RENDERING_6: Wojtek the soldier bear
The recommended reading for this week is “Value-Added Dogs and Lively Capital” by Donna Haraway from her book When Species Meet (2007), which is book number 3 in the Posthumanities series (edited by Cary Wolfe) that Animal Capital is also from.
In this chapter Haraway argues that dogs, like humans, are subjects of biopolitics. She wants to move past human exceptionalism and include the labours of all fleshy beings in the story of “capitalist technoculture.” This complicates the traditional humanist doctrine that only humans can have valuable histories. As she notes, “Foucault’s own species chauvinism had fooled me into forgetting that dogs too might live in the domains of technobiopower.” (Haraway, 60)
She describes dogs as workers, patients, human simulates in experiments, consumers of 38.4 billions dollars’ worth of products annually in America alone, as model citizen-subjects to help discipline prisoners—even as technologies themselves (as bits of their DNA are copied and reused). More generally, she is interested in “matters when the kin-making beings are not all human.” She wants to affirm cross-species subject making, get rid of “categories for subjects,” and forget “all the names of human kin” commonly bestowed upon companion animals, especially “children.” (Haraway, 66-67)
This week, for my rendering, I offer up the story of a historical cross-species encounter that I think fits nicely with Haraway’s article, and Animal Capital where species distinction becomes an issue for Shukin with the “humanist philosophies” of Marx and Negri, where she see “little room… for the material labors and lives of other species”. (Shukin, 79)
This story is about a bear that was “adopted” by the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps from somewhere in Iran, during World War Two. The soldiers named the bear “Wojtek” (roughly translated: “happy soldier”) and when the regimen received orders to move to the allied front lines in 1944, they took an extraordinary step to bring Wojtek with them. To allow the bear to travel with the soldiers and draw food (and apparently also beer and cigarette) rations, Wojtek was officially enlisted in the Polish Army and given the rank of Private. Colloquially he is known as “Wojtek the soldier bear”.
As the story goes, during the Battle of Monte Cassino (actually four battles in the first half of 1944) Private Wojtek “helped” unload trucks packed with heavy artillery boxes. After victory in Europe he, along with roughly 2,000 other Polish troops were transported to Scotland while central Europe worked to recover from the devastation. In 1947, when the Polish troops returned home, they put Wojtek in the Edinburgh zoo, where he lived as animal capital until his death in 1963. His story has continued to circulate, and he has even been made into an emblem of wartime camaraderie. A statue of him (lowered on all fours, under the steady hand of a mindful human soldier) was unveiled in Scotland in 2009.
Below, I’ve transcribed three “provocative”/evocative quotes from Scottish “Wojtek experts” interviewed in this short news feature (starts at 0:35).
1: “He lived like a soldier, he ate like a soldier, he slept in a tent with the men, he was one of the men, he would share a beer with the men, he even liked a cigarette.”
2: “The story about Wojtek is a story of comradeship, Wojtek didn’t know he was a bear, Wojtek thought he was a soldier.”
3: “They wonderful thing about Wojtek was although he had the body of a bear, he had the heart of a man.”
Clearly, Wojtek’s story is both transnational (he was picked up in Iran, enlisted in the Polish Army, taken to fight in Italy, and memorialized in Scotland) and trans-species. While a subject of Polish Army discipline he contributed immaterially (the figure of a bear was featured on the regimen’s patch) and materially (helping get bullets to guns at the front) to the war effort, before becoming a capital-generating attraction at the Edinburgh Zoo.
Obviously, Wojtek was not actually considered fully-human, or totally non-bear; he is always pictured chained and was “moved” to a zoo when the regimen was ordered to return to Poland. However, this is an interesting case of flexible boundaries.
Towards the end of “Value-Added dogs” Haraway laments a dearth of ways “to specify these matters in non-humanist terms”. (Haraway, 67) Is that what the Polish Wojtek experts are ham-handedly trying to do? They seem to simply “elevate” Wojtek to the privileged level of human (“one of the men”), in spite of his having an implicitly de-valued “body of a bear”. How can we retell this animal history in non-humanist terms?
dis_order 
Wow. I’d never heard about this story before… really excellent post! The enlistment of a bear in the arm is such a fascinating case in cross-species relationships, I’m surprised it’s not mentioned in Haraway’s text. Certainly the quotes that you include above seem to be taking the side of a certain naive “humans in fur coats” vision of companion species – but wait, it sure grates to call a bear a ‘companion’ species, not to mention the fact that as an official private in the corps, he’s more of a comrade than companion. And then, that reminds me: what to make of the fact that, after surviving the war, he ends up living out his retirement West of the Iron Curtain? Lucky bear… generating capital for the Edinburgh Zoo while most of his former ‘comrades’ are going around referring to each other as such.
And by ‘arm,’ I meant ‘army.’ Haha.
I find it interesting how there is a dual treatment of the bear as both honorary human, and as patronized animal. He was, after all, adopted “as a mascot” (1:16). I question whether or not this position truly did reverse as he became one of the soldiers and attained the rank of private. Indeed, one cannot read this story except through the various voices mobilized to tell it including the narrator who seems to take a more dominating tone than the advocates who seemingly anthropomorphize him to a fair degree (“he was a big big personality” 4:43 or “one of the men” as you rightly point out). The narrator seems to describe it in tropes used in colonial discourse in the description of how he was “discovered” (1:10). Perhaps I’m stretching a bit here, but the particular emphasis the narrator placed on this word was curious. Indeed, each of the voices (perhaps especially his advocates) added their own humanist take, and in statements like “although he’s got the body of a bear, he’s got the heart of a man” (5:08), humanity is reduced to masculinity, and both come out dominant. I am left pondering the question you posed at the conclusion of this post.
I found an alternative depiction of “Mary”, I think this short animation resonates with your presentation. It is a wholesome story of a boy and girl who kill a rabbit and find a tiny demon in its stomach who offers them vast riches in return for large quantities of jam.
regarding your choice of the name Mary, I nearly forgot to post this:
(although when I remembered this in class, I forgot that it was based on popular songs, not baby names.)