Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany. By Anne Berg
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, people value recycling as a public good—important both for environmental sustainability and as a way to demonstrate care for one’s community. In reality, such a view of recycling practices is idealistic at best. “Recycled” garbage largely goes to landfills; “donated” used clothing undermines local manufacturing in developing nations. Most people, however, prefer not to think about the waste they are creating, as long as it disappears weekly from the kerbside. The meanings and motivations behind waste management is thus a subject that warrants closer analysis. In the case of Nazi Germany, the topic speaks to three issues that have long captured the attention of scholars: the Nazi fixation on purity and hygiene; the regime’s support for initiatives that appear to anticipate the environmental movement; and its engagement of most citizens in ways that belie the ferocity of the dictatorship. Empire of Rags and Bones interrogates Nazi Germany as a “waste regime.” The book examines the myriad ways the German state and individual citizens sought to turn trash into usable resources, such as the collection of kitchen scraps to feed livestock or the abhorrent Müllwurst (trash “sausage’)—made from pulping waste—that was fed for a time to Mauthausen prisoners. It also offers a framework for understanding the nation’s leaders’ obsession with recycling, or as Berg puts it, the internal logic of the regime’s “quasi-religious hunt for junk” (3). Her argument unfolds over three roughly chronological sections, beginning in earnest with the Four-Year Plan in 1936 and ending with the first wave of post-defeat clean up. Berg maintains that the recycle-mania she describes reflects the regime’s “extractivist” imperial agenda fueled by an annihilationist worldview that pitted purity and order, represented by “Aryan” culture, against impurity and disorder, represented chiefly by Jews and Bolshevism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".