Essay: Magdalena and the Animals

The distinguished novelist Stevie Davies has just published her latest work called Earthly Creatures, described as a riveting, epic historical novel set in 1940’s Germany. Here she considers one of the central themes of the book, being genetic engineering.

‘I desire a violent, domineering, fearless and ferocious upcoming generation,’ said Adolf Hitler, ‘able to bear pain … show no signs of weakness or tenderness. The free and magnificent predator must once again glint from their eyes.’

Chomping away at his mashed potato, sipping his clear soup and masticating his oatmeal with stewed fruit (for Adolf was vegetarian), Germany’s principal ‘magnificent predator’ liked to be called Wolf or ‘Uncle Wolf’ and believed that the German race had evolved further from the apes than any other – but must keep breeding purer and purer specimens, both human and animal.

Adolf in his ‘table talk’ (hours of monologue spouted to comatose dinner guests, yes-men and lickspittles every one) liked to upset guests’ stomachs by feeding them revolting information about animal slaughter, to put them off their Wienerschnitzel. Blond he wasn’t, tall he wasn’t, muscular he wasn’t, but when you are top predator you’re permitted your contradictions.

So, in the animal kingdom, let the purebred horse be our Kriegskamerad; let the aurochs (cattle ‘backbred’ into something like their extinct wild and violent ancestors) roam the forests; let the pure-bred human ‘magnificent predators’ copulate with magnificent blonde maidens in Lebensborn homes to produce pure-bred etceteras for the future.

And exterminate the Untermensch, be he Jew or defective German. Pass the turnips – no, I won’t have dumplings, you should have remembered they contain liver, how disgusting you carnivores are …

The upcoming generation in Earthly Creatures is represented by a girl, born in the beautiful and ancient city Lübeck, to dissident parents in the Nazi state. She is the mixed product of her father’s learned humanism, her aunt’s Christian pacifism and the Hitler-regime’s indoctrination via school, radio and the all-marching, all-singing Band of German Maidens.

In 1941 Magdalena, nineteen years old, idealistic, book-mad, conflicted, has been called up for Nazi war work as a schoolteacher in the distant German state of East Prussia.

Now she’s sitting on the eastbound train, with a gorgeously illustrated children’s book on her lap, a National Socialist fable entitled Trust No Fox on his Green Heath, written by Elvira Bauer, a girl even younger than Magda. It’s a set text for her little pupils. Too elated to read, she listens in to the chat in the compartment.

Fatherland

This pompous geezer with a Party badge sitting beside her, dressed all in green, turns out to be a Nazi zoologist, Dr Vogel, on his way to raid the zoos of the east for pure-bred ‘German’ animals, with a view to bringing them ‘home’ to the Fatherland.

He has much to impart to his captive audience about Nazi love of animals; theories of ‘backbreeding’; the distinction between heroic wild animals and degenerate ‘Jewish’ animals of the swine variety. Dr Vogel praises to the skies the severe Nazi laws against cruelty to animals, so that even earthworms must be anaesthetized if you want to experiment on them.

What? Earthworms? Really?

It’s only later that Magdalena, at once exhilarated and disturbed by Vogel’s loquacity, takes in the subtitle of the obscene book in her lap: Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath. This is what she will be required to teach.

Magda thinks of herself as educated but her education is only beginning – a voyage of discovery that will teach this daughter of dissentient parents and a violent state to struggle with her own equivocations; to resist ideology; to love her fellow creatures equally and to see that (as Darwin unforgettably wrote in his notebooks) all earthly creatures are our family, animals ‘our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering & famine’: we are all, says Darwin, ‘netted together’ in the very cells of our being.

In a fictional East Prussian village, Alt Schönbek, lodging with a defiant fellow-teacher, Ruth Daschke, and her twin daughters, one of whom is disabled and classifiable as an Untermensch, Magdalena will learn the human meaning of Nazi eugenic theories. She will learn to love, protect, resist.

Breadbasket

I’ve never been to Magda’s destination in East Prussia – and nor have you, if you’re under 80. In 1945 this vast Baltic state was wiped from the map, divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, millions of German women and children having fled before the Russian armies; been murdered or evicted. Reading refugee memoirs, letters, diaries, you glimpse an immemorial territory of immense horizons, rich fertility, natural beauty, the ‘breadbasket of Germany’ with its own ancient culture, myths, dialect and a superabundance of animal life.

East Prussia’s lush fields fed cattle, sheep, pigs, horses; its forests were alive with wild animals, wolves, boars, foxes, elk; colonies of birds were resident or visiting – redwings and wild geese.

On marshy pastures at migration time thousands of storks would assemble, clattering their bills, having fed full through the season on ‘lizards and frogs, birds and fish, voles and mice.’

This plenitude of animal life recurs throughout Earthly Creatures, from the insect world to the pigs on the Laulitz farm and to the mighty stags and violent back-bred aurochs of nature-lover Hermann Goering’s animal sanctuary at Rominten Heath.

In a forest glade, taking time out from the madness of indoctrination, Magda seeks the peace of the forest, to listen and gaze:

Just be, she advised herself; just be. Like the birds. Like this millipede, travelling over the debris at quite a lick. It marched like an army on manoeuvres, each pair of legs attached to a single segment of the body. Placing her forefinger in its path, Magdalena watched the creature hesitate before climbing straight over and continuing on its quest.

We are young compared with you, she thought, you are millions of years old; we are an afterthought. Brown in the shade, glossy orange in the light, the thousand-legged wonder snaked along, disappearing under a mossed log.

No creature is too humble for consideration in this Prussian idyll of fertility and growth. But this is also a land of depravity and death, where creatures deemed ‘weaker’ or ‘diseased’ or ‘subhuman’, including that gentle human animal, Flora Daschke, are threatened with culling.

Predator

The theme of genetic engineering in humans and animals is central to Earthly Creatures. The misbegotten aurochs, bred by the Heck brothers and Goering, were in practice found to fit Julius Caesar’s description two thousand years earlier: ‘an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack’.

(A fair description of that ‘magnificent predator’ Hitler himself, when one comes to think of it.) In the Nazi state women were valued as breeding stock.

Your highest ambition was meant to be the honour of the Mother’s Cross First Class (Gold) for producing eight children or more. The strident Mrs Edith Struppat in Earthly Creatures is not quite there: seven, and all of them daughters.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings: the young girls in my book have their say, and their say can be radical. They won’t be shushed. Julia Daschke, Ruth’s surviving child, asks Dr Vogel, when he pontificates about the glories of German zoological science, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m worried about milk … Because, there won’t be any cows any more, will there, so will we have to drink aurochs’ milk?’

When Vogel, chortling paternally, reassures her that aurochs won’t replace cows, Julia comes back with, ‘Good, because I don’t know how you would catch the aurochs to milk them if they’re trampling around tearing up trees.’ The girl-children of Earthly Creatures alarm their delusional elders by their power to see and say the obvious.

Darwin’s phrase that we and the animals are all ‘netted together’ and ‘brethren in suffering’ preoccupied me as I wrote. In the writings of the East Prussian Christian physician, Hans von Lehndorff, one of the greatest of all anti-Nazi diarists, I found a description of foreign cattle from the east that, driven west by their terror of the advancing Soviet army in 1944, had bolted in their thousands into East Prussia. Unrelated to one another, no longer a herd, they’d reverted to the condition of wild animals. Magda is advised not to approach them as they will attack.

Late in the novel, in the bitter winter of that year:

The alien cattle, skeletal, stood motionless on the frozen ground, udders shrunken, bellies distended, spines protruding. They bellowed in their extremity of hunger, like calves separated from their mothers. Their bodies swayed, their legs splayed and, one by one, the animals fell.

Here come the ‘magnificent predators’, Hitler’s dream meeting the fate of the dreamer.

Earthly Creatures by Stevie Davies is published by Honno. It is available from all good bookshops.