Insectopedia (65 page)

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 Genocide
, 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.

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.