Invisible enemies: bacteriology and the language of politics in imperial Germany

The text analyzes the related semantics of bacteriology and politics in imperial Germany. The rapid success of bacteriology in the 1880s and 1890s was due not least to the fact that scientific concepts of bacteria as "the smallest but most dangerous enemies of mankind" (R. Koch) resonated with contemporary ideas about political enemies. Bacteriological hygiene was expected to provide answers to social and political problems. At the same time metaphors borrowed from bacteriological terminology were incorporated into the political language of the time. While the "high command of our doctors" (F.J. Cohn) fought diseases, some contemporaries were identified with members of the evil species of "bacillus communis odii." Both imperialistic politics and bacteriological science relied on images of inferior and invisible but potent enemies. Both were able to increase their prestige via a mutual interchange of their vocabularies.