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Review of Frank Westerman's Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse

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BROTHER MENDEL'S PERFECT HORSE by Frank Westerman

Harvill Secker £16.99 ☎ £14.99 inc p&p

Rating:

The very word ‘dressage’ makes me feel a little queasy. It seems perverse to turn a bold horse into a fancy-pants song-and-dance man, a sort  of Lionel Blair with hooves and a saddle.

The Lipizzaner is the breed that prances about at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. It is apparently the creme de la creme, the Rolls-Royce of horses. Like the Rolls-Royce, it has long been the transport of choice for some of the world’s most unsavoury despots and tycoons.

Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia presented Lipizzaners to Nehru, Nasser and our own dear Queen, as well as selling a job lot  of 30 to Emperor Haile Selassie for his imperial stud at Addis Ababa.

Thoroughly bred: Lipizzaners are the result of four centuries of selective breeding and training

Nicolae Ceausescu and his equally grim wife Elena jointly owned a Lipizzaner stud farm in Romania. Napoleon owned a Lipizzaner, and Adolf Hitler ordered one as a gift for Emperor Hirohito.

Over the years, says Frank Westerman, the Lipizzaner has performed ‘at the coronation of shahs, parvenu sovereigns and Third World dictators . . .’ It can’t  be long before a Lipizzaner is spotted out for dinner with Michael Winner, or, sporting Calvin Klein shades, sunning itself on the deck of Simon Cowell’s yacht.

It is a breed that goes back centuries. ‘When you touch a Lipizzaner,’ Westerman was told by the owner of the riding school where he worked as a boy, ‘you are touching history.’

The owner went on to explain that the Lipizzaner was the product of four  centuries of breeding, involving tiny tweaks and fine-tuning, by the end of which human beings had produced a horse that could skip, pirouette and dance the Viennese waltz. Who knows? Perhaps in another 400 years, the Lipizzaner will be able to do the Twist, bake the perfect souffle and book easyJet flights on the internet.

The riding-school owner fills Westerman in on the horses’ background. ‘Since 1580, at the Habsburgs’ imperial stud farm on a ridge above Trieste, form had been given to a horse destined to bear kings and emperors. There the Austro-Hungarian equerries had created a pure and noble breed.

Power and grace, loyalty and eagerness to learn – these traits had all, by means of selection and cross-breeding, been brought together in one animal.’

A major theme of this book is the how the quest for the perfect horse echoes the quest for the perfect human being

And here we come to what turns out to be a major theme of this very meandering, off-centre book: the quest for the perfect horse echoes the  quest for the perfect human being. At the heart of Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse is a moral and historical exploration of the world of genetics.

Needless to say, it is not long before both the Nazis and the Soviets barge their way on to centre-stage. As an Austrian, Hitler took a particular interest  in Vienna’s world-famous Spanish Riding School, and placed it under the army high command. In 1939, the Nazis  made a documentary film about it, the  46 Corinthian columns of the school all bedecked with swastikas.

Hitler became obsessed with confiscating as many ‘racially pure’ Lipizzaners as possible from all over the Balkans and, when Mussolini fell, from Italy, too. They were then gathered together in a secret stud farm in what is now the Czech Republic, close to the German border.

Elsewhere, Hitler’s equerry Gustav Rau set about a cross-breeding programme intended to create the perfect horse: one that was a dab hand at farm work, as well as being able to hop, skip and jump, and dance the military two-step.

‘At the stud farm we had a Noriker mare, a really heavy-limbed Shire horse, and we had to cross her with a Lipizzaner stallion,’ recalls one of his underlings. The resulting foal looked grotesque, with bones that seemed too big for its skin, but, being an ideologue, Rau managed to convince himself that his experiment was a stunning success.

Hitler became obsessed with confiscating as many 'racially pure' Lipizzaners as possible

Such cross-breeding was, of course, against all the tenets of the Nazi racial doctrine, which exalted the pure Aryan ideal. But then the Lipizzaner was itself a strange hybrid of Danish, Italian, Egyptian and Czech: no perfect Aryan, he.

Meanwhile, the Nazis were also developing stud farms for human beings: ‘The Fuhrer’s Brides’ was the creepy name given to the women placed on the SS’s Lebensborn programme, charged with copulating with SS officers in order to produce racially pure babies.

Inevitably, the Soviets had their own ideological take on genetics, which was the polar opposite of the Nazis’.

In 1948, Stalin called on Soviet scientists to cast biology in a new proletarian mould. The scientist in charge of this compulsory rebranding exercise, Trofim Lysenko, immediately declared that genes did not exist, but were instead a fiction perpetrated by the bourgeoisie, who wanted everyone to believe that one’s origins inevitably determined  one’s future.

Overnight, Soviet geneticists were dismissed or forced to repent. Anyone who continued to believe in the existence of genes was declared ‘an adherent of theories popular in Nazi Germany and still advanced by defendants of slavery and racial discrimination: the Americans’.

Pioneering voices such as those of  Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Malthus were all retrospectively condemned as the stooges of a capitalist  system hell-bent on promoting the virtues of competition. For Lysenko, Nature  was not red in tooth and claw.

In fact, quite the opposite: animals and plants were all, at heart, good communists, able to find strength in numbers, and to learn from their mistakes.

Accordingly, a vast, disastrous system of farming was put in place, based on  the utterly bogus idea that plants and animals will never compete with each other. Thus, when forests were planted, bundles of saplings were shoved in the same hole, in the belief that they would somehow come to a sensible agreement.

In Siberia, pigs were placed in the freezing cold, in the hope that this would toughen them up. Crops, too, would never be subjected to genetic manipulation. Sure enough, the saplings died, the pigs froze to death, and dire corn harvests resulted in the deaths of millions.

Yet it was not until 1964 that Lysenko was himself denounced as a ‘pseudo- academic’ whose crackpot ideas had reduced the Soviet Union to beggary.  At the same time, Mendel, the Austrian monk whose experiments with peas had introduced genetics to the world, was rehabilitated: in 1965, a delegation of  70 penitent Soviet scientists laid a wreath on his pea patch.

By now, you might be wondering what all this has to do with all those pirouetting Lipizzaners. Only a little, is the answer. Westerman is one of those writers who delight in freewheeling around a subject, swirling around here, there and everywhere rather than travelling in a straight line.

In terms of the Olympics, it is as if an athlete had decided against running as fast as possible from A to B, but had decided to take pretty little detours to P, J, and Z along the way.

The resulting book is, as a consequence, full of interesting tales but, in biological terms, it seems to follow the old Soviet system, bunging all its saplings into the same hole, trusting that, given time, they’ll sort themselves out.

Along the way, Westerman touches on all sorts of fascinating topics – cloning, apartheid, eugenics, bogus science, national identity – but never quite manages to graft them successfully to his key story of the Lipizzaners, as they are shunted hither and thither around Europe by successive regimes.

This jumble is muddled still further by Westerman’s undue interest in his own movements. He is incapable of interviewing someone without letting us know what they had for lunch, or precisely where he placed his coat. The author’s blurb tells us he is Dutch, but I suspect there might be a bit of Double-Dutch in his genes, too.



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