27 - Representations of the Poison Gas War on the Eastern Front, 1915–1917

Summary

This chapter takes up a half-forgotten novel fragment of 1941-2 by André Malraux based on first-hand accounts from the 1914 War, as well as two, neglected photographs of targeted civilian casualties of poison gas made in a Macedonian town in 1917 by the German Jewish criminologist R. A. Reiss. It moves beyond conventional archives to uncover complex histories, interweaving cultural artifacts with archival material to represent at two distinct moments the experimental poison gas war on the eastern front. Prussic acid -- by 1917, the base for an early form of Zyklon – provides the constant in these episodes. Eastern Europe, an area historically associated with colonialism and post-colonialism, furnished the choice terrain in 1915-17 of poison gas warfare, and so, premonitions of a Nazi continental imperialism which relied on gas, a weapon designed for colonial use, to enforce racial hierarchies. These cultural artifacts –Malraux’s Bolimów/Bolgako and Reiss’s Monástir -- map the head of the “Zyklon trail,” in Lemkin’s phrase. The experimental poison gas war on the eastern front substitutes premonitory vistas for the classic, western battlescapes of Wilfred Owen’s poetry by redrawing the templates and boundaries of the developmental logic of Nazi “scientific violence” amidst occupation, subjugation, and ethnic/racial warfare.