The Place of Plants in War 

Taraxacum kok-saghyz

INTRO: RUSSIAN DANDELION

On my visit to the Holocaust Galleries at London's Imperial War Museum, I was struck by an exhibit label describing a ‘blue and grey striped rough wool or 'shoddy' dress’ on display, hauntingly bearing the number '7963' and red Star of David. The label referenced ‘dandelion plants’, in conjunction with French and Jewish biologist Claudette Bloch, who in the summer of 1942 was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a prisoner, and later wore the dress at a protest ‘in front of the German Embassy in London against the resurgence of Nazism in Europe’ in the 1960s. With a PhD in biology, Bloch became a scientific asset to the Nazi party and was sent to work as a research assistant in Rajsko, a sub-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here she was forced to aid the rather cumbersome task of synthesising Russian dandelion, or Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), into rubber, as Germany and other countries suffered from a dearth of supplies, blockaded by Japan from Southeast Asia, namely the prolific Hevea brasiliensis. Little is on public record of Bloch's life, but the botanical research she undertook at Auschwitz demonstrates the Nazis’ desperate attempts to prematurely concoct technological alternatives out of whatever materials they could muster, lowly weeds included. Ersatz, as they were commonly referred.

Seizing USSR land in Ukraine, ripe with fertile soil conducive for the abundant growth of Russian dandelion, the Nazis continued its cultivation, distributing samples for the research labs occupied by prisoner scientists such as Bloch. However, the latex distilled from the Russian dandelion was not known to be so amenable as the Havea plants of Southeast Asia, namely due to high rates of coagulation. Astonishingly, efforts to augment the production of rubber using Russian dandelion are being reexplored, many decades after the war, researched as a potentially more ‘sustainable’ alternative latex material to the dominant rubber plants. The hardy Russian dandelion was recalcitrant to the Nazis’ efforts to transform it into rubber. Despite being nominally ‘Russian,’ the eponymous plant is native across central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Uzbekistan, border encroaching, without the invasive bellicosity of industrial military complexes.

While Bloch recounted the rather terrible conditions she and others experienced at Rjasko, her botanical erudition and concomitant connection to plants in the context of the war ultimately released her from the death camps that sealed the fate of so many others. As William G. Clarence-Smith writes, ‘Paradoxically, the Russian dandelion saved the lives of some Jews in Auschwitz, mainly women’. At Rjasko, Bloch and the Jewish inmates she recruited as researchers were allegedly ‘treated somewhat better than in the main camps’. Importantly, Clarence-Smith concedes that ‘The German managers were not acting to save Jews, however, but to advance their scientific careers and avoid being sent to fight on the eastern front’. Notwithstanding, the Russian dandelion's contribution to the turn of events is striking and demonstrates how the lives of humans and plants intersect in times of adversity, oftentimes changing the course of history. The recalcitrant wildness of the plant stalled the Nazi's technological development and in turn deferred Bloch's likely death.

These historical events reminded me of the writings of the late Bruno Latour, whose 'actor-network-theory' describes the influence enacted by all manners of beings, no matter how diminutive or even sentient they are. As Latour explains:

An “actor” in AT is a semiotic definition -an actant-, that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action. Bruno Latour

What follows is a musing on the place of plants in war, what spaces they occupy, in both a metaphysical and moral sense...

PLANTS AS SYMBOLS OF REMEMBRANCE

Wars have a pertinent influence on the ways that people come to interact with plants, not just as resourceful materials, but as auxiliaries for wellbeing, poetic influences, but perhaps most powerfully, as co-inhabitants and as kin. Although animals too contribute significantly to the mechanisms and semiotics of war, their involvement is more explicitly avowed than plants and in a less metaphorical way. We see this for instance in the variation of the purple poppy, intended to elicit the remembrance of animals lost to the war; namely that of horses, ponies and canines. While the plant plays the signifier, it is normatively the human/animal that is signified. The purple poppy that UK charity Animal Aid had originally conceived of, however, was to be replaced by an enamel badge in the shape of a paw, as to dispel the perception of animals as heroes, supplanting the misnomer with 'victims'. Isn't it interesting then that the First World War saw the phrase 'Lions led by donkeys'? As if the very concept of heroism wasn't influenced by the animality that the red poppy excludes, and that the enamel paw corrects.

Perhaps the retrospective power of floral war symbols is that they oversimplify, a bit like stone monuments that root a historic and complicated figure into a city centre, serving to venerate or vindicate, eventually to be torn down by city dwellers that disagree with tacitly problematic, lithic reverence. The organic vibrancy of flowers is that they grow, wilt, die and decay. But the plastic poppy, pinned to one's lapel is solidified in time in quite a different way to the sessile plant. The white poppy is intended to provoke remembrance for victims of all wars, which has been perceived as reactionary. This litany of prismatic poppies, oftentimes eliciting incredulity, however seems to highlight the parochialism at the heart of the red poppy, or indeed any floral symbol of war, which is susceptible to circumscribe victimhood or indeed heroism to one particular characteristic.

When lieutenant John McCrae wrote his poem In Flanders Fields, the red poppies he saw growing amidst the graves of his fellow soldiers were representative of both the dead and the living, whom fought at the Battle of Ypres. 'We are Dead' McCrae declares, 'Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved, and were loved, and now we live in Flanders Fields'. Poppies emerge from the aftermath, living in or from the remains of the dead. McCrae is the survivor, the dead accompanying the living, not a surrogate but a spectre. The poem evinces that survival from war is really a type of death, but is this 'we' delimited to McCrae and his battalion? In some ways, yes. But as the red poppy began to encompass more, the day of 'Remembrance' itself, its capaciousness came into question and other poppies of different stripes emerged.

What is so especially allegorical and indeed powerful about the poppies growing in Flanders? Admittedly, the flower of the poppies themselves are rather striking, a prodigious flower, akin to a head standing strong atop a lofty torso. The solider's bodies perhaps? Without losing the plants themselves to the power of men, there is a blissful continuity between what is materially and indeed allegorically true. Though a commemoration of kinds to McCrae's friend and fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who died in the second battle of Ypres at a tender age of 22, the poem is in a profound sense anonymous. When we think of the poppies at Flanders or any meadow of flowers for that matter, there is something inherently anonymous, almost egoless, ghostly even, to the scene, comparable but not quite equivalent to perceiving a sparkling array of constellations in a clear night sky. As discrete as they may appear, the flowers' collective anonymity is much like the anonymity of the dead that lie beneath both them and McCrae's poem. To broach this thread further, we shall invoke the work of 'mystic' philosopher Georges Bataille.

GIVING BATAILLE HIS FLOWERS

For Bataille, both continuity and discontinuity are very real to both life and death (La vie la mort, as phrased by Jacques Derrida, who highlights their contiguity). Discontinuity is normative to our everyday, stratified existence as individuals. However, as Bataille demonstrates, many experiences and indeed desires are shaped towards shattering discontinuous existence. While oft erotic in nature, the ecstasy of continuity, that is a form of coincidence and togetherness, is also anxiety inducing, as is it in some sense reflective of death, the cessation of self. This is why Bataille writes 'After the living man the dead body is nothing at all...what we experience is a kind of void, a sinking sensation' (Bataille, Eroticism, 58). It is the 'growth of vegetable life' that Bataille characterises as the 'continuous piling up of dissociated substances corrupted by death' (Ibid., 60). Even in this decomposed mass, or compost, Bataille asks rhetorically 'How could anyone assert that that stinking mass is nothing at all?'.

There is a dynamic between continuity and discontinuity present in McCrae's poem. The soldiers are anonymous, continuous with one another like the poppies. They are continuous, however, not only in the soil of Flanders, but also with the living, hence why McCrae is in some sense already dead even in his survival. It is this life of continuity, that which is suggestive of death, which Bataille intimates we are fearful of, but desire notwithstanding. A desire for unity is, as Bataille suggests, a desire for transgression, in an act of copulation, war or death, for example, attempts 'to get at continuity...without actually crossing the boundaries of this discontinuous life' (Ibid., p. 141). We may think of the plant as demonstrative of the continuous anonymity of vegetal life, the basest of all life that sets the stage for discrete animality. But this vegetal continuity undergirds our own discontinuous life, especially potent in the emergence of poppies amidst the grave stones. This phenomenon is both poetic and metaphysical, an allegory that literally erupts from the earth. The symbol of the poppy is not merely representative of something other, for the poppy symbolises itself, enveloping humans in the life-death of its own planty existence. 

Though a lamentation of war, McCrae's poem demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the desirousness of death that Bataille broaches. Soldiers do not become continuous as such as a troop, but are made continuous in death, fused in some sense after life. This vegetative rebirth is really a reminder of the anonymous continuity inscribed in our lives, that while we might not recognise, will come with time. Regardless of the colour of the poppy in question, this continuity persists like a brute fact of existence, meaning that any delimited characteristic ascribed with a floral object is made tenuous, for the vegetation is a tapestry of soldiers wearing different stripes. To disavow the actual plantiness of the poem is to disavow death, mere pathetic fallacy. By disavowing the continuous, 'Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things.' (Ibid., p. 59) The poem really does see the soldiers become plants, not strictly as symbols of who they were as people, but actually as plants that were dormant on the battlefield, able to emerge through the destruction as boots and bullets brought seeds up with the lime-rich soil that sustained their latency. As Bataille puts it, 'Death is really the opposite process to the process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled. The death of the one being is correlated with the birth of the other, heralding it and making it possible.'

CONCLUSION: REMEMBERANCE AND JUSTICE

...Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

We will write our names with scarlet steam.

We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.

We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here

our blood will plant its olive tree.’ 

- Mahmoud Darwish ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’

What does it mean to remember, to remember those that came before us and have passed? Memory is spectral, haunted by what can never truly return, yet persists in some other form. In wars so many lives are lost, red poppies, purple ones, others too. These are the forms that humans, animals, plants and other life forms take, metamorphosing into something that for a second, translates, only to look completely different in another light. Plants, whether we like it or not, play some kind of role in the remembrance and justice that comes with war and death. They don't merely act as an arbitrary sign, designed to signify a predictable image. Plants and their floral manifestations are visually captivating, not as mere adornments, but as exceptional bursts of life that embody the truth of continuity invoked above, expressions of romantic love and commemorations of death, what we were and what we become.

Plants are the life in death; this pervades religiosity, in the Buddhist lotus or in architectural, Islamic floral patterns, even in the secular environmentalist faith and solicitude, that which engenders care for the lives and generations whose future may hinge on our actions. Sometimes in these environmentalist circles, the focus on plant life leaves a sour taste. As Naomi Klein concedes, ‘People do tend to be put off when their lives are treated with less respect than flowers and reptiles' (Klein, 129). At the extreme, where ecology intersects with fascism, Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest shows a Nazi family take care of the flowers and plants growing in their garden with such delicate tactility at the anterior of Auschwitz-Birkenau, whilst the bodies of the prisoners are incinerated. Images of humans bodies fertilising the soil reappear, but in a more egregious way than Flanders.

This is also evoked powerfully by the extract of Mahmoud Darwish's poem above, whose writing illustrates the complex and deeply rooted relationship between the Palestinian people and their Olive Trees. Genocide attempts to wipe out the sui generis of a particular human ethnicity, but in turn also the relationships between them and other plants, those that been able to historically flourish, olive trees and orange groves in the West Bank. The question of remembrance and justice in the case of war and genocide is therefore infiltrated already by the presence of plants. It is not a matter of commemorating all lives, human and non-human as if they were of equivalent value. But nor is it a case of forgetting the lives that entwined with those that we once loved, whether animal or vegetal. The anonymous envelopment of life, vegetal in nature, means that remembrance can never truly restore what once was. I leave you with a quote by Derrida, which intimates the role of remembrance when it comes to the justice engendered by the memory of the once living, both human and not so human:

'To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome— without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice...One must constantly remember that it is even on the basis of the terrible possibility of this impossible that justice is desirable: through but also beyond right and law.' - Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx 

References

Bataille, G. Eroticism. tr. M Dalwood. Penguin (2001)

Derrida, J. Specters of Marx. tr. P. Kamuf. Routledge (2006)

Klein, N. On Fire: A Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Alfred Knopf Canada (2019)