An American Insect in Imperial Germany: Visibility and Control in Making the Phylloxera in Germany, 1870–1914

Abstract

The ArgumentThe vine louse Phylloxera vastatrix became a “pest” as it was transferred from North America and from France to Germany during the 1870s. Embodying the “invading alien,” it assumed a cultural position that increasingly gained importance in Imperial Germany. In this process, the minute insect, living invisibly underground, was made visible and became constitutive of the scientific-technological object, “pest,” pertaining to a scientific discipline, modern economic entomology. The “pest” phylloxera emerged by being made visible in a way that enabled control measures against it. Thus, visibility functioned as a prerequisite for control measures. I differentiate between social visibility and physical visibility, as well as between social control and physical control of the “introduced pest.” The object phylloxera emerged at the intersection of techniques of social control such as surveillance, techniques of physical control such as disinfection, and representational practices of the sciences such as mathematics and graphics. The space of its visibility was not the vineyard as property of a vintner but the vineyard as national territory, where German (viti-) culture was defended against foreign infiltration and destruction. Many vintners had alternate visions of the grapevine disease, they resented the invasion and destruction of their vineyards by government officers, and thus they did not participate in the social and epistemic constitution of the “pest.” By 1914, the “introduced pest” had not yet become an effective “machinery.” However, the “pest” as an object of scientific knowledge emerged together with economic entomology. The field became organized as a discipline in Germany in 1913, forty years after the phylloxera had first aroused the minds of some worried Wilhelmians, and, together with its nationalistic images, the field of “pest” control became organized towards a redefinition of German society and its perceived dangers.

Strange Birds: Ornithology and the Advent of the Collared Dove in Post-World War II Germany

“…The association of new entrants with certain damage to agriculture, technical infrastructure, etc. often led to their demonization as “vermin” or “monsters” (Chew 2009; Coates 2006; Jansen 2000; idem 2003). Conversely, exotic species were also welcomed and supported, for example – as Coates (2006) has described in his study of the late nineteenth-century North American controversy on the “English sparrow” – to combat pests.…”

“…Since the nineteenth century, when botanists began to develop subtle categorizations of species according to their degree of nativeness (see Chew 2009), biotic exchange has increasingly come to be framed as a matter of a species belonging to a certain territory or ecological system. Such understandings not only rely on negotiable eco-historical periodizations and delineations of human agency (Chew and Hamilton 2011; Smout 2003; Helmreich 2005); all too often they have also blended into nationalistic, xenophobic, or racist discourses (Landström 2005; Peretti 1998; Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahm 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Jansen 2000; Pauly 1996; Coates 2006).…”