Insectopedia (25 page)

Koch’s most significant legacy in this respect lay in the formalization of a set of authoritarian protocols, including compulsory testing, quarantine, and household disinfection, that he developed and put into practice in colonial Africa. In 1903 in German East Africa, for example, he established a “concentration camp” for the isolation of sleeping sickness. Though the authoritarian management of populations was only one lesson that could be drawn from his work, it was an influential one.
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Claus Schilling, an assistant of Koch’s who would go on to direct a department for tropical medicine at his mentor’s Koch Institute, was eventually executed for his malaria experiments at Dachau.
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Advances in the scientific control of all kinds of pests—bacteria, parasites, and insects—were by no means restricted to Germany. Medical science stimulated both rivalry and a degree of cooperative research among the imperial powers as shared concerns became evident. Hygiene was the rubric that invited investigation into the intertwined vectors of
human, animal, and plant disease as researchers worked to safeguard the health of colonial settlers and their livestock and crops.

At the same time, concern about contamination in Europe and the United States led to restrictive border policies and punitive inspection procedures targeted at particular social groups, with quarantine laws enacted in the United States specifically to prevent the entry of Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms.
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Disease both necessitated and facilitated the isolation of particular groups as sites of medical intervention and social control. The apparent predisposition of Jews and certain others to infection was self-evidently a mark of cultural primitivism.
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We might therefore imagine that hygienic interventions expressed a kind of missionary modernity. But it seems instead that regimes of cleansing were dispensed and experienced as punitive, not redemptive. The implication was that disease, at least for these parasitic populations, was an inherent trait rather than a curable condition.

This is the period in which we see the development of those technologies of disease control that achieve a kind of fulfillment at Auschwitz: collective showers, bacteriological soaps, chemical gas, cremation … These technologies were already compulsory features of a network of border-control stations that fortified the German frontiers with Russia and Poland and encouraged migrants from the east to regard German territory as implacably foreign ground. Following a severe cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which was widely attributed to Russian Jews, Germany closed its eastern borders, relenting only to establish a hygienic transport corridor to the ports of embarkation for Ellis Island. For a while, the major shipping lines took over the financing and expansion of the border-control posts.
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The outbreak of war in 1914 soon produced mass epidemics among refugees, troops, and enemy captives. In a lightning typhus outbreak in Serbia, more than 150,000 civilian refugees and prisoners died in six months.
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Hygiene became an urgent political priority, and sanitary regimens became correspondingly more severe. It was Russian soldiers—rather than the atrocious conditions—who were blamed for the appalling mortality rates in the POW camps. “Eastern peoples” were characterized not as victims of disease but as its carriers. State efforts were directed toward protecting the civilian population from contamination (Russian prisoners were to be tended only by Russian doctors).

The critical scientific breakthrough just prior to the war—the identification of lice as the typhus vector—led to an industrialization of delousing and its expansion to civilians. The historian Paul Weindling describes what this meant:

Weindling describes the mass application of such procedures by German disinfectors throughout German-occupied Poland, Romania, and Lithuania in response to typhus outbreaks during the war. He documents an increasingly strident association of disease with Jews and others regarded as racial degenerates. Jewish-owned stores in Poland were closed until the owners had undergone delousing. Lodz, a city with a large Jewish population, was ringed by thirty-five detention centers for persons considered infested.
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But military defeat in 1918 radically changed the calculus. Rather than expanding into purified colonial living space, medical authorities now found themselves confined to a dramatically reduced national territory. They also found themselves confronting an unmanageable crisis of refugees—mostly ethnic Germans and
Ostjuden—
as well as sick and wounded military personnel returning from the front. In the years following the Treaty of Versailles, highly restrictive immigration controls and draconian inspection practices were imposed in an effort to protect the newly vulnerable
Volk
against contamination from the east.
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Nonetheless, and despite the terrible events of the Russian Civil War—25 million typhus cases and up to 3 million deaths from typhus between 1917 and 1923
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—it was becoming clear that the real danger was no longer external. As early as 1920, police in Berlin and other cities were invoking “hygienic control” as they rounded up
Ostjuden
and transported them to disease-infested camps along the national borders.

Not only the discourses of hygiene (themselves an amalgam of eugenics, social Darwinism, political geography, and pest biology) but also specific technologies, identifiable personnel, and particular institutions dedicated to the eradication of disease shifted rapidly and quite seamlessly to the eradication of people. The elimination of typhus would enable a simultaneous purification of race and polity—one and the same by the mid-1930s—and increasingly the disease’s human victims became functionally and perhaps ontologically indistinguishable from its insect vectors.

From 1918, this trajectory accelerated as a conservative political and medical consensus formed around the understanding that contagion was directly tied to degeneration, that a body politic whose health had been shattered by the humiliation of Versailles was now dangerously contaminated, that disease had reached the racial heartland, and that exorcising the phantasm of infection was the only solution. The interwar period is striking for the radical conflation of political philosophy and medicine, such that ghettos, for example, become places of confinement that protect the excluded German population from disease, and simultaneously—and inevitably, given the conditions inside them—diseased sites that generate a pathological anxiety around fears of contamination from escapees. The rest is too well known to bear further repetition.

An elderly Alfred Nossig appears repeatedly in the diary of Adam Czerniakow. The entries are cryptic and irritated, perhaps even condescending. Nossig runs to Czerniakow with prattle from the ghetto streets; he is short of money; he bombards the Germans with letters; on one occasion, they throw him out of their offices.
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It all raises the suspicion that the old man is senile.
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Czerniakow describes him as “pleading” and “babbling.” He talks about Nossig’s “antics.” At one point he “admonishes” him.
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It is clear that even though Czerniakow may not find Nossig directly threatening, he does not trust him. For a start, Nossig is too familiar with
the Nazis. It is the Germans who introduce him to the Jewish administration, to whom he is already known, and it is the Germans who insist on a position for him. Appropriately enough, he is appointed the council’s emigration officer. But what kind of farcical task is that? Ghettos were soon to be liquidated all across the Reich, and Nossig is negotiating resettlement with the SS as if this is 1914, as if we are all still Germans! Nonetheless, the work seems to energize him, and for a while he appears to convince himself (if no one else) that there is real hope of relocating the Warsaw Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.

When the ghetto is sealed in November 1940, the Nazis appoint Nossig director of its Department of Art and Culture. It seems another absurd position. But opening the committee’s first meeting, the elderly Nossig speaks with characteristic force about the role of art in Jewish Warsaw, by now a place of acute desperation, advancing starvation, and disease. “Art means cleanliness,” he is reported to have said, momentarily bringing together those deeply tortured histories of social hygiene. “We have to introduce culture into the streets,” he insists. The ghetto must be made clean “so that we are not ashamed in front of our German visitors.”
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We know this story. A solitary
Ammophila hirsuta
captures and paralyzes a larva of the turnip moth,
Agrotis segetum.
She drags it to her nest, lays an egg on its soft belly just beyond reach of its feebly waving legs, and exits, barricading the entrance to the burrow behind her. The egg hatches, and the emerging wasp larva at once starts to feed. It grows fat and strong. The caterpillar, unable to move with force but still discerning shape and shadow, sensing atmospheric and chemical changes, and experiencing pain, is slowly consumed, first the nonessential tissue, later the vital organs.

This morning, I read that less than 1 percent of caterpillar eggs survive to adulthood. Such is the ferocity of the predators they face: the birds, reptiles, and mammals (large and small); the parasitoid wasps and flies, the ants, spiders, earwigs, and beetles; the viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Not to mention the gardeners. This state of affairs accounts for the caterpillars’ spectacular battery of defenses: toxic flesh, chemical sprays, aggressive
sounds, spiny bristles, garish coloring, biting mouths, silky escape ropes, unpleasant fluids regurgitated, repellant odors diffused, the precision mimicry of eyespots, horns, faces, and camouflage, the barbed hair, the stinging hair, the intimidating postures, the alliances with ants.
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Still, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood, to that moment when “with a reckless smile,” as Roberto Bolaño put it, they emerge anew.
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Less than 1 percent survive to adulthood? It must be difficult to establish this fact with confidence when there is no reasonable estimate of numbers to begin with and when each caterpillar instar—each larval stage, of which there are often five or six before pupation—can look quite different.

In short, consider the difficulty of establishing this statistic with confidence when caterpillars, as the ecologist Daniel Janzen recently pointed out, “are the last unknown group of big things on the terrestrial world.”
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One claim, two problems: the problem of quantifying survival and the problem of conceptualizing adulthood. If the first problem is insurmountable, the second is harder.

The textbooks explain that a caterpillar is a Lepidoptera larva, the stage in the life cycle of a butterfly or moth between the hatching of the egg and the formation of the pupa. It is the stage that leads to metamorphosis and the adult form, the stage during which some animals increase their mass a thousandfold and repeatedly molt as they travel through their various instars.

Jules Michelet, the historian and naturalist, considered the ways in which this extended journey of the insect from one state to another might parallel the passage of other animals “from the embryonic existence to the independent life.” Unlike mammals, he wrote in
L’insecte
in 1857, for pupating insects “the destination is not merely different, but
contrary, with a violent contrast.” This “is not a simple change of condition,” and these are not “the gentle manoeuvres” by which the rest of us achieve maturity. These beings that are one and the same could not be more different: clay-footed yet ethereal, earthbound yet aloft in the skies, scurrying to the shadows yet drawn to the light, a grinder of leaves yet a sipper of nectar, unencumbered by genitalia yet dedicated to sex. “
The legs will not again be the legs…. The head will not be the head
,” wrote Michelet. This transformation, he saw, “is a thing to confound and almost to terrify the imagination.”
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Michelet no doubt knew that the word
larva
had entered the Romance languages accompanied by older, darker associations. In a time of meaningful correspondences between natural phenomena and everyday life, an age when people discerned potent signs in stones and storms, the word
larva
conjured disembodied spirits, ghosts, specters, and hobgoblins, and it seized on its insect in a fit of recognition. The duality of the word expressed the occult ambiguity of the creature. It was Linnaeus who insisted on the restrictive modern meaning of the term and, with that shift of logic and sentiment, began the textbook entry that still stands between us and the uncanny reality of the thing.