Germany's turn from an agricultural nation to an industrial powerhouse was rapid, disorienting, and well-documented. Changes that began in the nineteenth century accelerated after 1945, with more and more Germans leaving the land for the town or city, and the remaining farms becoming increasingly mechanized. How, though, did the agricultural sector employ ever-fewer Germans but somehow produce ever-greater quantities of beef, chicken, and pork, not to mention eggs and milk, for a hungry public? What, moreover, did this transformation mean for the increasing numbers of Germans whose only close contact with farm animals occurred in the freezer section of the grocery store? Veronika Settele sets out to answer these questions by focusing on developments in German animal husbandry from 1945 to 1990.
Settele takes an “integrated German-German view” (317) of postwar animal husbandry, and the resulting monograph is an example of the value of centering commonalities rather than contrasts in scholarship of the postwar Germanys. In Communist Pigs (2020), Thomas Fleischmann used the growth of pig farming in the GDR as an entry point into how communism shaped the postwar economy and how the industrialization of agriculture both supercharged productivity and created growing environmental problems for rural East Germans. Settele picks up on some of these themes but widens the lens, arguing that the rationalized production of beef, chicken, and pork in both Germanys came about primarily through the increased medical management of farm animals; the adoption of new methods of quantifying farm animals and their products; and the application of new technical innovations to the care and feeding of farm animals.
The end of the Second World War served as a turning point because the crisis conditions of the immediate postwar period – widespread hunger among the human population, weakened health of surviving livestock, and limited availability of feed for existing animals – allowed and accelerated the implementation of efficiencies which animal husbandry experts had been researching since the nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of expellees from the East needed to be settled and integrated into the economies of the FRG and the GDR, and providing them with livestock was a necessary prerequisite to their hoped-for success as farmers. Questions of optimal animal management became of paramount importance to the recovering Germanys.
The book is divided into three thematic sections in roughly chronological order, on the farming of cows, chickens, and pigs. The transformation of these creatures into beef, chicken, and pork is one Settele takes seriously, as she understands animals as living beings; commodities, yes, but not in the usual sense. Their biological processes, possibilities, and limitations affect the extent to which they may be rationalized in both capitalist and communist systems. Animal experts worked, within biological limitations, to transform animals as much as possible into living machines, who could be automatically fed and watered without troubling the farmer, milked on a convenient schedule, maintained in a limited space, or characterized according to a “refinement coefficient” (Veredelungskoeffizient), developed so that the efficiency of poultry operations might be measured and compared.
The stall became the nexus of human-animal interaction and the primary site of the postwar transformation in animal husbandry. Expert agronomists shared their innovations with young farmers through informational films, trade publications, and intensive agricultural education courses. These students applied expert advice by maintaining careful watch over growing herds and flocks, which spent most of their time in a stall and under surveillance rather than grazing in fields. The shrinking of animal horizons was accompanied by other artificial interventions designed to maximize animal output while minimizing input of feed and labor. For cows, artificial insemination facilitated ever-more-selective breeding. The odd chicken in the barnyard, provider of a daily protein supplement to the farm family of yesteryear, became the cage-bound member of a massive flock of factory-farmed birds. Pigs enjoyed a massive redesign of the pigsty, a transformation that minimized human effort required for feeding and cleaning.
The optimization of animal bodies was not without negative consequences, for the animals themselves as well as the lands on which they once grazed. Optimized feeding and mechanized extraction left animals more productive but also more stressed, a phenomenon observed in both Germanys from the 1970s on, which required greater veterinary interventions to reduce animal anxiety and mitigate its impact on production. Settele describes how the redesign and shrinking of pigsties compelled anxious pigs to gnaw off one another's tails, which prompted a series of attempted reforms, until frustrated pig farmers resorted to surgically removing the tails in piglethood. The story underlines a point that Settele makes throughout: animals have been agents as well as objects of agricultural transformation, influencing and resisting the conditions of their care through their responses to change.
Even as animals spent less time in the pasture and more time in the stall, the land reflected the intensification of animal husbandry. In the 1970s, human interest in the origins and living conditions of what graced the dinner plate finally began to offer a counterweight to the overriding demand for abundant meat at affordable prices. Some consumers questioned the ethics of caging chickens for the duration of their lives or the wisdom of allowing rivers of manure slurry (Gülle) to potentially contaminate the drinking water. Fewer people ate meat, and less often, and others protested the pollution caused by animal farming, pointing to trees poisoned by ammonia and sulfur gas from the manure. Settele underscores the moral dimension that began to inform consumer choices in the 1970s and 1980s, which further undermined many farmers’ sense that they were an integral part of German society. Though they produced record numbers of eggs, liters of milk, plucked chickens, and slabs of beef and pork, farmers recognized their diminished status in an industrialized Germany.
The postwar transformation of animal husbandry in the two Germanys can best be understood, Settele suggests, in the context of a larger movement toward agricultural rationalization throughout the Global North. Contrasts between the GDR and the FRG are less illuminating than are the parallels, because these overriding similarities demonstrate the relatively negligible importance of postwar political systems in shaping the ultimate outcomes of a process much bigger than divided Germany. For this reason, Settele's account is of use to historians of the agricultural sciences and agricultural economies in Central Europe, but also in areas well beyond her geographic scope.
