Human-animal studies academics dogged by German hoaxers

Editors of Dresden-based journal apologise after being fooled by fake PhD student’s paper on role of alsatians in totalitarianism

 The academics left clues to the hoax, such as calling a dog Rex – the star of a TV show popular in Germany. Photograph: Dennis Galante/Getty

Philip Oltermann in Berlin-Tuesday 1 March 2016

The findings unearthed in Christiane Schulte’s journal article were a revelation. The first fatality at the Berlin Wall, it showed, had not been human but a police dog called Rex. And a new law forcing East German border guards to keep their canine enforcers on a lead helped prevent a third world war.

Most shockingly, the 26-year-old PhD student revealed that the alsatians that patrolled the Berlin Wall were direct descendants of those deployed by the Nazis in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, thus maintaining a “tradition of violence”.

In Schulte’s own words, the academic paper she published in a peer-reviewed German journal in December “revealed the prime importance of human-animal studies for contemporary research into totalitarianism”.

But two months after publishing these revelations, the editors of the Dresden-based publication Totalitarianism and Democracy have had to admit that they have fallen victim to an elaborate academic hoax.

In a statement published this week, the editorial team at the Hannah-Arendt Institute for Research into Totalitarianism said they had been “systematically deceived, ie through a faked CV and an apparently academic argumentation, which sought to convince the reader with detailed explanations, extensive footnotes and false archival references”. Christiane Schulte did not exist, and nor did the alsatians with totalitarian tendencies.

The hoaxers have since published their own mission statement. In an article entitled Plea Against Academic Conformism, a group of academics calling themselves “Christiane Schulte and friends” say they had wanted to instigate “a debate on why dedicated social criticism has become such a rarity in the humanities”.

The intention of the article, they said, had been to satirise the “animal turn” in postmodern theory: the attempt to interpret historical events through the perspective of affected animals. Such academic fashions, the group wrote, were “the waste products of leftist social critique which has sought refuge in academia”, but also signs of an “anti-humanist trend in philosophy”. While academics were competing with each other to follow the latest trend, they were failing to do the basic work of criticising social conditions.

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