“Thousands of tiny Bakunins”. Insects colonize the colonizers. Fascist ants, anarchist termites, and the “collectivism of shit-eating”. Insects speak, scream, and “go on rampage”. The German Empire fights bugs.
Whereas the battle against mosquitoes was part of colonial expansion strategies, in the twentieth century another insect set out to colonize the colonizers themselves. We are talking about the termite, whose conquest of a northern German city also shook certainties about which animal belongs where. […] It was probably shortly after the German Empire had carried out a campaign of racist collective punishment against the Herero and Nama peoples in the colony of German southwest Africa (today Namibia) in the early twentieth century that the colonizers were colonized by termites. The “destructive, wood-munching creatures” had likely made it to Hamburg with imported wood that was used for the cladding of the city’s new heating system. The termites would probably not have survived a single winter in the cold climate of northern Europe, but luckily for them, in 1921 the local electric company had begun to channel waste heat from the generation of electricity through a pipe system to government offices and homes. […] In all probability, the termites were living in a thriving colony when they were discovered in 1937. […] [T]he termites followed the duct grid and worked their way up to the trees of the Karolinenviertel district (“Karoviertel”) and the Justice Forum, where they still live to this day.
While the Karoviertel was being overrun by a congenial army of creative types from above, becoming a trendy residential neighborhood with all the well-known problems of gentrification, simultaneously the venerable Justice Forum (consisting of the Higher Regional Court, and the Criminal Justice and Civil Justice buildings) was being attacked from below. One city official reports that the worst nightmare of all property owners became reality when civil servants discovered that termites had started to devour the state registry records – thousands of tiny Bakunins.
It had been the strategic goal of […] Bakunin-style anarchist revolts of the 1800s to destroy as many local records of deed registries and bank liabilities as possible before normal class rule could be restored. Ironically, a contemporary anti-termite poison is being marketed by BASF under the brand name Termidor, which unintentionally draws a connection to Leon Trotsky’s coinage of the term “Thermidor” to refer to the counterrevolutionary phase of the bureaucratic restoration of power. In the corporate newspeak presented on the Termidor company website, control means killing, design is extermination, and lifetime is a registered trademark: “For the best termite control solution, turn to Termidor® … as seen on Designing Spaces on Lifetime®.”
The files were quickly relocated, but even after a series of countermeasures over the past ninety years, including the subterranean installation of glass barricades and the massive deployment of heat to dry them out, the termites are still a problem. Even the removal of entire houses and experimental hormone therapy by a research unit of the German armed forces did little to help. Old tactics like the mass poisoning of entire districts with highly toxic substances and the introduction of all kinds of insecticides into bricks and wood were common into the 1980s […].
As real, symbolic, and affective agents, the Hamburg termites cause discomfort that is like a “cloud shaped like a sword” stuck in the heart of the city. If mosquitoes speak through the social noise they make, as Timothy Mitchell argues in his analysis of malaria outbreaks in colonial Egypt, and if tsetse flies scream, as Clapperton Mavhunga states in connection with the human and non-human entanglements in Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park – then the Hamburg termites make bambule (go on a rampage).
When the termites arrived in Hamburg, the discourse around the insect had already morphed from admiration to disgust. […]
The Belgian Nobel Prize winner and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck vividly described this astounding social metabolism in his Life of the Termites (1926): “You see, this is perfect communism, communism of the pharynx and intestines, driven by the collectivism of shit-eating. Nothing is lost in this dreary and thriving republic, where the dirty ideal that nature seems to offer us is made real in economic terms.”
The forestry scientist and zoologist Karl Escherich, a staunch National Socialist, picked up this thread in his inaugural address as the newly appointed rector of the University of Munich in 1933. His speech, titled “Termite Delusion,” contrasted the supposedly good ant colony of the Third Reich with the diabolical termite system of the Soviet Union.
Text by: Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords” e-flux Journal #115. February 2021. [Bold emphasis, some paragraph breaks/contractions, and italicized first paragraph/heading added by me.]
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