A History of Vegetarianism
In 2075, a young historian based in Auckland, New Zealand, opened the electronic file which contained the letters of Adalbert Kehr. The historian’s name was Mei Oliviera Szabó, and she was part of a “scholarship collective,” a group of friends who sought to revive the traditions of rigorous historical research, in the absence of formal university structures. Although the public Internet had largely ceased to function more than thirty years earlier, sufficient connectivity had been restored, by the early 2070s, for several archives to be made searchable, on a subscription basis, from a network of libraries in Oceania, Africa and South America. It was in such a library that her collective met, and by using the library’s subscription, Mei Oliviera Szabó was able to find the file.
The metadata showed that the file had been accessed four times in the previous 50 years. Three of those “touches” were purely mechanical—as the index, which had been generated from the high-definition scans of 2023, was supplemented, and eventually replaced, by a complete multilingual text produced by new handwriting recognition technology. The fourth “touch” was just a note, dated July, 2060, from the “Wagner-Goethe Collection of the Post-European Patrimony Project,” certifying that the original paper files had been re-scanned at molecular resolution, and then destroyed, according to the protocols of the “Disease Eradication Initiative.”
After studying the metadata, Mei Oliviera Szabó realized that she was the first human to look at these documents since they had been digitized. She was somewhat disappointed: although she knew that she was exploring a lost world, she had hoped to encounter the traces of a previous researcher, perhaps a kindred soul from the 2020s or 2030s, with interests similar to her own.
The file she was looking at was part of a larger set, based on a physical collection that had been compiled and organized in the early years of the 21st century by an archivist named Dr. Elke Muche-Albrecht. All the artifacts in the collection had been discovered among the papers that Elisabeth Nietzsche brought back to Germany from her failed colony in Paraguay. This particular file contained various materials written by Adalbert Kehr between 1875 and 1889,including fair copies of his own letters, a draft of a philosophical essay about the astrophysics of Johann Karl Freidrich Zöllner, the minutes of seven meetings of the Anti-Vivisectionist League, a children’s story about a dwarf who lives in a cave underneath a magical toy store, and the complete digital scan of Das Heinrichlied, Kehr’s rendering into modern German prose of a medieval epic poem.
In 2077, Mei Oliviera Szabó published her first book, A History of Vegetarianism in 19th Century Europe, at the most respected publishing house in Singapore. It was well-received by members of the various scholarship collectives and by what remained of the general reading public.
Its promotional materials featured a quote from Adalbert Kehr’s letter of January, 1881:
Just this past week I attended meetings of the Vegetarian Society, the Anti-Vivisectionist Campaign, the Physical Culture Guild, and the Pure Gardening Collective. (No longer do I eat the bloody mulch that my landlady splatters on her table; instead, I belong to the New Saxon Dining Club—the menu is 100% vegetarian, and I have never felt more energetic!)
The quote appeared in a chapter celebrating the work of Bernhardt Förster, the husband of Elisabeth Nietzsche, in his trailblazing role as a “vegetarian activist.”
Seven decades earlier, Elke Muche-Albrecht had wanted to explore the complexities of the relationship between Adalbert Kehr and Konrad Josef, that is, the friendship between two romantic German nationalists, one of them a scholarly anti-Semite, the other an anti-religious Jew. Mei Oliviera Szabó, in contrast, had little interest in that friendship as such. For her, Konrad Josef was simply the addressee of several letters that contained fascinating details about life in the 19th century. What interested her about Adalbert Kehr was not his friendship, nor his politics, nor his philological ambitions, but his activities in the Anti-Vivisectionist League and his enthusiasm for the vegetarian movement.
She was vaguely aware of a prejudice called anti-Semitism, which seemed to have pervaded the civil society in which Bernhardt Förster and Elisabeth Nietzsche were leaders—and Adalbert Kehr such a willing participant—but she saw no reason to mention it, as it seemed somewhat innocuous in comparison to the harsh discrimination she herself had experienced, having been born in an “isolation camp,” the daughter of refugees accused of bringing “hybrid-nano DNA” into the Southern Hemisphere. Nor did it occur to her to make a connection between the dietary movements of the 19th century and an obscure, and from her perspective, relatively minor excess of the 20th: the Nazi movement.
Mei Oliviera Szabó had come of age in the aftermath of the Depopulation—a period, almost two decades long, of decimating wars, widespread famines, untreatable diseases and brutally blocked migrations. For this young historian and her contemporaries, the distant war of 1939-45, with its comparatively tiny death toll and small-scale genocides, was no longer a significant historical touch point, no longer the looming nightmare or the catastrophic memory that had informed the history of recent centuries for the generation of Elke Muche-Albrecht. Over the imagination of Mei Oliviera Szabó, only one catastrophe held sway: the Depopulation, the eighteen years of horror during which (to use the blunt aggregate language of ecology) the human biomass of the Earth had been reduced by two thirds.
A History of Vegetarianism soon came to be regarded as one of the foundational works of the Carnivory School, which placed the blame for the Depopulation solely and squarely upon the eating of meat, an “epidemic of illusory cravings” which had caused the disastrous spread of industrial livestock farming in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Other explanations could, of course, be found. The Extraction School, somewhat poetically, held that the Depopulation was the Earth’s revenge on humanity for centuries of rape and pillage, especially for the crime of mining, the violent extrication of fuels and minerals from Her surface and from Her depths. For those who preferred an explanation that involved the actions of individual humans, the School of Conquest emphasized politics and game theory, attributing the cataclysm to the faulty military strategies of several neo-imperialist regimes, beginning with the New Holy Roman Empire.
Some members of the scholarship collectives associated with the Carnivory School were not shy about mocking the other explanations as jumbles of myth, conjecture, metaphor and cliche. They boasted that they were the only ones to have successfully resurrected the traditions of critical analysis and archival research. Their ideas spread widely, at least among those who considered themselves part of the new intellectual elite. In certain social circles, A History of Vegetarianism in 19th Century Europe, despite its apparently narrow focus, became required reading. By the mid-2080s, many of these readers had adopted the European vegetarians of the 1800s as heroic ancestors. The convivial young men of the New Saxon Dining Club were now perceived not as they had seemed to Dr. Muche-Albrecht—as precursors of National Socialism—but rather as brave pioneers, prophets of dietary reform.
For the readers of Mei Oliviera Szabó, Adalbert Kehr was calling out across two centuries, a lonely voice from the ruins of Europe, showing the human species how it might survive.
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