This paper critically examines the public display of agricultural life in the Nazi era by focusing on the annual Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) exhibition held in several major German cities between 1933 and 1939. Using a variety of unexplored archival and primary sources, the paper focuses mainly on the exhibition ...
(Show more)This paper critically examines the public display of agricultural life in the Nazi era by focusing on the annual Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) exhibition held in several major German cities between 1933 and 1939. Using a variety of unexplored archival and primary sources, the paper focuses mainly on the exhibition held in Munich from 30 May to 6 July 1937. The paper speaks to the rural network themes of professionalization of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries; the press or media culture of exhibitions and its representations of the rural world; and the reshaping of the countryside in the depression years of the twentieth century. Of particular interest is the reworking of the traditional agricultural fair and its reformation as a modernized, scientific and technological display of agricultural performance. Far from being a rustic movement of ‘Blood and Soil’ the agricultural world packaged for public consumption displayed tropes of mastery over nature, social competition, mechanization, and scientific advances in agricultural productivity. For all of the emphasis on the “new peerage of blood and soil”, anti-semitic rhetoric, livestock and produce competitions, and celebrations of rural folklore, the main feature of the national exhibitions was a legislative ‘hands-on’ display of model modern farms and production techniques. It was a constructed image of rural modernity offered up as entertainment and instruction that sought to redefine the popular image of the rural world as distinct and ‘modern’ when compared to the Junker or homestead countryside of the nineteenth century or the contemporary collectivization of peasant agriculture in Stalin’s Russia.
At the same time the exhibition constituted a recreational site of modernity with rural Germans taking advantage of the subsidized tourism packages operated by the Reich Food Estate and other National Socialist organizations including the Strength Through Joy leisure agency. And not only rural Germans were expected to benefit from visiting the exhibition. In their appeal to racial national unity and social cohesion, agricultural officials encouraged urban Germans to experience the vicarious excursions into rural life on display on the exhibition grounds.
The regime’s aim of agricultural self-sufficiency, as outlined in the regime’s four-year economic plan of 1936, required significant investment of capital, mechanization, managerial competence, and labour both to widen and deepen agricultural productivity. Scholars have noted the limited investment on the part of the Nazi regime in the primary economy and the gradual decline in support for the regime in the countryside but a study of the Reich Food Estate Exhibition suggests that in prescriptive terms, the regime opted for regulation, mechanization and professionalization of agriculture in the form of privately-owned farms rather than the soviet model of collectivization or any nostalgic return to a neo-feudal past. It was this image of rural modernity that appealed to the agrarian constituency and its unfulfilled promise the cause of much decline in support for the regime in the countryside. Coupled with other exhibitions and other forms of cultural display, the Reich Food Estate exhibition encouraged fidelity to the manufactured image of a new Germany charged with possibilities, a nation engaged in the restless motion of its transformation and one in which redefined rural communities were cast in leading ideological and social roles. A study of the annual Reich Food Estate agricultural exhibition demonstrates the Nazi regime’s revolutionary but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to redefine the rural world in the making of the racial state.
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