In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Menschen und Haustiere im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte by Amir Zelinger
  • Maureen O. Gallagher
Menschen und Haustiere im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte. By Amir Zelinger. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018. Pp. 404. Cloth €39.99. ISBN 978-3837639353.

Many of us accept as a given the presence of cats, dogs, fish, birds, reptiles, and small mammals in our homes, but, like all social conventions, the particular practice of sharing house space with animals has a particular history shaped by complex social dynamics. In Menschen und Haustiere im Deutschen Kaiserreich, Amir Zelinger, a postdoctoral researcher in History at Boston University, uses the voices of Wilhelmine Germans, from bureaucratic documents, autobiographies, diaries, and journals and periodicals, to show how Wilhelmine Germans came to cultivate these relationships and how companion animals, as they are termed here following Donna Haraway, became a key part of the Wilhelmine household.

The volume is thoroughly researched and touches on an astonishing breadth of topics—colonialism, scientific racism, the history of hygiene and medicine, the development of industrial meat production, changes in the household economy, the rise of animal rights, etc. The book is structured into four chapters that link large-scale social dynamics like the authoritarian bureaucratic state, scientific racism, and industrialization to the story of humans and their relationship to companion animals. The first chapter, "Das nützliche Haustier," documents the changing role of the Nutztier in Wilhelmine households in light of industrialization and urbanization and the changing food production landscape. Using autobiographies, journals and other documents of daily life, trade journals, and bureaucratic documents relating to agriculture and animal husbandry, Zelinger shows that Wilhelmine Germans increasingly came to offer house space to animals like chickens and rabbits and that these relationships were marked by both affection and usefulness. Chapter 2, "Das kontrollierte Haustier," chronicles the dog's long march through the institutions of Wilhelmine Germany's authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat). Zelinger analyzes laws, policies, and police reports to show how efforts to combat rabies and to implement dog registration and license fees simultaneously brought dogs and other animals more directly under state control and brought humans and animals closer together. The third chapter, "Das wilde Haustier," takes up the rise of popular science to counter the common argument that this time represents a period of estrangement from nature to instead show how Wilhelmine animal collectors and autodidacts forged a [End Page 595] new relationship to and understanding of nature. Hobbyist scientists who collected animals like fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians for purposes of scientific observation and classification and sought to recreate "natural" habitats for them attempted to find a new balance between nature and culture, the "natürlich-kuturell" (268). The fourth and final chapter, "Das rassifizierte Haustier," shows how Wilhelmine ideas about racial purity and anxieties about racial mixing were projected onto dogs. Efforts led by the upper classes to not only define racial distinctions between breeds but to breed better, purer animals led, perhaps paradoxically, to a "radikalen Annäherung" of human and animal (343). Humans came to view dogs as living in a kind of parallel society and efforts to render this society racially pure reveal broader concerns with supposed degeneration and social progress. Zelinger convincingly argues that domestication is most properly seen as a kind of socialization (Vergesellschaftung).

Though the book contains a thorough discussion of print sources, it would also have benefited from consulting more visual sources. This is, after all, the era that, at least in the English-speaking world, brought us novelty cat photography (e.g., British photographer Henry "Harry" Pointer [1822–1889] and his "Brighton Cats"). If such documents do not exist from Wilhelmine Germany, that would be an important observation, and if they do exist, including photographs and visual analysis could have livened up the, at times, dense prose.

The work touches on both race and class, particularly in the final chapter, but lacks a thorough discussion of gender. It was primarily men—amateur scientists, collectors, bureaucrats, members of breeding (Tierzucht) groups—who documented their interactions with animals in the sources Zelinger consults. Yet were those men the primary caretakers of these animals or did the day-to-day work of feeding, watering, socializing, and cleaning the...

pdf

Share