"Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser. . . ": Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland 1889-1945 (review)

Innovations in agricultural technology have had the most immediate consequences for modern societies. And yet the history of the agricultural sciences, if compared with the history of eugenics and medical genetics, is under-researched. The only exception is a small number of studies on the close relationship between the rise of Mendelism and its application in agricultural plant breeding in the United States and the United Kingdom. Thomas Wieland's book comprehensively covers the changing relationship among plant breeding, agricultural science, and genetics in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Third Reich. It draws on an impressive amount of rare published and archival sources.

Following German academic customs, the book is a slightly edited version of Wieland's doctoral dissertation, approved in 2000 by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. It thus misses some more recent German publications on the agricultural sciences during the Nazi period, notably the collective volume Autarkie und Ostexpansion (2002) edited by Susanne Heim. Wieland worked in parallel with Jonathan Harwood, whose Technology's Dilemma: Agricultural Colleges between Science and Practice in Germany, 1860–1934 (2005) explores the social history of German agricultural education. Both books complement each other, and in the case of Wieland's it is its epistemological focus—admirably substantiated by a detailed reconstruction of the institutional, social, and political-economical history of German agricultural science—that makes it an indispensable contribution to the field.

The author's central thesis is that plant breeding was characterized by two interrelated trends: an increasing scientification, and an increasing politicization. Scientification began in private-sector plant breeding. Members of a new class of "agrarian entrepreneurs" in Prussia, possessing large estates and some academic training, began to experiment with new methods, like pedigree selection, and successfully marketed new strains of cereals. Although some of them published extensively during the 1880s and 1890s, their concerns remained practical and their methods empirical. As an academic specialty, plant breeding was instituted by agricultural scientists, who succeeded in securing support from agricultural associations and state administrations, the latter especially in Württemberg and Bavaria where the dominance of small-scale farming precluded private initiatives.

Establishing plant breeding as an object of scientific expertise had several consequences, which inadvertently prepared it for the reception of Mendelism. Plant breeding came to be seen as independent of plant cultivation, breeding methods as well as their products were subjected to centralized control and testing, and the plant organism was broken down into quantifiable traits. Wieland's fourth chapter explores how these developments fed into the reception of Mendelian theory. It provides fascinating reading, especially because Wieland resists the temptation either to conflate or to oppose science and technology. He emphasizes instead that the agricultural plant, turned into an object of scientific inquiry, functioned as a "boundary object" by separating academic from commercial plant breeding on the one hand, but establishing a connection between these two spheres as well (p. 136).

It is within this tension that Wieland then explores the politicization of plant breeding. Academic plant breeders had always argued for the national rather than local importance of their subject. The short-lived epoch of German colonialism before World War I, the striving for national autarchy after the war, and the National Socialist policies of "Erzeugungsschlacht" and "Lebensraum" provided political agendas that were readily taken up by academic plant breeders to promote their science. In a detailed comparison of Theodor Roemer, professor for agricultural sciences in Halle, and Erwin Baur, the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research, Wieland shows that it was not a closeness to practical concerns, exemplified by Roemer, that resulted in the politicization of the subject. Quite the contrary, it was Baur and his school—which tried to emulate the successes of Thomas H. Morgan's Drosophila genetics by turning the snapdragon (Antirrhinum) into a model organism and experimenting with mutagens—that was most successful in...