, 1853, quoted in Gossman, “Michelet and Natural History,” 289.
10. Ibid., 114.
11. Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 30. Having attracted considerable attention over the past few years, Maria Sibylla Merian is fast becoming the Frida Kahlo of natural history. Of the several useful accounts, I have drawn most heavily on Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (New York: Harcourt, 2007).
12. Maria Sibylla Merian, “Ad lectorum,” in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam: Gerard Valck, 1705), quoted in Davis, Women on the Margins, 144.
13. See “The Lady Who Loved Worms,” in Translations from Early Japanese Literature, ed. Edwin O. Reischauer and Joseph K. Yamagiwa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 186–95.
14. Charlotte Jacob-Hanson, “Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist-Naturalist,” Magazine Antiques, August 1, 2000, 174–83.
15. Victoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Metamorphosis of Perspective: ‘Merian’ as a Subject of Feminist Discourse,” in Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist and Naturalist, 1647–1717, ed. Kurt Wettengl, trans. John S. Southard (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje, 1998), 214.
16. Michelet, Insect, 361.
17. My thanks to Edward Kamens for a discussion of this point. See also Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literaure (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 66.
18. Robert L. Backus, trans., The Riverside Counselor’s Stories: Vernacular Fiction of Late Heian Japan (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 53. I have incorporated Haruo Shirane’s amendment into Backus’s translation; see his review of The Riverside Counselor’s Stories in the Journal of Japanese Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 165–68.
19. Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, quoted in Schmidt-Lisenhoff, “Metamorphosis of Perspective,” 218.
20. Franz Kafka, “A Report to the Academy,” in The Transformation and Other Stories, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1992), 187, 190.
Language
1. The quotation can be found in James L. Gould’s Ethology: The Mechanisms and Evolution of Behavior (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 4. Without writing directly on von Frisch, Eileen Crist has also drawn attention to this rhetorical and epistemological shift from natural history to classical ethology. My reading of von Frisch locates him as something of a transitional figure in her schema between Jean-Henri Fabre (writing in what Crist
calls the Verstehen tradition of animal studies, a hermeneutic ethology) and the new objectivism of Lorenz and Tinbergen. See Crist, “Naturalists’ Portrayals of Animal Life: Engaging the Verstehen Approach,” Social Studies of Science 26, no. 4 (1996): 799–838; and Christ, “The Ethological Constitution of Animals as Natural Objects: The Technical Writings of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen,” Biology and Philosophy 13, no. 1 (1998): 61–102.
2. An argument first elaborated by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). For a useful discussion, see Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3. On Clever Hans, see Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). In regard to the impact of this episode on ethology, “the analysis of learning was limited to simple S-R (stimulus-response) associations; hypothesizing the existence of higher-level cognitive activities in animals was scrupulously avoided … until the 1960s and 1970s.” James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, The Honey Bee (New York: Scientific American, 1988), 216.
4. Karl von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, trans. Lisbeth Gombrich (Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon Press, 1967), 149.
5. Ibid.
6. On this, see Ute Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10–58.
7. Von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, 71.
8. Ibid., 57.
9. Ibid., 72–73.
10. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee, 58.
11. In his monumental history of the early ethologists, Richard Burkhardt quotes a passage from von Frisch’s Du und das Leben (You and Life), a popular biology text published in 1938 in a series sponsored by Goebbels. Burkhardt writes that von Frisch “concluded the book with a section on race hygiene, voicing there the familiar warning that the relaxation of natural selection in higher cultures was leading to the perpetuation of variations that in the wild would have been ‘mercilessly weeded out.’ … This amounted in effect, he said, to an ‘encouragement of the inferior,’ or, as he put it more bluntly, ‘A tub of lard or a blind man finds his table as well set as any other person.’” Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 248.
