TEN

Hope and Hunger, Vollkornbrot and Swedes, 1914 to 1949

In retrospect the tussle between free traders and autarchist protectionists appears to be a harbinger of things to come. To be torn between the relaxed and confident embrace of all the new and exotic tastes and aromas which the world at large had to offer on the one hand, and the much more cautious locavore who promised reliable familiarity on the other, was a conflict that would repeatedly and profoundly mark the German diet during the twentieth century. It recurred in different forms. The life reform movement was one of them: as soon as pauperism had been halfway overcome and society at large started to believe in a future of meat and white bread for everybody, sceptical voices called for reforms, a return to a supposedly better past of wholemeal bread and vegetables. But the real shock was still to come. Instead of a glorious repetition of 1871, as most of them expected or had been led to expect, with the outbreak of war in 1914 Germans were drawn into a relentless strudel of rationing and shortages. Eventually they were reduced to eating swedes – also known as cattle fodder – and even they were in short supply. Women’s lot reflected the general dilemma; they were supposed to be feminine, but now had to hold their own and run the show on the home front. Faced with empty shelves and cupboards, it was primarily they who had to find an answer to the moral conflict about civil obedience. But who would have hesitated very long between decrees, propaganda and hunger on the one hand and autonomous action to procure at least a minimal daily ration on the other, disregarding the law if necessary? The confusing rollercoaster of food-centred feelings, questions and issues would haunt Germans again and again and left its traces in their culinary DNA.

Ironically the fleet everybody had been so obsessed with in the pre-war years was never fully deployed during the First World War, but it was the naval construction programme that put Germany on a collision course with Britain. The British reaction to the appearance of a rival naval power was a radical one: they cut Germany off from its external food sources. This blockade, a historical switch from military to economic priorities in maritime warfare, was widely regarded as being contrary to international law, as it expanded the list of contraband and put pressure on neutral countries. At the onset of war, Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British admiralty, openly declared his intention to ‘starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission’.1 The outcome of war no longer depended on military plans and materiel, but on how long civilians could endure hunger and hardship. Food had become one of the decisive battle grounds.

According to official estimates, German food imports, whether direct or (equally important) indirect in the form of animal feed, represented roughly one-third of pre-war consumption. This was by no means exceptional at the time, as by 1913 foodstuffs made up 27 per cent of the world’s export trade.² Supplies for the army, numbering about one-sixth of the population, as well as the rural population, accounting for about one-third, couldn’t be cut far below pre-war levels. The result was that without any imports only one-sixth of the usual supplies were available for the remaining half of the population. Centralized distribution might have offered a slim chance of making this work, at least for a while, but rural producers were not interested in supplying the urban and industrial areas through a middleman. So far as food was concerned, Germany had lost the war by early 1917.

Prior to the war agricultural output had risen steadily due to the use of fertilizers, mostly imported, and there was initial optimism about reserves and future yields. Germany had forged a place in the international food community by refining raw materials, such as converting feed grain via cattle into meat, fat and milk. In time of war this made for a fatal dependency on imports, which became difficult or impossible to obtain even from neutral countries. Many factors combined to reduce food production at a time when it was most needed: agricultural labour became scarce because of the call to arms, machinery was difficult to find as German factories were increasingly used for armament production, horsepower represented a problem since horses were needed at the front, and fertilizers such as Chilean nitrate could no longer be imported. The latter problem had already been addressed by Fritz Haber, who had developed a chemical method to produce fertilizer by synthesizing ammonia, a process subsequently made commercially viable by Carl Bosch and the BASF company of Ludwigshafen. The method, however, was still expensive and mainly used to produce explosives (with Haber also playing an unfortunate essential role in the push for gas warfare).

As a result of these factors, crop yields declined and attempts to increase the area under cultivation failed. Even seemingly ample crops such as potatoes and sugar quickly became scarce, as people compensated for the lack of fat and meat by consuming more starch and sweets. German officials were much criticized for their lack of preparation and mishandling of the food supply. However, the task was not only immense but without precedent, and it seems to have been impossible to deliver a satisfactory result. At the start of the war official strategies for dealing with scarcity were virtually non-existent. Stores and warehouses were filled to the brim and after the initial panic buying no hardships were noticeable. The government didn’t build up any stocks, since the necessary laws for this were difficult to steer through parliament, and war preparations were deemed inappropriate from a psychological point of view. Soon, however, export embargos and import tariff exemptions for important foodstuffs were followed by state attempts to buy food in neutral countries. The conservative agrarian lobby refused to join the war effort on a political level, hindering efficient centralized food distribution, while small producers were unwilling to give up their precious wares for the official maximum prices, which were kept deliberately low. At the same time transport for perishable foodstuffs, particularly potatoes, was problematic since trains and roads were needed for the army. As it became obvious that the war would not be over any time soon, the authorities saw no other solution but to step in and become actively involved in food production and distribution. From January 1915 grain production was nationalized and its distribution centralized. New ministries and offices, complete with the necessary administrational apparatus, came to manage supplies of everything from potatoes, meat and eggs to legumes, salt herrings and sauerkraut through fixed maximum prices, allocations and rationing.

Bread was largely replaced by potatoes, but its supply was considered essential to maintaining civic order. Official efforts concentrated on making grain supplies last as long as possible and sought to disguise potatoes as bread, at least to some degree. As early as October 1914 it was decreed compulsory to include 5 per cent potato products (mostly in the form of dried flakes) in all rye bread. With an even higher potato content (up to 20 per cent) this was sold as K-Brot, leaving it up to consumers to decide if they were eating Kriegsbrot (war bread) or Kartoffelbrot (potato bread). As Germany’s main grain-producing territories in the east weren’t suited to wheat growing, from January 1915 regulations obliged millers to include a proportion of rye when milling wheat and higher minimum grinding levels were set. Night baking was declared illegal in an attempt to reduce the consumption of wheatflour rolls, a popular breakfast indulgence. Since the home-grown grain available to the bakeries had a higher water content than the previously used imported varieties, all bread was somewhat heavier than in pre-war times, and the potatoes in K-Brot added to the load. By June 1915 bread was rationed. As the situation deteriorated during the course of the war and potatoes became scarce as well, K-Brot was made with the addition, depending on availability, of maize, peas, beans, soy beans, manioc, tapioca, acorns, swedes and even animal blood. The educated classes nevertheless endorsed the new national loaf with patriotic fervour, leading the British prime minister Lloyd George to comment that the German ‘potato-bread spirit’ was more dangerous than German militarism.3 Beer supplies were considered a similarly delicate matter. Before the outbreak of war, Germany had been the second largest beer producer worldwide (behind the U.S.). In spite of grain shortages many breweries carried on, though national production was reduced to one-third of its previous total, beer became lighter and thinner and many small breweries eventually had to close down.

The introduction of rationing cards was without precedent and a complex apparatus was required to make the scheme work at all. In spite of this new kind of state socialism the system favoured self-governance. Regional authorities, responsible for implementing state decisions, were faced with immense practical and administrative tasks. In many cases they not only produced their own food to complement official allocations, but had to solve storing and control problems – all this while confronting the complaints of the angry and desperate. Early in the process, working-class women in particular didn’t hesitate to vent their anger when faced with price increases, leading to riots and looting.

Certain official decisions seemed particularly short-sighted and driven by panic, such as the so-called Schweinemord or pig slaughter. In December 1914, shocked by fast-diminishing stocks of potatoes and grain, officials sought to reduce the use of animal feed by declaring pigs competitors with humans for valuable food. As a result, in the following spring a government order was issued calling for higher slaughter numbers. Sources widely differ in their assessment of numbers, but the market was certainly inundated with meat and fat, as many communal authorities were unable to cope with preserving the meat, which often came from animals slaughtered too young. Prices collapsed for a time only to reach even greater heights later in the year. Left as the main source of meat (as well as milk, fat and fertilizer), cattle in their turn became scarcer and the breeding stock gradually deteriorated. Whatever action was taken in one part of the market led to a serious lack in another without solving the underlying problem. The introduction of a maximum price for pigs in November 1915 drove the market almost completely underground, by then a familar response to all attempts at regulation. Maximum prices for cattle followed in March 1916, and by May, when few foodstuffs were left without regulation, the KEA, Kriegsernährungsamt (Office for Food in Wartime) was created as a coordinating body. The authorities, it seemed, had no choice but to stumble from one measure to another in their attempt to establish a centralized structure in spite of regional and group interests. Attempts to solve shortages were only put in place when these became too severe to ignore. The reality was that supplies were insufficient, whatever official policymakers might do or say.

The rationing system defined Germans neither by their social nor financial status, but according to their relevance and importance to the wartime economy. The army and armament industry had absolute priority. The latter used fat and sugar to replace blocked imports of glycerine (glycerine required for nitroglycerine can be manufactured from sugar by fermentation in the presence of sodium sulphite4), while exporting sugar, potatoes and coal to neutral countries in exchange for raw materials for their factories. Army provisioning still relied on a law dating back to 1873, but the authorities realized that with urbanization and industrialization the situation had profoundly changed. Instead of calling for regional supplies as in the past, army provisions were bought on the free market by a central office. In spring 1917 it was estimated that 70 per cent of all food available was consumed by the army. However, the provision for soldiers listed in an imperial decree of 1909 was undoubtedly soon reduced to mere theory: 750 g bread, 10 g roasted coffee beans, 180 g raw meat plus 40 g suet (or any other kind of animal fat), 250 g legumes (which could be replaced by 125 g rice or 1.5 kg potatoes) and 25 g salt as well as ‘other necessary foodstuffs’ were to be provided daily.⁵

To complement the comparatively meagre civilian rations, the populace was strongly encouraged to collect and consume anything that held the promise of a few calories as well as to forage for food in the wild. Schoolchildren in particular were roped in to collect anything and everything they could find, from bones, fruit stones and potato skins to all kinds of wild plants, including beechnuts. They were also taught to attack pests such as caterpillars on cabbages. In some regions the woods had to be closed for certain periods to allow nature to recover from ravenous collectors. By late 1916 it became obvious that in spite of the activities of numerous charities, more had to be done to prevent famine. Following experimental efforts to relieve the worst effects of shortages in Berlin with what were known as Goulaschkanonen, goulash cannons, the KEA pushed for more and larger Massenspeiseanstalten, literally ‘dining institutions for the masses’: communal soup kitchens that would make more efficient use of foodstuffs. Official propaganda presented these soup kitchens as a civilian equivalent of the soldiers’ field kitchens. Initially developed to provide for soldiers’ families and the unemployed, they were soon established in most towns and increasingly became open to everybody. In Berlin the initiative was put under the command of the dynamic home economist Hedwig Heyl, the local women’s movement pioneer. Massenspeiseanstalten usually offered a simple stew at lunchtime which could also be taken away. At some point the authorities even discussed compulsory attendance in cities; a utopian de-privatization of cooking and eating that was never realized. On the contrary, attending them was often perceived as shameful. Only at the beginning, when meals were provided without the need to produce a ration card, did they enjoy some popularity. Women in particular not only criticized the prices for the quality and quantity offered, but resented the perceived intrusion into their private sphere. Many regional authorities came to realize that soup kitchens were not actually more efficient in their use of scarce foodstuffs. Nevertheless, towards the end of the war, the system pushed meagre official supplies in that direction, and for many the soup kitchens were the last resort.

By the last months of 1916, the official daily regular civilian ration stipulated 271 g bread, 357 g potatoes, 11.4 g margarine and butter, 36 g meat, less than a tenth of an egg, 26 g sugar and 9.8 g pearl barley or other starch, a total daily allowance of 1,344 kcal.6 Given that supplies were so meagre it seems somewhat absurd to consider recipes in cookbooks, even assuming that additional supplies might be self-grown or obtained from illicit sources. As it happens, leaflets dealt rather better with the constantly changing situation than any cookbook. Daily newspapers also provided regular instruction on how to deal with ration cards, unusual ingredients and substitutes, and how to cook ‘without’ the various ingredients in short supply – particularly fat, milk and eggs. The market for surrogates of all kinds flourished, in April 1916 reaching at least one-eighth of all expenditure on food. Some of these substitutes were familiar modern industrial products such as margarine, stock cubes and custard powder; others were of very questionable quality and origin, or ersatz-ersatz, such as coffee surrogates made of swedes, acorns or heather. Some products made by profiteers had no merit whatsoever – ersatz salad oil made from yellow coloured vegetable substances, coloured maize or potato flour posing as powdered egg and pepper made from ash. A brand called Topol, sold as Nährhefekraftmehl (nutritious yeast flour), promised to replace fat, meat and milk in one go. Under great logistical difficulties, the market in ersatz foodstuffs was officially regulated, and by July 1919 there were 837 officially sanctioned sausage substitutes, more than 1,000 stock cube surrogates and a choice of 511 branded stand-ins for coffee.⁷

Potato peeling in a Berlin central soup kitchen, catering for 9,000 jobless each day.

Books such as the Kriegskochbuch, a wartime cookbook written by Luise Holle (editor of the Davidis cookbook from 1892), were undeniably published with the best of intentions, advising a return to soup mornings and evenings. Holle provided recipes for meat dishes made with nonrationed offal, low-fat dishes, cheap desserts and austerity baking. Nevertheless, the ingredients still included such unobtainables as fifteen Pfennig-worth of candied lemon peel, 200 g ground almonds, four eggs and 250 g chocolate.

Housekeeping had become almost schizophrenic. On the one hand private initiative and the old subsistence skills were needed and implicitly encouraged. The worse the quality of the raw material, the more work and creativity were needed to turn it into something palatable. Housewives associations joined official propaganda efforts by organizing talks and cookery demonstrations to promote thriftiness and ingenuity. Every available patch of ground was to be cultivated, be it balcony, windowsill, public park or allotment. Potatoes, vegetables and fruit were planted; goats, rabbits and poultry were kept for milk, meat and eggs. Balkonschweine, balcony pigs, are often mentioned in this context, supposedly showing the desperate desire of urban families to keep pigs, though the term usually referred to rabbits. On the other hand, the consumption of all officially traded foodstuffs was highly regulated and deprivatized. Private households were checked to prevent hoarding and overconsumption, and precious reserves were subject to confiscation. Forward planning was impossible, as foodstocks were completely unpredictable and depended on what was available after seemingly endless queueing, sometimes all night long, a system christened Lebensmittel-Polonäsen. On top of all this, even when successfully making do with official rations, women were repeatedly accused of selfishly ‘over-caring’ for their families by making food taste good. Cooking was to be a patriotic requirement; the goal was to avoid pleasure and overindulgence.

Besides the shortages, unequal distribution of scarce supplies caused many complaints, leading to demonstrations, riots and strikes. The discrepancy between urban and rural populations grew and was in turn augmented by the gap between city folks with rural connections and those without, as well as between rich and poor. For a wealthy minority, food was still available – a reality made painfully obvious in delicatessens, restaurants and hotels. Officially these outlets had the same status as the soup kitchens, and were restricted in their offerings by the obligation to serve rationed food only with the necessary coupons. However, money procured a comparatively sumptuous meal at most places, especially as non-rationed game and poultry often found their way into restaurant kitchens. On official meat-free days (introduced in 1916), menus offered dishes containing meat as ‘bread with topping’.

The food situation reached its crisis point in the winter of 1916–17, known as the Kohlrübenwinter, turnip (or more precisely swede) winter, when the potato crop failed and the winter months were particularly cold. Until summer 1917 swedes had to stand in for potatoes as a staple food while also appearing in the form of jam, bread and sausage. Previously swedes had been regarded as cattle fodder, and relying on them for survival represented a severe blow to German morale, much worse than having to fall back on paupers’ potatoes. Metaphorically people felt they had been reduced to the status of cattle, reflecting the state of those being sent to the slaughterhouse at the front. Even so there was too little to go around, even for money. Average rations in this period fell below 1,150 calories per person per day, well below subsistence level. The resulting famine was widespread and has been compared to the situation in Ireland in the 1840s.

This might have been decisive in ending the war forthwith had it not been for the German decision to resume and expand submarine warfare against Allied merchant vessels. Hunger isn’t only a bad cook, as a German saying goes, but also a bad advisor, as it gave the U.S. the final excuse to enter the war on the Allied side and further tighten the blockade. Food-related propaganda in Germany was relentless in persuading consumers to accept restrictions and sacrifices in the name of patriotic duty, preaching the return to the supposedly healthy, natural diet of old (picking up on Lebensreform slogans) and appealing to people’s sense of responsibility in posters, leaflets and lectures. But the longer the war continued, the less the population identified with official views on food policy. Towards the end of the war official contributions from the agrarian regions to the centralized food distribution had been reduced to minimal amounts, and official rations shrank to a fraction of pre-war consumption. With the exception of the winter of 1916–17, potatoes were the only food supplied at anything close to pre-war levels, whereas meat rations in the second half of 1918 were down to 11.8 per cent, eggs to 13.3 per cent and butter to 28.1 per cent of pre-war consumption. In cities this represented half the protein required by an ‘average’ adult, one-quarter of the fat, three-fifths of the carbohydrates and a little over half the calories.8

As the situation deteriorated, anarchy crept in and almost everybody cheated on everybody else at all levels: regional governments exaggerated population numbers to receive higher allocations, farmers exploited their position to get higher prices from urban customers and factories cheated on the system by providing workers with food acquired through ‘self-help’, that is, illegal bartering. City folks hoarded food bought directly at the farm gate, an illegal activity facilitated in many districts by special trains conveniently scheduled in addition to the official timetable. Illicit trading increased in importance as state-sanctioned supplies of food diminished (along with clothing, shoes and lighting material). Official estimates suggest that only about half of all rationed food was legally distributed. The government seemed to tolerate the status quo for the simple reason that illicit trading was probably the only way the nation could survive (it was only in March 1918 that illicit trading as a professional activity was declared a criminal offence punishable with a prison sentence). Women were fully aware of the fact that official rations were totally insufficient and that soldiers at the front were often in better physical shape than their families back home. They didn’t hesitate to turn to ‘self-help’ and commit criminal offences in trying to keep their families alive. The Heimatfront (home front) turned into a battle between people and authorities. The less the state was able to guarantee food supplies, the more the Schleichhandel, illicit trading, flourished (the term Schwarzmarkt, black market, was only introduced into German during the Second World War).9

In cities and industrial regions people began to suffer from famine-related illnesses such as oedema, tuberculosis and rickets, the same fate that had earlier afflicted those reduced to strict official rations in institutions. Schoolchildren, young people, the elderly and the chronically ill suffered the most, but scarcity and the lack of any stimulants such as chocolate, spices, coffee, tea and tobacco led to general depression and apathy. Mortality rose among all age groups and was particularly severe in the large cities when the influenza epidemic in 1918 took its toll. While war casualities among the military were calculated between 1.9 and 2.4 million, between 700,000 and 800,000 civilians died of starvation or related illnesses. Officially this situation did not exist. Propaganda seemed to have learnt a lot from the new art of advertising. At late as spring 1918 a poster in doctors’ waiting rooms declared:

We must persevere. We can persevere. Our nutrition is sufficient and secure. It is expected that the situation will soon become better. The general state of health is satisfying. We have been spared from epidemics. Rheumatism and gout have completely disappeared.¹⁰

Everybody who saw this knew it was a lie and whether in the trenches or at home, people were increasingly unwilling to fight for the so-called authorities behind them (it is notable that the situation in Britain was quite similar).11 Having appealed to the U.S. for an armistice, Germany was expected to surrender her merchant fleet as well as rolling stock in the form of locomotives and freight wagons in good working order ‘to ensure the supply of foodstuffs to Germany’. However, those few of the wagons that were still in working order were needed to distribute such little food as there was. German officials hesitated to sign a document which sentenced their country to continuing hunger and starvation, risking anarchy through famine. At the least they expected to be able to buy food for the starving population in return for the merchant fleet. But France had borrowed heavily during the war to meet her own food shortages and kept insisting that German gold reserves be used for reparations instead of buying food supplies. Consequently the blockade was further extended into the Baltic Sea, suspending German rights in those fishing grounds. German industry ground to an almost complete halt from lack of raw materials and the inability to feed its workers. Depression and hopelessness were even more acute than in wartime, threatening moral collapse. A British commissioner reported in 1919, after an inspection trip in Germany, on the appalling quality of the potatoes: ‘It was with difficulty that one could believe the potatoes I referred to could be eaten by any human creature; only the pangs of direct hunger would make their consumption possible.’¹²

It is rarely mentioned how negatively these hardships affected the way the Treaty of Versailles was perceived in Germany. Also, there can be no doubt that the deep food trauma of the First World War shaped Nazi strategies. Some historians even claim that the experience turned a whole generation, the schoolchildren of that time, into enthusiastic Nazi followers, adding conviction to their theory that Germany’s economy needed to expand east to achieve Lebensraum, or living space, a concept that had been coined by Friedrich Ratzel in the late 1890s.¹³ Finally, in March 1919, the German delegation agreed to part with the merchant fleet. During the following weeks food arrived in German ports, most of it organized by the American Relief Commission, although restrictions remained until the blockade was lifted with the official signing of the peace treaty in late June 1919.

In 1919, depending upon region, 20 to 40 per cent of the population were unemployed, with their allowance from the state constantly eroded by rising inflation. From 1920 onwards American and British Quakers organized the provision of additional food to as many starving German children as possible, reaching 25 per cent of all those born between 1907 and 1919. The Quakers were seen as apolitical and impartial as a result of the help they gave to civilians and German pows in France and Belgium during the war. They were careful not to interfere with German ideas about family structure and cautious in the way they offered assistance: these provisions, they explained, were

A group of poor unemployed people during lunch on a bench, 1920–29.

meant to be a supplemental meal. We do not want to raise the burden of support from the shoulders of the parent any more than necessary. The meal is given at ten o’clock in the morning, or at two or three o’clock in the afternoon so as not to coincide with the meal at home.

Perhaps due to these sensiblities, the state authorities were reluctant to take up the role of providing extra food from the Quakers when they stopped sending food and money in 1925, although the need for school meals was obviously acute. In 1922 more than 60 per cent of all schoolchildren in the larger cities were malnourished. In 1924 an American visitor noticed:

You can’t tell from their faces how old they are; so you don’t know how undersized they are. It is just the expression and color as well as the odd lines and wrinkles that one cannot imagine on a child’s face.

Once again it was left to private initiatives and charities to care for hungry children in the large cities while the authorities reverted to admonishing housewives to prepare sensible meals with little money, continuing to offer advice rather than assistance throughout the depression of the early 1930s.14

In 1922 meat consumption remained at wartime levels: 22 kg per head per year, less than half the 52 kg available in 1913.¹⁵ Obliged to spend up to half their income on food, the urban middle classes felt reduced to a social and economic level unacceptably close to that of the lower classes. It has sometimes been said that the First World War made for a growing social homogenization, a ‘socialization’ through shortages. However, in retrospect a general loss of confidence as well as the rise of egocentric principles based on the idea of the survival of the fittest seem more characteristic of the First World War and the post-war period. The anarchic spirit of self-help that had developed during wartime led to food riots. Disillusioned and frustrated that peace hadn’t brought a return to their pre-war lifestyle, the less fortunate were by no means ready to accept private profiteering and extortionate prices. In contrast to those in work, they were unable to express their feelings through striking. The police had to be called, often in vain, to protect shopkeepers from looting. In Berlin the situation reached a new climax on 5 November 1923 when the city authorities were unable to distribute unemployment allowances due to paper money shortages. Sparked by mounting anti-Semitism, thousands stormed the Jewish Scheunenviertel quarter in the centre of Berlin, looting Jewish shops and robbing, beating up and stripping naked any Jewish-looking person unfortunate enough to cross their path. Most of the people in this mob had known only hunger, misery and frustration and saw group action as their only chance of wielding any kind of power. A wider spectrum of society involved itself in much less violent incidents of lawlessness, and those who stole food from shop displays were almost apologetic to shopkeepers. Meanwhile farmers and wholesalers were holding back their goods in anticipation of currency reform, which eased the tension on 15 November 1923.¹⁶

Finally, after almost a decade, life in Germany was becoming less bleak, not least due to the easing of reparation payments under America’s Dawes Plan and increased acceptance of Germany as a political and economic player. During the so-called Goldenen Zwanziger, Golden Twenties, at least some of the urban middle classes adopted a more relaxed lifestyle, warmly embracing modernity. An underlying need for escapism made people search out amusement, sometimes almost desperately, albeit with a certain flourish. On Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm the density of cafes, bars and restaurants was even higher than on the Linden boulevard. All tastes were catered for at all hours. Sitting out on the pavement to watch passers-by was part of the attraction year-round. In winter some places even put out tall coke-fired ovens very similar to the outdoor gas-heaters of today, adding further to ‘the Paris feeling’.17 American-style amusement parks modelled on Coney Island, Luna-Parks, replaced the pre-war coffee gardens. Restaurants serving wine and beer became ever larger, louder and more colourful gastronomic experiences. Among the best-known of these establishments was Café Piccadilly on Potsdamer Platz, which had 2,000 seats on two floors.¹⁸ Opened in 1912, it had been renamed Kaffee Vaterland, fatherland cafe, in 1914. In 1928 the Kempinski family reopened it as Haus Vaterland; it offered entertainment as well as food and drink and could seat 3,500. Music and entertainment of every kind started at midday, while a wide range of themed restaurants and bars offered the equivalent of a world tour. The best known of these places of entertainment as well as refreshment was the Rheinterrasse, a simulated Rhine landscape complete with vineyards and looming castles where revellers experienced a ‘genuine’ thunderstorm over the Rhine at regular intervals. Vienna was represented by a Grinzing Heurigen wine bar where guests were serenaded by schmaltzy violins while gazing across a panoramic vista of the Austrian capital. In a Moorish palace, where the Golden Horn and Constantinople complete with mosques and minarets were visible on the horizon, Turkish hookahs were set on Turkish tables and Turkish coffee was served from copper pots along with proper Turkish raki. Rice wine was on offer at the Japan-Bar, a Texas band played in the Wild West, sherry could be had in a Spanish bodega, Tokaji wine was served in the Csardas-Stube – and, of course, there was ample provision of beer and wurst at the Bavarian Löwenbräu beerhouse, while an Altberliner Bierstube was aptly named Teltower Rübchen, Teltow turnip. Music and artists were to be heard and seen everywhere, but the heart of the whole endeavour was a vast dancehall. On the tenth anniversary of the opening of the complex, Haus Vaterland claimed to have welcomed ten million visitors who had consumed 3.5 million bottles of wine from the Kempinski cellars and eaten food provided by more than 100 cooks working in the main kitchen on the fifth floor. Berliners themselves, it was said, visited Haus Vaterland once out of curiosity, then left the place to tourists and newcomers, since natives of the city much preferred the catering at the original Kempinski establishments.

For Hotel Adlon the Golden Twenties were golden indeed. With its cellars well-stocked with wine, the hotel was financially stable in spite of inflation, welcoming increasing numbers of international visitors who appreciated the ambience even more than Berliners did. In 1928 the dinner menu had become a relaxed international mix: scotsch (sic) woodcock and poule au pot were mentioned next to holländische Tunke, sweet potato and omelette au confiture. At the dinner gala evenings announced for every Thursday, the chef heeded the call of the exotic even more enthusiastically, offering a wild mix of Florida, Londonderry, Rhodesia, Souvaroff and Stroganoff.

Cafés on the Westberlin Kurfürstendamm in the 1920s provided coke-fuelled heaters to prolong the season, ‘following the Paris model’. Today gas heaters are used even in the midst of winter.

In contrast in private households women were increasingly obliged to contribute to finances to make ends meet. Fewer and fewer families could afford servants, by now a scarce and expensive commodity. Taking their inspiration from the U.S., home economics associations endeavoured to highlight the virtues of modern technology. Of the many American publications which dealt with the subject, the most influential, Christiane Frederick’s The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, was translated into German in 1920. Households were regarded as workplaces in need of rational organization based on modern scientific findings. Nevertheless traditional ideas lay behind the supposedly modernist vision: it was never questioned that housework and childrearing were women’s tasks. In addition the war had shown the importance of housework as an economic force, and its rationalization in Germany was not intended to promote consumerism, leisure activities or any of the other selfish white urban female indulgences enjoyed in the U.S. Housework was intended to assist economic recovery and help the nation meet reparation payments; for the same reason, buying imported goods was considered unpatriotic. In that respect nothing had changed in the aftermath of war. Performing the duties of a wife and mother was still widely regarded as a woman’s main task in life. Taking part in any other activities – including spending more time than necessary on household chores – was to cheat the husband and children of the time they deserved with their wife or mother.

Bauhaus architects, industrialists, Social Democrats and feminists were all united in promoting the need to rationalize women’s daily chores. In 1926 these uncomfortable bedfellows came together in the creation of the Home Economics Group of the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit (RKW, National Board of Trustees for Productivity), forerunner of the Rationalisierungs- und Innovationszentrum der Deutschen Wirtschaft (German Economic Centre for Rationalization and Innovation). For some this seemed to offer a convenient means of controlling the spending habits of the lower classes, thus limiting wage demands; for others it could be considered an opportunity to criticize the proletarian lifestyle for scientific reasons – an excuse to deplore knickknacks in the kitchen, chattering with neighbours and frequent unplanned shopping trips as wasteful and causing a nuisance for the rest of the population. Cooking, cleaning and washing, it was felt, should conform to the same processes that governed industrial labour by delivering maximum output for minimum input through the elimination of waste. A large show on the subject, Die Ernährung (Nutrition), was held in Berlin in 1928. It was designed to demonstrate that hunger would never return thanks to the new, modern, rational kitchens on show, assuring visitors that homemaking and housewifery were central to the whole economy. The Berlin trade fairgrounds had been started for the first automobile exhibition in 1921 and were situated next to the Avus motor racing track. The new Funkturm radio tower was finished when in 1926 the first Grüne Woche (‘Green Week’) agricultural fair took place there. It soon also featured a restaurant at a lofty 52 metres off the ground.

The nation’s home economists were tireless in developing new materials such as Cromargan, a type of stainless steel, and Durax or Jena, fireproof glass, as well as more affordable and easy to clean utensils made from aluminium and enamel. Every tool and kitchen activity was monitored and reviewed in the search for more efficient implements and methods, leading to calls for the standardization of furniture, appliances and kitchenware. The board even examined household tasks such as peeling potatoes, though an exhaustive search for the ideal instrument and method for the task proved inconclusive. Advice then focused on saving energy and avoiding exhaustion caused by incorrect posture and poor working conditions. Industrialists, charities and the government promoted the board’s ideas in schools and pamphleted the populace at large. At the forefront of the campaign were electrically operated food processors with numerous applications – bringing the technical revolution into the home environment and ensuring the industrialization of private kitchens. However the majority of the households targeted by the campaign used coal or firewood to cook, as most couldn’t afford electricity until after the Second World War. Like war propagandists, the rationalizers were always ready to turn events to their own advantage: ‘The vacuum cleaner will be superfluous in the home which does not allow dust the possibility of collecting’, wrote Erna Meyer, one of their leading advocates, in 1927. Germans were by no means alone in holding up rationalization as the answer to domestic drudgery, but the notion seems to have had an unusually strong appeal there, at least in the abstract. With hindsight, this seems to anticipate the irrational acceptance of the absurd idea of resettling the conquered territories in the late 1930s and early ’40s: as long as we stick to the right principles, we’ll manage anything.19

In the wake of the economic recovery of 1924 new housing projects enabled the introduction of modernist ideas into the home. However, it is important to keep in mind that at the time the functional layouts that enabled the rationalization of work in kitchens equipped with water and heat sources derived from gas or electricity were too expensive for most working-class families. In these new spaces the kitchen was placed at the centre of the household but was largely reduced to cooking and related activities. Living and eating in the same room had come to be regarded as unhygienic, and as requiring a room deemed too large for rationalized labour. Only in very small flats was it declared acceptable to combine cooking and eating activities in a single space. The ideal new kitchen was sited next to the living or dining room. It was small, well-ventilated and had plenty of light. The best known of several new kitchen models was the Frankfurter Küche designed in 1926 by the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Commissioned by Frankfurt am Main’s city council, it was modelled on the kitchens installed on steamships and in dining cars on trains. The prototype was furnished according to the Taylor system and complied with efficiency studies in home management. Three different types were proposed, giving away the project’s middle-class target groups: for households with two servants, for those with one, and for those with no servants at all. They all included an ironing board that opened out from the wall, moveable lamps and Schütten, small aluminium drawers for flour, sugar and other necessities. The smallest model was 6.5 m square and narrow in shape with a single window at the short end. It had wooden cabinets painted blue, a colour with a supposedly hygienic ‘anti-fly’ function. It could be argued that Schütte-Lihotzky valued simplicity for aesthetic reasons, for even at the time her design was criticized for isolating the housewife. In response she developed an additional model with a glass wall facing the living or dining room, aestheticizing the housewives’ isolation rather then ending it.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen.

A culinary place in time: Musterhaus am Horn

Germany’s very first fitted kitchen was installed in the Bauhaus model house Musterhaus am Horn in Weimar in 1923 on the occasion of the first Bauhaus festival. Bauhaus represented a lifestyle in which art and technology were seen as one. The kitchen here is all in white, with milky glass tiles, and its use is restricted to food preparation and the cleaning of dishes. Visually and functionally it is the very opposite of the traditional lower classes’ Wohnküche or kitchen-cum-living-room. Unlike the Frankfurt Kitchen, ceramic containers (which are still in industrial production today) are used for flour, sugar and similar provisions. The Musterhaus was conceived as a model for a new kind of building but remained a one-off. Just as the ideal of a classless society was unable to overcome inflation, massive unemployment and political instability, all of which worked against women’s emancipation, any notion of democratization through the standardization of living space as proposed by the Bauhaus was strongly opposed by conservatives who wanted to hang on to the traditions which gave them a favourite position in society. The Haus am Horn was lived in until 1938. It was restored and declared a world heritage site in 1996 and is open to the public (www.hausamhorn.de).

The Nazi regime appropriated and exploited many of the life reform movement’s ideas. Not only was the lawn of Berlin’s Olympiastadion maintained according to biodynamic principles, but the concentration camp in Dachau also ran a 150-hectare farm growing a wide selection of herbs following Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, which were sold in a shop on the premises.20 Körperkultur – body culture – became an Aryan, neo-pagan cult closely linked to the vegetarian ideal of a ‘pure’ and thus healthy body. At the same time the Nazis were deeply suspicious of the vegetarian movement itself, which they considered both pacifist and sectarian. In 1935, the same year that Johannes Haussleiter provided a history of vegetarianism in antiquity, Der Vegetarismus in der Antike, Germany’s vegetarians’ association, the Vegetarierbund, disbanded to avoid being forcibly absorbed into the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lebensreform – German Life Reform Society – founded by the Nazis.

In Nazi ideology farmers were idealized as the backbone of the Aryan race, providers of the life source and embodying the link between Blut und Boden, blood and soil. As early as 1933 the agricultural sector was brought under the direct control of the Reichsnährstand (national food estate). The regime mounted a far-reaching campaign for self-sufficiency in food production to reach independence from food imports. Obviously this was one of the lessons which they had learnt from the First World War; self-sufficiency was considered essential in preparing the country for war. Programmes initiated during the late nineteenth century, designed to create more usable land from swamps and coastal areas, were restarted as Landeskulturmassnahmen, and grassland was brought under the plough.²¹ However, agricultural productivity lagged behind the industrial sector. Chemical fertilizer, by now industrially produced, was expensive and would soon become scarce as its production had rival requirements with the armaments industry. Farms were often small and fields widely dispersed, a result of Napoleonic inheritance laws which led to fragmented landholdings in some regions. The Nazis tried to consolidate farms to make them more efficient, an essential prerequisite for the replacement of horses and oxen with tractors. The model for these new farms was to be the Erbhöfe, so-called ancestral estates, whose owners (who had to be of pure Aryan descent) had safeguarded their farms from splitting up and thus becoming inefficient. However, like most regulations at the time, this had the ultimate goal of tighter state control (and substantial Flurbereinigung, the re-parcelling of land, only took place after the Second World War). Lebensraum in the east was considered essential to provide the land and resources the German race deserved. Once the east was conquered and its former inhabitants forcibly removed or murdered, German agronomists in their megalomaniac fantasies intended to build an agricultural empire modelled on the American Midwest as well as earlier European colonial efforts in the tropics.

Agriculture in Germany in 1930.

From the beginning, Germany’s ‘battle for food’ ran into severe problems due to below-average crops and bureaucratic deficiencies. In addition migration away from rural areas made for deep-rooted labour problems during the harvest. When a bread crisis threatened in the winter of 1935–6, drastic steps such as rationing were only narrowly avoided, leading to renewed efforts and even stricter agricultural regulations in the years that followed. Sport and dance halls were confiscated to house national grain reserves in preparation for war, and the building of silos and store rooms was subsidized by the state. The need for migrant workers in armaments production led to the official promotion of machinery on farms. A the same time inexperienced members of the Nazi Youth were sent to provide cheap labour in stables and fields.22

The Nazis promoted Vollkornbrot, wholemeal bread. However, they didn’t invent it; indeed the concept and term were by no means as timeless as some would have liked them to be. The history of Vollkornbrot, bread made of the whole grain except for the husk (or chaff), went back to the 1890s, when bread reformers lobbied against the commercial white bread made with flour from modern mills where bran and germ could be easily separated. The first documented use of the term is from 1910: then as now (up to a point) it not only stood for the use of wholegrain flour, but the idea of a complete, indeed full – voll – reconnection with nature. There had, of course, been earlier versions of non-white breads, above all in the north of Germany, where more rye was consumed than in the centre and south. The darkest and heaviest of these virtue-bestowing breads was Westphalia’s Pumpernickel. Originally known as Swattbraut or black bread, there are many stories attached to its seventeenth-century beginnings, though historians remain divided as to the roots of the name. To this day pumpernickel is made from coarsely ground whole-grain flour kneaded with water and salt and formed into large, long, rectangular loaves that steam rather than bake for 24 hours in a sealed oven, producing a sweetish, almost syrupy flavour. Since the 1890s reform bakers had come up with various new wholemeal breads. At the start these were called Ganzmehlbrot (literally wholemeal bread), among them Steinmetz, Simons and Schlüter breads made from rye and Graham bread made from wheat, all named after their ‘inventors’ and encouraged by new scientific findings which promoted the idea that food should be unadulterated, ‘natural’ and complete. The term Vollmilch, full-fat milk, was also coined then and was legally defined in 1899 as linked to fat content.

Official Nazi policy declared that the quality and colour of the daily bread was directly linked to the general health of the German race, an almost mythical notion perceived at the time as threatened with degeneracy. However, since the hardships of the First World War, dark bread made with bran had a negative connotation in not so mythical daily life, and many people were convinced that it made more sense to eat more digestible white bread and feed the bran to animals for meat and milk. In 1923, with hyperinflation under control, a general shift from rye to wheat bread mirrored that of the comparatively prosperous late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Political discussion once again was divided between those who advocated free trade and wheat imports on the one hand, and supporters of a conservative campaign favouring rye bread and designated wheat-free days along with the imposition of import restrictions on American wheat on the other. As the depression took hold in Germany in 1929 home-grown rye gained ground once more, and wholemeal bread was seen as a more sustainable and thrifty way to use precious home-grown nutrients, as well as a source of the newly discovered and already popular vitamins.

In their quest for German supremacy the Nazi party appropriated and exploited this trend, initiating an impressive systematic campaign in favour of Vollkornbrot on the basis of domestic economy and health, in particular the fight against tooth decay. The master race, it was assumed, would thrive and flourish on a diet of domestically produced, ‘natural’, wholesome food. In a survey of bread consumption in 1936, black and wholemeal bread made up 6 per cent and rye bread 50 per cent, while bread made from a mix of rye and wheat – to this day one of the most popular types of bread – was at 20 per cent and wheat bread at 24 per cent. In the same year autarchy in food and military self-sufficiency were officially declared the main political goals, along with the mobilization of the entire German economy for war as a prelude to the expansion of Germany to the east. Vollkornbrot was one of the most important elements of these preparations for war. Having learnt their lessons from the First World War, officials didn’t attempt to standardize bread production in general. Instead they called for the regional family-run bakeries that were widespread in Germany (in contrast to Britain where the bread industry was already dominated by large-scale industrial producers) to come up with their own wholemeal breads based on the Vollkornbrot principle. An advertising campaign using posters, leaflets and educational materials for kindergartens, schools and dental practices sought to inform and convince instead of ‘force-feeding’ the population; it was later augmented by short films shown in cinemas detailing the ‘battle for bread’.

In 1939 the Reichsvollkornausschuss or National Wholemeal Committee was founded with the aim of increasing consumption of wholemeal loaves to between 30 and 50 per cent of the total. Bakers were required to submit samples of their respective breads for quality control. Upon approval and for a fee, they received advertising materials and an official sticker featuring the general health committee’s logo with the old runic sign symbolizing life (which came to be used on over 150 different foodstuffs officially approved as healthy) and the words Vollkornbrot ist besser undgesunder, wholemeal bread is better and more healthy. At the same time the committee trained bakers to optimize quality and advocated the production of wholemeal rolls and pastries. Official prices for those wholemeal goods were slightly higher than those for ordinary ones in the hope that the higher margin would serve as an incentive to increase production, one of the major problems of the whole operation.

Vollkornbrot became a national symbol. It entered the school curriculum and was made compulsory in soup kitchens, canteens, restaurants and hospitals. Instant food products for infants using wholemeal flour were introduced. On the somewhat delicate subject of digestibility, officials assured people who complained about flatulence that their degenerate digestive systems only needed time and training to gradually return to full capacity. Statistically the campaign was a success. Between 1937 and 1939 consumption of black and wholemeal bread rose steadily almost everywhere in the country. In spite of all the propaganda, however, Vollkornbrot never fully shed its association with wartime and hardship, and many equated it with the fortification of margarine with vitamin A; a necessity associated with shortages and a lack of personal choice.

As soon as German troops marched into Poland in early September 1939, a totalitarian food regime took full effect through rationing. Once again lessons had been learnt and in contrast to 1914 everything seemed well prepared. It was only logical that only racially pure Germans were entitled to Vollkornbrot. From 1942 onwards Vollkornbrot couldn’t be produced in adequate quality and quantity, and porridge and gruel were increasingly recommended instead. This was partly due to failed crops, in spite of the often ruthlessly inhumane exploitation of the conquered countries. Ironically this failure led to a return to what actually were Germany’s original foodways. In the post-war years, as soon as white bread became available once more, national preferences reasserted themselves, although in the 1970s environmental concerns saw a return of Vollkornbrot, fortunately this time without a grim ideology.23

On a more psychological level, Eintopf was another element in the Nazis’ attempt to mobilize and involve the whole populace in the war effort. The term Eintopf, one pot, means quite literally that only one cooking vessel should be used for the whole meal. As with Vollkornbrot, this was by no means a new invention, since stews and hotpots are the kind of dishes whose origin is universal and cannot be ascribed to any particular time or place. The word Eintopf itself was a Nazi attempt to exploit the romanticizing of the outdoors that motivated young hikers and boy scouts. A simple foldable tripod to hang a pot over a fire was as much a part of their equipment as a guitar to encourage group singing. In some circles even individual plates came to be seen as degenerate, evidence of a lack of community feeling. The Nazis positioned themselves as honest and down to earth, officials deliberately posing as men of simple tastes. During the Second World War Eintopf was commented on by the writer Bertolt Brecht:

We’re Eating One-pot Dishes, Nobody Must Go Hungry, 1933–45 propaganda for the Kriegswinterhilfswerk.

Die Oberen sagen, im Heer

Herrscht Volksgemeinschaft.

Ob es wahr ist, erfahrt ihr

In der Küche. In den Herzen soll

Der gleiche Mut sein. Aber

In den Schüsseln ist

Zweierlei Essen.

The ones up there are saying, in the army we’re all one people. The same courage should prevail in our hearts. But in the bowls are two kinds of food.24

From October 1933 Eintopf-Sonntage, stew Sundays, were introduced to reinforce the feeling of community. All Germans were asked to serve and eat a simple stew instead of the usual roast lunch on the first Sunday of every month from October until March, donating the pecuniary difference to the newly founded Winterhilfswerk, Winter Relief Organization, to support and show solidarity with the unemployed. The money was collected by party members, and though officially declared optional, social and political pressure made support for the campaign far from it; a characteristic Nazi strategy. Specialized cookbooks offered recipes suitable for these Sundays which were marked in calendars in the same way as public holidays; recipes were printed in newspapers along with pictures of the Führer himself eating Eintopf. In January 1935 the menu at Hotel Adlon listed Suppentopf Hausfrauen Art oder Möhren mit Pöckelkamm bürgerlich – housewife-style stew or carrots with salted pork à la bourgeoise offered at 2.20 marks, the price being composed of 0.80 basic costs, 1.20 Winterhilfe donation and 0.20 service charge.

With gold and foreign currency reserves not only low but urgently needed for importing raw materials for the armaments industry, the Nazi regime was under severe financial constraints. At the same time purchasing power rose following economic recovery, threatening inflation. Officials deemed it essential to steer food consumption in the right direction. Initially health was used as the prevailing argument. A poster from the 1930s delivered the message loud and clear: ‘Eat fish and you’ll stay slim and healthy.’ As a result, fish consumption rose from 8.9 kg per head in 1932 to 12.5 kg in 1938.²⁵ It was not long before economic and political necessities dictated more direct interference, although the authorities were always careful to mask their real motives. From 1934 the building of new fishing boats was state-subsidized, neatly connecting job creation with rearmament efforts, since the owners of the boats were legally bound to convert their vessels to become part of the war fleet when required. In the same year, 1934, an effort was made to steer private demand even more directly by establishing the first modern market research society, Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK), as a privately funded body. In 1937 the GfK issued a Reichsspeisekarte or national menu listing foodstuffs appropriate to every month while generally recommending higher consumption of potatoes, quark (widely popular since ancient times), low-fat cheese, fruit and fish, all perceived as produced domestically and in abundance. Butter, lard, bacon, margarine and oil were to be used sparingly, and jam was promoted as a substitute on bread. As a result of state subsidies, jam production tripled between 1933 and 1937. Many companies supported these efforts by including the GfK’s meal recommendations in housekeeping courses they offered their female employees.26

Bakers were now legally obliged to sell Vollkornbrot, wholemeal bread. State funding went into various research projects designed to promote self-sufficiency and develop protein and oil-rich plants such as rape (advertisements promoted Erstes deutsches Rapsfett, the first German rapeseed fat). The cultivation and use of soy beans were once more heavily promoted (though for various reasons the campaign proved unsuccessful everywhere but in the occupied Ukraine). The whaling industry was revived, fish farms were set up and farmers were encouraged to plant root crops to replace grain as animal feed. Dairy products became a sensitive subject. A decree of October 1938 prohibited the production and distribution of liquid cream and all related products between 15 September and 14 May of each year, leading to all kinds of ersatz recipes, often using egg white and resembling a kind of syllabub. From the start of war only low-fat milk was distributed. In the attempt to get hold of every single gram of milk fat a decree of 1940 even aimed at the confiscation of farmers’ butter-making equipment, although it is difficult to know how far this was implemented. In spite of the regime’s motto Kanonen statt Butter, ‘canons instead of butter’ – corresponding roughly to Churchill’s famous ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ – the importance of butter as a contributor to the national feeling of well-being cannot be overstated. Butter had been rationed since 1937, but quantities remained constant until spring 1942, when regular allocations were cut from 150 to 125 g per week. In 1943, 60 per cent of all butter consumed in Germany came from domestic production, an increase of 30 per cent on 1939, although the quality of this wartime butter was far inferior and led to the coining of the term gute Butter, good butter – that is, the real thing – which still rings familiarly in the ears of those like myself who grew up in the 1960s.

After German troops had marched into Austria in 1938, German tourists apparently descended in hords on Austrian coffeehouses, hungry for badly missed delicacies such as Torte and Schlagobers, whipped cream, causing the official ss newspaper to comment: ‘One would think Greater Germany was only created so that this raving Philistine rabble can wolf down whipped cream.’ The ss commentator, naturally enough, did not mention that while the cream-eaters were gorging themselves, Austria’s Nazis were beating up Jews in the streets.27

Official propaganda declared the purchase of imported tropical fruits unpatriotic, promoting German apples and presenting rhubarb as a patriotic replacement for lemons. This (and similar attempts to control advertising) only worked up to a point. Leaders of the Women’s Bureau, Frauenwerk, the Nazi successor to the housewives’ associations, tried their best but frequently admitted how difficult it was to effect permanent changes in consumption patterns in spite of all their efforts through cookery courses, leaflets, radio programmes and recipes in newspapers. The Frauenwerk’s list of recommended foodstuffs for October 1937 featured ‘fish, cabbage, jam, quark, skimmed milk, grapes and porridge oats’.²⁸ It should come as no surprise that many women clung stubbornly to regional and personal preferences in the attempt to preserve their self-esteem and self-identity. The suggestion to replace the cold evening meal of buttered bread with cold cuts with a warm cooked dish met with particularly strong resistance, even if this was promoted as more flexible and therefore better suited to accomodate fat and meat shortages. Thrift, the old bourgeois ideal, was lifted to new heights of pettiness: restaurants were subject to official guidelines on leftovers and housewives were advised not to use wooden spoons as these might soak up precious fat, while butter and jam were to be spread directly onto bread to avoid waste on the plate. In a similar vein women were discouraged from shopping in department stores as this could lead to impulse purchases.²⁹

Some of this advice on food and cooking sounds perfectly familiar and sensible. It is only the political background – the imposition of social pressure and constraint through lack of alternatives, all with the goal of brutal imperialism – that makes these efforts more than questionable in the historical context. Pellkartoffeln, potatoes boiled in their skins, can be delicious as anyone might wish, particularly when served with quark – the official alternative to butter – when both are chosen freely and without the indigestible background of racist ideology and dictatorship. The point is well illustrated in a passage from a report of the NS Frauenschaft from 1936 which sounds as familiar to contemporary ears as the Nazi campaign against food waste: ‘City women had actually come to ignore the growth and cycle of the natural environment that surrounded them. Fresh strawberries in winter were now simply seen as a delicacy.’³⁰

Overall consumption of fruit declined, although in 1938 Germans still ate 7 kg per head of unpatriotic imported tropical fruit, down from 10 kg in 1930. In spite of the fact that alcohol and tobacco were presented as unhealthy, particularly for women, cigarette consumption almost doubled between 1932 and 1940, not least as result of the young, elegant women depicted in advertisements who were undoubtedly representative of consumers’ desires. Brandy consumption among adults rose by 40 per cent between 1930 and 1937, while coffee became a highly controversial subject, since demand notoriously exceeded supplies. The black market in coffee flourished from the start. In 1939 the propaganda minister fulminated about unnecessary needs:

We don’t want to go so far as to apply the drastic antithesis of ‘First guns, then coffee’, but it seems necessary in face of the difficult state of affairs of the world to judge stringent German rearmament as more important than supplying our Kaffeetanten (coffee-aunts) with sufficient coffee.31

The Nazi philosophy was full of contradictions. In spite of all the nostalgic agrarian romanticism, the regime also promoted modern technology in households and advanced new methods of food production. Consumption of electricity in private households and small businesses rose by 38 per cent between 1933 and 1940. In the effort to avoid waste – driven home with yet another campaign, Kampf dem Verderb – and build up stocks for war, convenience foods became a priority for state-subsidized research. New kinds of food packaging were developed. The output of cans as a means of preserving fruit and vegetables almost doubled between 1933 and 1937, and mass production of frozen food started in 1938. However, while the state promoted the virtues of frozen food, foraging for wild food and vegetable gardening were also strongly encouraged. Later on potato and vegetable peelings were collected for local pig farmers in return for some adelige Milch, literally noble or blue-blooded milk, the skimmed milk naturally tinged with blue which was given to pig farmers by the dairies to feed their animals. Temporary restrictions on sought-after luxuries were made more palatable by the promise of a better future: Hitler’s vision was of a modern consumer society modelled on that of America, with refrigerators, radios, washing machines, holidays and a car affordable by every family. However, the Volkswagen Beetle project was as unrealistic as similar schemes promising affordable household goods – the first car was delivered to a private customer in 1946. Nevertheless for a while such promises made people feel good. Many working-class families remembered the years between 1935 and 1939 as ‘good years’, times when they were feeling more affluent than in 1932 and better off than before the depression, though this had more to do with expectations than actual living standards. In the late 1930s Germans had to spend about 45 per cent of their income on food but consumed only one-eighth more meat than during the depression, 48.6 kg per head and year. The Frankfurter Zeitung commented in January 1937 on the ‘intensive impression of popular enjoyment making itself felt in restaurants, beer-gardens and open-air cafés . . . [although] customers often could not afford to purchase more than a cup of coffee or a glass of beer.’32

After the rise of the Nazis to power, the Germanizing Sprachverein perceived itself as contributing to the official party line, calling itself ‘our Mother Tongue’s SA’ (the SA or Sturmabteilung was the Nazis’ paramilitary troop).³³ But the association’s members had misunderstood the Nazi agenda. The Fascist ruling party often deliberately used certain foreign words as euphemisms, preferring Sterilisation to the much more widely comprehensible German term Unfruchtbarmachung proposed by the association. In November 1940 Hitler, who was very much aware of the fascination little-understood foreign words possessed for the masses, decreed:

The Führer does not wish any kind of forcible Germanizing and does not approve of the artificial replacing of foreign words that have long since been integrated into German by words that are not in the spirit of the German language and mostly insufficiently render the sense of the foreign words.³⁴

Nevertheless some very German terms are used on a menu from the Adlon Grill from June 1939, among them Tunke, Edelpilze and Marseiller Fischsuppe instead of Sauce, Champignons and Bouillabaisse, but in general the menu still sounds quite cosmopolitan, offering ragout fin, Scotch woodcock and Welsh rarebits. Guests are also encoraged to drink wine: the saying ‘A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine’ is printed in both German and English. The official activities of the Sprachverein ceased as the Nazis increasingly instrumentalized language for propaganda purposes while severely regulating it in the public domain. With the exception of the infamous Eintopfsonntage discussed earlier, food is rarely mentioned in the linguistic studies of the period. References are generally oblique rather than direct. A German journalist of the time gives an account of a woman in Berlin in 1941

who was less than complimentary about the quality of the Magermilch (low-fat milk) which people were being served, and as a consequence had to go to the police station every day for three months and recite ‘There isn’t any skimmed milk. There’s only skimmed fresh milk’ (entrahmte Frischmilch).

It is impossible not to be reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 and the language of Newspeak:

The whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it . . . The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.35

Cover of an Adlon menu from 1939.

Aryanization, another characteristic euphemism of the Nazi regime that masked the forced sale and later disposession of Jewish businesses, in many cases helped to consolidate buyers’ fledgling enterprises and led to immense and often shameless personal gains by ‘good’ Germans. One prominent example is the sale of the Kempinski group to Aschinger in 1937. The depression had put an end to the sybaritic escapism of the late 1920s and everybody in the hospitality industry was struggling. The Kempinskis had not only managed to stay afloat but had even made profits. Aschinger, however, in spite of a legendary reputation that lingers to the present day, had been too lofty in its ambitions, and in the 1930s the gastronomic empire ran into serious financial trouble. The group abandoned the provision of free rolls and turned to the authorities for help. The enterprise became the Nazis’ main caterer at all major events, including the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936.

During the aggressive anti-Jewish campaign introduced as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933, shops under Jewish ownership were boycotted, with customers’ entry actively hindered by paramilitary SA pickets. Like other Jewish-owned stores and hotels, those under Kempinski ownership had to mount signs declaring themselves as such. While the industry in general recovered from the economic crisis, the Kempinskis’ business suffered considerably and from 1933 no further profits were made. In the years that followed the management tried to scale down the company by selling some of their holdings. Whereas Kempinski had been cultivating their own vineyards in several regions of Germany and exporting wine worldwide, they now ceased to bottle their own vintages and were obliged, like other Jewish companies, to accept a designated Aryan manager. In addition, faced with constant social defamation and the deterioration of their reputation, they were forced to retire from all official committees. After the Olympics anti-Jewish attacks became ever more open, and the Kempinskis’ financial position weakened further. In common with many other Jewish companies, at a certain point they were forced to sell as they were simply squeezed out of the market and rendered insolvent. Aschinger and Kempinski were business partners who cooperated on many levels in the close-knit industry. After lengthy negotiations in 1937 Aschinger took over Kempinski ‘under very favourable conditions’, though regarded as legally correct under the prevailing system, thereby solving Aschinger’s financial problems. The Aschinger production facilities had in any event been oversized and had suffered from a lack of outlets. Under the new arrangement the two companies could be streamlined into one and resources could be rationalized. Advertisements made it known that the Kempinski restaurants were now socially acceptable and the takeover proved to be thoroughly profitable for Aschinger. When in 1941 Jewish company names were declared illegal, Aschinger managed to buy the highly respected restaurant and delicatessen store Borchardt and use the name for the whole operation. As a result Aschinger’s turnover doubled between 1936 and 1943. In those years, as people sought at least temporary escape from the daily problems caused by war, restaurants and bars were busy. During the war Aschinger was able to offer potato and vegetable dishes without requiring ration cards, and in 1942 the company employed German Jewish women as well as forced labour from 26 nations. Conditions were close to slavery: workers were payed a pittance with the foreign workers housed in barracks.

Haus Vaterland’s menu from October 1943 promises second helpings of potatoes, but signals that free rolls (Gratisbrötchen) can only be had against wheat coupons, promoting the official propaganda slogan: Esst Vollkornbrot, es ist gesünder!

Since the start of the war in September 1939 blackout regulations had made for complete darkness after sundown, with air raid wardens patrolling the streets. Urban bars greatly profited, offering refuge from the dark outside. Haus Vaterland continued to provide entertainment and meals until November 1943, when it was partially bombed out. A menu from October of that year offered German pearl barley soup, fish cakes, salad and pancakes with stewed fruit as well as Szegedin sauerkraut with potato dumplings and a Feingericht, a fine dish, of prawns and mussels in white wine with vegetables and sautéed potatoes. Second helpings of potatoes were on offer, and the bottom line reminded everybody to eat wholemeal bread: Esst mehr Vollkornbrot, es ist gesünder. Officials were aware that food was crucial to maintaining military and civilian morale. They knew that supplies would not last long in spite of all strategic preparations, so the intention was that the war should be short. Campaigns like the one for Vollkornbrot tried hard to suppress excessive demand and match consumption with domestic production, but also aimed for a healthier population able to withstand wartime restrictions. White bread made of wheat was denounced as leading to anaemic blood, the very opposite of ‘racial fitness’. Whereas before women had been told to do the ‘right’ thing for the welfare of their families, the discharge of their duties was once more portrayed as for the benefit of the whole nation.

After a blitzkrieg of just three weeks (during which Aschinger’s trucks helped to carry men and arms to the front) Poland was divided and Slavic families were chased from their homes to make room for ethnic Germans from outside Germany. Young women serving their Pflichtjahr, the mandatory year of service introduced in 1938, were sent to help the immigrants adopt a ‘proper’ German lifestyle. This included orderliness, cleanliness and observation of the Christmas rituals that had become hugely popular during the late nineteenth century and now formed a firm part of German national identity. Supply problems back home were countered by the systematic and unscrupulous exploitation of the conquered territories, including the drafting of foreign labour, first voluntarily, than forced. In summer 1943, 6.5 million foreign workers were living in Germany, representing a slave labour market in many respects. Those from eastern countries received particularly small rations of frequently bad quality food, mostly turnip soup, some bread and occasional weekly allocations of tiny quantities of margarine and meat. Prisoners of war didn’t fare much better. After a twelve-hour day of hard physical labour a British soldier interned in Upper Silesia was issued

about a pint of watery vegetable soup, usually mangold or sauerkraut . . three potatoes boiled in their jackets, and a loaf of black bread between twelve men, and sometimes a minute piece of ersatz margarine.

The bread and margarine were intended for breakfast with a cup of ersatz coffee. Survival in these camps often depended on Red Cross food parcels. In non-military prisons food rations were set at an even lower level; they were to all intents and purposes a death sentence in themselves.36

With the rationing of fuel, clothing and food introduced in late August 1939, even before the invasion of Poland, food allocations went down to below pre-war standards, although the need for calories was increased by additional physical activity, including collecting water or walking to work and shops. Fat supplies barely balanced carbohydrates in the form of staples such as Vollkornbrot and potatoes. Potato dishes were everyday fare, with Kartoffelgemüse particularly popular. This, a dish of sliced potatoes in a flour-based sauce, could be varied in many ways, with the addition of vinegar, a little sausage, pickles, herring brine or fresh herbs. If no fat at all was available, people ‘roasted’ the potatoes with cold ersatz coffee and made ‘meatballs’ and ‘meat-spread’ out of potato skins. Unlike in Britain, the rationing system in Germany echoed that of the First World War in being unequal in entitlement and extremely complex. Army rations were set at 4,200 calories per head per day, compared to 3,600 for those engaged in heavy labour and allocations for Normalverbraucher, regular consumers, at 2,400 calories. Children, pregnant women and nursing mothers, assuring the future of the master race, were entitled to additional milk, butter and sugar rations. Ration cards were colour coded and issued by the municipal authorities for four weeks at a time, allowing for constant adjustment.³⁷

In the 1940s academic nutritional studies examined the precise amounts of calories different occupations needed and at what time of the day warm meals were most efficient for productivity. The domestic economy section of the Reichsnährstand redoubled its educational efforts, publishing in 1940 a new edition of the Einschlachtheft, guidelines for pig-slaughter and sausage-making, with an appendix on Kriegs-Sparmassnahmen beim Schlachten, wartime saving-methods as applied to butchering. Other titles in the same series advised on eggs, wild fruit and quark. Women developed their own methods of preparing starch from potatoes and syrup from sugar beet. Culinary ingenuity came up with mock meat chops prepared from boiled cabbage and a marzipan lookalike made with grated potatoes or semolina mixed with sugar and artificial bitter almond flavouring (other available artificial flavourings were lemon, vanilla and rum).

As during the First World War, theoretical entitlements in the form of rations per head per day were not the whole story, and what people could actually obtain often differed significantly. As a result of the constant barrage of food-related propaganda of previous years, many households seem initially to have been well prepared, stocking up on basic supplies while continuing with the housewifely habit of preserving fruit and vegetables against winter and other hard times. However, after 1941 shortages extended to many everyday items such as shoelaces, candles and toilet paper. Queuing was obligatory and most supplies were ersatz – copies of the real thing. Pigs were in competition with humans for foodstuffs such as grain, potatoes and turnips – another reminder of the First World War – and in 1944 meat supplies were half those of 1933, as general food shortages led to fewer and leaner pigs. In 1943 and 1944 regular consumers were eating 40 per cent less fat, 60 per cent less meat and 20 per cent less bread than in 1939, though this was still considerably more than during the First World War or in the invaded countries at the same time, and did not lead to actual starvation.

Poster, Hamster Woman, Be Ashamed of Yourself, December 1939. This propaganda warns against the hoarding of food (shown are macaroni, linseed and olive oil, palm fat and a sausage) as well as shoes or wool.

The Nazis’ plans greatly counted on Ukraine for grain. This meant cutting off supplies to Russian cities, where the official Nazi Hungerplan scheme led to the greatest death rate since the Thirty Years War, just as Stalin was ready to let the Leningrad population starve instead of evacuating the majority and abandoning the city when it became clear that the German army was prepared to lay siege to it. In general the German army was expected to live off the land, ruthlessly requisitioning whatever was needed. German troops pillaged, plundered and destroyed even the very means Ukrainians needed to produce grain. The harvest of 1941 was much lower than expected, while transport problems meant that the army’s food supplies were frequently simply in the wrong place. In addition the police systematically searched Ukrainian houses to confiscate hidden supplies of food. Even so brutality never extracted enough from the eastern territories to feed the entire German army, as had been the original plan.

But even on the eastern front soldiers were able to siphon off goods from the black market. In 1940 the introduction of the Schleppererlass, literally hauling decree, allowed German soldiers to loot as much as they could carry. In France in particular, the troops lived off the fat of the land, dining in Parisian restaurants and sending back and taking home butter, coffee, wine, champagne, cognac and other luxuries, even whole pigs and sheep. These riches were both looted – ‘organized’ – and paid for in the local currency, as German soldiers were well paid in comparison with those of other nations and were expected to spend money in situ to reduce inflation back home. Many of the occupying forces were also sent additional money by their families to spend on delicacies and luxuries. In May 1942 each individual soldier was allowed to send home an extra 20-kg parcel in addition to the usual forces’ parcels, and customs officers were officially instructed not to check their contents. A father returning to his family from Paris is recorded as bringing

fabric for clothes, stockings, dried beans, writing paper, liver sausage, carrots in meat sauce, gloves, fabric for underwear, belts, shoes, soap, washing powder, pears, almonds, cinnamon and pepper. The table was full [of these goods] and [the practice] has now become a habit in Germany. Wherever the men are, whether in Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, the Balkans, Norway, they’re buying.

This meant that for those back home who had the right contacts, life could be quite comfortable. The architect Julius Posener was shocked to see young women in white clothes on the ruined streets of Cologne when he returned from Italy in April 1945, where people had died from starvation in the streets: ‘The people didn’t correspond to the destruction. They looked well, rosy, lively, looked after and reasonably well-clad.’38

In the course of the war agricultural productivity in Germany went down as a result of shortages of agricultural machinery, labour and draught animals. Many farms were run by women with the help of forced labourers and pows, some of whom were treated like slaves and others like family, the latter case being the exception and against official regulations. Plans for a mass-migration of German farmers to the European California in the new eastern territories – with the Slavic ‘subhumans’ taking the role of the Native Americans – were never realized. Those few who followed the call were full of expectations but in the main were unable to cope with the new climate and soil conditions, and were often ambushed by partisans, many of whom were the former owners of the farms.

The Nazi mantra was that others must suffer before German rations would be cut and that all of occupied Europe could be regarded as a perfectly legitimate source of food for Germany. Thus hunger was ruthlessly exported to all the occupied countries, leading to severe famines and malnutrition as the grain imports on which some of these countries depended, particularly Greece and Italy, were also cut off. Estimates say that about 45 per cent of the grain used for bread in Germany during the war and 42 per cent of all fat and meat came from outside Germany, mostly produced through forced labour.³⁹ French agriculture struggled as a result of labour shortages, while farmers increasingly retreated to self-sufficiency and the black market as means to make a living. The urban population there could only survive with the right connections and appropriate financial means. Italy and Norway were equally squeezed dry. In fact, western Europe contributed more food to wartime Germany than the occupied Soviet Union, with vast amounts of meat and grain imported from France, Holland and Denmark. The latter represented a special case, as the Danes were regarded as fellow Aryans and were initially left more or less alone in their internal affairs. Denmark’s pricing policy encouraged agricultural production, a black market barely existed and Denmark provided Germany with about a month’s worth of butter, pork and beef a year (200,000 tons of butter in 1940–43, compared to 49,000 from France). Unlike Germany, but similar to Holland, Danish agriculture was very efficient and based on the latest scientific knowledge.40

As on earlier such occasions, the food situation in wartime Germany differed significantly between urban and rural areas. Particularly on the large estates in the east, food could still be plentiful, whereas great efforts were needed to produce meals from the monotonous urban supplies of mostly bread, potatoes and legumes in the industrial areas in the west, where cooking once again became the art of making something out of nothing. As during the First World War many city dwellers depended on ‘hamster tours’ to the hinterland to complement their rations with milk, butter, eggs, vegetables or fruit. Rural connections replaced the social hierarchy of old. By 1942 open spaces in cities had once more been converted to vegetable patches, with trees cut for firewood. Rabbits and chickens were kept in suburban gardens and on balconies. When the Berlin zoo was hit by Allied bombs in autumn 1943, people feasted on crocodiles’ tails, deer, buffalo and antelope, followed by bear ham and sausage. During the latter stages of the war, reports from all over Germany repeatedly mentioned the spontaneous and savage butchering of dead horses in the streets. The black market became ever more important, increasingly operating through barter or with tobacco (or tobacco coupons) as a substitute currency, often leading to complicated networks of exchange. Once again it was mostly women who had to bear the additional load. In spite of all the Nazi propaganda illegal trading has been estimated at at least 10 per cent of average household consumption, but was probably much more important in large cities.⁴¹

Many small farmers were disappointed with Nazi politics. They disapproved of the centralized collection and distribution at fixed prices and withdrew into self-sufficiency and profiteering, making good contacts even more important for town folks seeking to top up official rations. Special courts were set up to deal with those involved in illegal trading and they occasionally handed out very severe punishments (just as looting following air raids was often punished with death), but it seems that many, including officials, took the risk anyhow without any sense that what they were doing was wrong. In 1943 August Nöthling, a Berlin delicatessen trader, was found to have provided large amounts of luxury and/or rationed goods such as ham, venison, butter, fat, poultry, tea, cocoa, sugar, oil, sweets, honey and fruit without coupons to an impressive group of the Nazi elite, including the chief of the Berlin police. He committed suicide in his prison cell.42 Until most restaurants (as well as theatres, dance clubs and the like) had to close following the declaration of total war after the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, real feasts could still be had at places such as Horcher’s in Berlin for the select few with the necessary pecuniary means. Waiters clipped the relevant coupons, while menus offered all kinds of non-rationed luxuries such as oysters, lobster and champagne, fish, fowl and pasta. However, the further the war progressed, the less the reality on the plate tended to correspond to the printed words. Less prestigious places were accused of cheating their customers of their ration allowances by asking for coupons without using any of the ingredients they covered. While some members of the Nazi regime made it a principle to strictly follow their own guidelines, others openly indulged. As for Hitler’s table, sources differ, making it difficult to differentiate between propaganda and reality – tales of frugal vegetarian meals on one hand and roasted pigeons followed by fancy cakes on the other – reflecting the contradictions of the Nazi realm as a whole.

Once again the British imposed a total blockade against Germany, her allies and occupied countries, cutting most of continental Europe off from the world’s food suplies. German officials welcomed any excuse to save calories that could be considered wasted on ‘unnecessary eaters’, be they slave labourers, the populations of occupied territories or otherwise deemed unworthy. Those in institutions, among them the mentally ill and disabled, were systematically starved to death on an official diet of potatoes, turnips and boiled cabbage without the addition of protein. Non-Aryan citizens’ rations were set considerably lower and choice was much more restricted, leading to gradual starvation. The systematic exclusion of the Jewish population from public life also took the form of restricted shopping times. From July 1940 in Berlin Jews were only allowed to buy food between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, and even then Aryan customers were to be served first. Shopkeepers were not allowed to reserve or deliver anything to Jews, whose rationing cards were marked with a capital J, and Jews were frequently prohibited from buying specific produce: rice, sugar, oranges, pastries, fresh vegetables, frozen food, almonds, nuts, even salt herrings, eggs, cheese and condensed milk. In October 1942 those Jews remaining in Berlin were only allowed to purchase fresh vegetables once a week, and then only white cabbage, swedes or beetroot. The same year it was decreed that even non-rationed food was to be sold only to Jews after everyone else’s needs had been satisfied.

During the exceptionally cold and long winter of 1941–2, potatoes froze during transport, leading to food shortages. Coal supplies were equally scarce, adding to the misery, with schools, theatres, bars and factories not involved in the war effort closed for lack of heating. The general mood of the German public threatened to turn against the government. Hitler and some of the Nazi leaders had always wanted to eradicate Europe’s Jews, and now they had a ‘rational’ reason to actually do so, eliminating even more ‘useless eaters’. In the camps food rations in general were below all imagination, with barely any fat to go with the bread and watery soup, so that inmates’ bodies consumed themselves after using up their fat reserves. Individual food situations differed according to the status of the camp, the inmates’ nationality and their category. In general ss supervisors installed a hierarchical system using food privileges as a means of coercing inmates. Obviously any jobs involving food were sought after. Working in the kitchen of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in July 1944 meant cigarettes, raw vegetables, meat broth and hot sweetened coffee, according to one report. Those in the ‘hospital’ section at the death camp Auschwitz were allowed to eat the rations of their unconscious fellow inmates. In general constant hunger made people egotistical, undermining solidarity and making for few revolts. Hunger often led to an obsession with food, fantasies about meals, recipes and orgies, called stomach-masturbation in another report. In his account of Auschwitz, Italian writer and death camp survivor Primo Levi wrote:

Lager [the camp] is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger . . . How weak our flesh is! I am perfectly aware how vain these fantasies of hunger are, but dancing before my eyes I see the spaghetti which we had just cooked . . . at the sorting camp when we suddenly heard the news that we would leave for here the following day; and we were eating it (it was so good, yellow, filling), and we stopped, fools, stupid as we were – if we had only known! . . . this way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and throats, without time to breathe, really is ‘fressen,’ the way of eating of animals, and certainly not ‘essen,’ the human way of eating, seated in front of a table, religiously. ‘Fressen’ is exactly the word, and is used currently among us.43

In 1940 the British Royal Air Force had started ‘morale bombing’ to undermine Germany’s will to fight by openly targeting civilians (in violation of international law). Once again Churchill was determined to starve, kill or cure the Huns, as he called the entire German population. Initially the German government offered generous compensation to those who had lost their homes and/or possessions in the form of money or ration coupons, occasionally distributing extra rations of white bread, meat, schnapps, wine and tobacco. As prices were fixed and purchases rationed, this often fuelled black-market activities. Equipment and comfort in shelters and the large public bunkers differed greatly from place to place. Where bombings were a regular feature, people went to bed in their clothes, leaving suitcases ready packed with valuables and food. Nevertheless life didn’t come to a halt: children were born under the most primitive conditions and birthdays and holidays were celebrated in the shelters. Feeding newborn infants was a particular problem, as many women found difficulty in producing sufficient milk for breastfeeding due to nervous stress and malnourishment or the need to suckle their babies at irregular times. The effect of major air attacks was much like that of an earthquake, sometimes followed by firestorms, creating an inferno in which temperatures could rise to over 1,000°c. Thousands of people were literally cooked, burned to death and completely incinerated or suffocated. Allied aerial bombing began to seriously affect food production and distribution, especially in the cities. Rations were cut in order to be able to supply bombed-out, homeless people with hot meals. For many factory canteens were the last resort. The long-term effect of constant living in fear and nights without sleep combined with food shortages and lack of medicine left its mark on the general health of the populace. Morale on the home front plummeted; conditions deteriorated.

Officially the German food supply system did not collapse until the very last months of the war. Nazi propaganda not only made sure that both the origin and the moral price of foodstuffs were either unknown or ignored, but partly reduced any impression of deprivation through constant indoctrination. In collective memory Germany’s civilian population did not go hungry until the war was over, and the regime’s conduct was perceived by many as the very model of crisis management. Hitler was seen as a safeguard against starvation, hunger an Allied weapon no less than bombing. Historians have been trying to show how restricted the national wartime diet really was, and the extent to which women’s everyday efforts ensured that people had enough to eat, frequently going hungry themselves in favour of husbands or children.44 As recently as the 1960s public voices ascribed the supposedly successful management of food supplies during the Second World War – with the exception of the very last months – to the fact that while home production might not have reached the ideal of complete self-sufficiency, production had increased enough for rations to stay well above the required minimum, omitting to mention the export of hunger to the occupied territories and the mass murder of ‘undesirable’ eaters.⁴⁵ In fact from 1942 onwards the populations of Greece and Belgium suffered severe undernourishment, while France, Norway and Holland seriously struggled.

By the spring of 1945 it was obvious to all but the most fanatical Nazis that the war was lost. For most people, particularly those in what was left of the cities and the large numbers of refugees, survival was all that mattered. A report from March 1945 speaks of empty food shops, the few that had survived that long, and a saleswoman greeting a customer with the discouraging news: ‘Whatever you might want to ask for, it’s not available.’⁴⁶ Finally the myth that the Nazis had the food situation under control was exposed as yet another of their lies. Untold numbers of refugees streaming in from the east struggled to find food and shelter for the night in improvised camps. Some had been able to pack and prepare provisions; others had been forced to leave without anything. Milk for children became an ever scarcer resource and mothers resorted to every possible trick to save their children from starvation. In early May 1945 Germany surrendered unconditionally and the Allies assumed supreme power. What was to have been a 1,000-year empire vanished after no more than twelve. Food had become a weapon of mass destruction used by all sides and the result was brutal devastation, physical as well as psychological. Over 70 million people had died, more from hunger than from any other cause, a number so immense it would be impossible even to begin to grasp the misery it represents. The Nazis’ policies had robbed German culture of almost all its Jewishness. Generations of young Germans would grow up without any knowledge of gefilte fish, challah, cholent or kugel.

As each occupying force came to terms with the territories under their command, differences between them very quickly became apparent. Most radical were the changes in the Soviet zone. In 1945 and 1946 a land reform carved up all farms larger than 100 hectares and those belonging to former members of the Nazi party into small parcels. While some of these were redistributed to peasants, landless workers and refugees, others fell into the hands of the state. In the western zones the primary concern was purely material survival. Food production and distribution were close to collapse. To further confuse matters, many of the borders of the occupied zones stretched across former economic areas. Crop yields in 1946 and 1947 were significantly lower than average because of the destruction wrought on farmland and equipment throughout the years of fighting, leaving much agricultural land unusable. In addition the agriculturally rich former eastern territories were now under Polish and Soviet rule. As had been the case throughout the war, hardships in all areas of life differed greatly. Some households lacked the bare necessities while others were preoccupied with luxuries such as children’s toys or the need to safeguard their precious wooden floors. Contrast between the bombed-out cities and rural areas were particularly extreme. While autumn 1945 saw the bottling of a top vintage at Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau region, the estate praised by German connoisseurs including Goethe, the writer’s parents’ house in nearby Frankfurt am Main was reduced to rubble, along with almost the entire city.

Restructuring of the German borders after the First and Second World Wars.

Distribution of food rations resumed almost immediately after the surrender. It was now organized by the occupying forces but basically used the same structures and systems. Allocations changed slightly and ration cards were linked to registration for employment. Survival strategies were basically the same as during the last years of the war, but under drastically worsened conditions. Improvised soup kitchens were set up in many cities. Queuing was essential for everything and information on stocks came by word of mouth. At the end of the war public and army storerooms had been opened and in most cases looted by whoever could get hold of something without being caught. Most survived on the twin essentials ‘organizing’ and ‘hamstering’, leaving the elderly without family, single women and war widows with small children often hit hardest. The differences between urban and country conditions became extreme. In many reports of the time farmers are depicted as tight-fisted profiteers, but sometimes their fields were plundered by hungry refugees.

By now most of the surviving civilian population were female, many of them unmarried or widowed. Most worked extremely hard to set the next meal on the table, trying to look after their children as best they could and working as nurses or leading refugees on the long trek home from the east. Women whose fathers or husbands had been party members were initially forced to work without pay as Trümmerfrauen – literally rubble women – clearing the ruins. For others, sorting out what could be reused from the rubble, while not enthusiastically embraced as an occupation, had the advantage of coming with a slightly larger food allocation. Though certainly not at brutal as in the Nazi camps, hunger now targeted the population at large. Women who were undernourished or exhausted simply collapsed and died while clearing the ruins. One woman reported from Hamburg in the summer of 1945:

Tired, tired! This summer is so much harder than the previous one. Everything is so scarce, and all thinking gradually concentrates on food! With the lack of fat, the cravings get worse all the time and fantasies become more excited; sausages, beef steaks, wonderful cakes, whipped cream, large bowls with fruit, sophisticated platters with vegetables full of young peas, beans, red tomatoes, delicate green cucumbers, pale cauliflower and lusty thick asparagus spears are dancing in a teasing and inviting way before one! These are the torments of Tantalus, being served at Michelsen [a delicatessen restaurant] a tiny sliver of meatloaf with dried vegetables – straw made somehow palatable! – no potatoes and preceeded by an undefinable broth! If only one could give up eating altogether!47

In the rubble and debris, life goes on: fine food store reopened, says the sign.

Historical wine restaurant Lutter & Wegner in Berlin, 1946.

Food rations were distributed every ten days, and many ate everything up at once and then had to survive on beets and foraged greens. Some women reportedly looked at pictures in cookbooks while eating a watery soup. Virtually everything was ersatz, a copy of something else: ‘gooselard’ was semolina flavoured with marjoram, softened with water and very little fat; chocolate cake was coloured with ‘coffee’ grounds made from roasted chicory root. Quality food did not exist. Potatoes were often half-rotten and stinking; bread made from bran was virtually empty under the crust. People who still had a home but no job often stayed in bed all day to save energy. Some survived on what they grew themselves, while many children went begging. Dogs and cats ended up in the cooking pot. Acorns were ground into flour as a substitute for wheat and rye. In 1945 beechnuts were plentiful and avidly collected to include in baking or in exchange for cooking oil. Memories of the immediate postwar years are marked by constant hunger for bread, a longing described by Heinrich Böll in his novel Das Brot der frühen Jahre (The Bread of Those Early Years, 1955).48 Many people lived in former air raid shelters or in cellars which were little more than holes in the ground without light or windows after having been bombed-out several times. Ever present amid the rubble and ruins was the smell of rotting corpses, which were being eaten away by rats. Heating materials were very scarce and distribution unreliable. In those areas where electricity and gas was available, supplies were frequently interrupted, as they had been following heavy bombing during the war. Cramped accommodation translated into the sharing of inadequate sanitary and cooking facilities in those households which still had coal-fired ranges. Households that lacked even the most basic cooking facilities used a few bricks to build makeshift fireplaces on balconies or doorsteps, fuelling them with little more than twigs. Many counted themselves lucky to have salvaged some kind of cooking pot; others had to fetch their meals from soup kitchens. All manner of seemingly impossible containers were transformed into cookware to replace items that had been lost, stolen or burned during the war. Many of the first cooking vessels produced in the post-war years were made of helmets and other military hardware.

In September 1945 Britain herself was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the war, but managed to avert mass starvation in the zone under her control by using the UK’s gold and dollar reserves to buy food. While a number of British NGOS supported the humanitarian effort that had started in those European countries formerly occupied by Germany, the general public in the UK tended to resent such assistance, particularly when bread and flour rationing had to be introduced throughout Britain in July 1946. The result was that private food parcels to Germany were declared illegal, while Germans themselves were described as ungrateful and unaware of the sacrifices required from the British. In Germany itself the general population didn’t seem to know what to expect and just carried on as before, surviving by keeping their heads down.

The author’s paternal grandmother’s scrap-metal pan from the immediate post-war years.

Not all were unforgiving. There had been voices in Britain opposing the total food blockade and ‘obliteration bombing’ of civilians, among them the Bombing Restriction Committee and the Food Relief Campaign, who pleaded with the British government to allow small quantities of special foods to pass through to children, mothers and invalids in the German-occupied territories. Victor Gollancz, a successful Jewish London publisher, was among those who campaigned relentlessly for a more humanitarian attitude to the former enemies. Gollancz visited the British zone for six weeks in the autumn of 1946, writing numerous letters on the dire conditions in Germany to all major newspapers on his return:

The most horrible of my experiences has been a visit to the camp at Belsen, where I saw the tattoo marks on the arms of the Jewish survivors. I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when I see . . . boys and girls in the schools, and find that they have come to their lessons without even a dry piece of bread for breakfast; when I go down into a one-roomed cellar where a mother is struggling, and struggling very bravely, to do her best for a husband and four or five children – then I think not of Germans, but of men and women.

In early November of the same year, Gollancz described the situation in Düsseldorf:

The normal consumer’s ration is supposed to be one of 1,550 calories a day, about half ours in England. But this week four of the items that account for most of this bogus figure – bread, cereals, skim milk, and even vegetables – are either non-existent or in horribly short supply; and the same has been the case, in varying degree, ever since I’ve been here.

When describing the bread famine, a particularly dire situation which left many empty-handed after hours of queuing, he added that those who could not supplement their ration through the black market had to make do with anything from 400 to 1,000 calories a day. In conclusion he pointed out: ‘The youth is being poisoned and re-nazified. We have all but lost the peace – and I fear that this is an understatement.’ Many died from starvation or simply froze during the extremely hard winters following the end of the war, in particular the elderly and the very young, with refugee children in urban areas most severely affected and infant mortality in some regions and at some points extreme. Hunger-related diseases spread at great speed, among them tuberculosis, hunger oedema, typhoid fever, emaciation and other effects of deficiency. Undernourishment was normal: a weight deficiency of 30 per cent was considered as by no means uncommon, with dizziness and stomach cramps a common part of everyday life.49

Connections with the occupying forces could procure life-saving food, particularly with the end of the non-fraternization rule in October 1945. Rape was a brutal fact of women’s lives, and not only, as is often assumed, in the Soviet zone. Prostitution and friendly relationships gradually became difficult to tell apart. American soldiers in particular were well supplied with luxuries. German children begged them for leftovers, sweets and chewing gum as well as Coca-Cola, official supplier of sodas to the American army. The company had had bottling plants in Germany since 1929 and had been intensely involved in promoting the Olympic Games in Berlin. In 1940, to deal with wartime shortages, the company invented the brand Fanta, a drink originally based on whey and deriving its name from Fantasia or fantastisch, fantastic, to avoid the economic effects of anti-American tendencies. The Billy Wilder film comedy One, Two, Three, staged in Berlin in 1961, was to star James Cagney as Coca-Cola’s head of operation.

German survivors: ‘These six did everything in this room.’ Victor Gollancz’s caption ran ‘wooden walls, leaking roof of wood and paper, 162 square feet. Old man 84, TB feared for one child.’

From 1946 onwards food parcels began to arrive from the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE), a privately funded aid organization that sought to relieve suffering and hunger in Europe following the Second World War. Further supplies were sent by more or less distant American relatives and friends. The CARE packages contained preserved meat and fat, tinned and dried fruit, honey, chocolate, sugar, powdered eggs, milk and coffee, along with much needed medical supplies. Displaced persons, many from the Baltic countries, received particularly generous numbers of CARE packages, the contents of which tended to fuel a flourishing black market. The equivalent in the Soviet zone was on one hand the Soli-Paket that could be sent via Switzerland and on the other the more ideological Soviet Pajok, distributed to artists, engineers and intellectuals. In Germany itself the black market flourished unchecked. As Victor Gollancz wrote in autumn 1946:

The general decline of public morality under the impact of the growing despair and financial chaos in which the grey and black sectors constantly encroach on the legitimate one, and the mark becomes more and more meaningless. Technically illegal transactions are, indeed, so open that the epithet ‘black’ is a misnomer.50

In Berlin in 1947 1 kg of sugar could be had on the black market for seven or eight American cigarettes; 1 kg fat for 23 to 25. Larger transactions were usually done by men, with some companies using their mass buying power to procure food for all their employees. Even the authorities participated in this moneyless alternative economy: in 1947 Ruhr miners worked extra shifts to supply Hamburg with its energy needs; in return Hamburg theatre companies went to perform in what was to become the Ruhr Festivals.⁵¹ Few Germans realized how much greater had been the hardships the Nazis had inflicted on the occupied countries, believing themselves let down by the occupying powers. In February 1947, when food distribution was made extremely difficult by the exceedingly cold winter, hunger riots erupted in the Ruhr region, Rhineland and Westphalia, soon spreading to Hamburg and Bavaria. On the occasion of the royal wedding in London in 1947, the Young Düsseldorf Workers’ Association sent the couple one day’s ration as a wedding present: this consisted of 300 g bread, 12.5 g meat, 2 g cheese and 40 g starch (this could have been semolina, pasta or oatmeal).⁵³

A young couple studies the content of an American CARE package, 1948–60.

A culinary place in time: Kempinski on Kurfürstendamm

The Kempinski Hotel reopened on Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin in 1952 is an example of reconstruction financed by the American Marshall plan. At the end of the war all Kempinski/Borchardt hotels and stores were bombed out, with the original house in the Leipziger Strasse totally destroyed. In the Soviet sector Aschinger’s holdings were confiscated and formed the basis for the state-run Handelsorganisation (HO) chain of retail stores and restaurants. Fritz Aschinger stayed in the west, reopening ten Aschinger pubs and restaurants in 1945 and 1946. He was accused of war crimes (after denying any involvement in Aryanized Jewish business transactions) and committed suicide in 1949. The last Aschinger Bierquelle near the West Berlin Zoo station closed in 1976. His main business partner presided over the opening of the Kempinski hotel on Kurfürstendamm in 1952. Most members of the Kempinski family had emigrated to Britain and the U.S. Only Walter Unger, a great-nephew of the founder, had stayed behind, hoping to save some of the family’s fortune. He was forced to sell everything he owned, paying a substantial ‘Jewish property tax’ on sales and renouncing any claims in the event of his death. He then was deported and eventually murdered in Auschwitz in October 1944.52

Meanwhile, because of inflation and price controls, there was no incentive for farmers or industry to produce food or goods. When from April 1948 onwards the Marshall Plan gave western Europe access to foreign exchange, most was used for the purchase of imports from the U.S. in the form of food, animal feed, fertilizer and building material, though it also acted as propaganda for the American way of life.

The introduction of the Deutschmark in June 1948 was of great psychological importance, providing the seed corn from which grew the Wirtschaftswunder, Germany’s post-war economic miracle. Suddenly many things were on regular offer again in shop windows and on shelves, though many people had to watch every Pfennig they spent. Quickly a large gap developed between the old rich and newly rich on the one hand (industrialists, politicians and many profiteers from black market activities and hoarding of illegal goods waiting for the currency reform) and the large West German majority, who were mostly somewhat better off than immediately post-war, but could only gasp at luxury when it was suddenly displayed. The black market didn’t disappear immediately, but ration coupons quickly became unnecessary. German farmers brought in a very good crop in 1949. In the western zones rationing officially ended in May 1950 and in the Soviet zone in 1958. By this point many people didn’t even bother to collect the cards and shops didn’t ask for coupons any more.54 With hindsight it is amazing how quickly economic recovery set in.

Farmer women selling vegetables in Nuremberg just after the Second World War.

Food supplies soon became a crucial weapon in the developing Cold War. In June 1948 the Soviets made an attempt to cut off the western Allies’ ties to Berlin, Germany’s erstwhile capital embedded in the Soviet zone, by closing all land and water access to the city. In response to this blockade the western Allies instigated the Luftbrücke, an airlift without precedent, flying in all essential supplies to a city which had long been a symbol of Prussian nationalism and Nazi militarism, thereby transforming it into a symbol of western freedom and democracy. For almost a year until May 1949, Rosinenbomber, literally the raisin-bombers, landed on the city’s three airfields almost every three minutes on average. The same aircraft which had brought death and destruction a few years earlier now ‘bombarded’ the city with life-saving food. On the busiest days 896 planes flew in about 7,716 tons of goods; in total 274,718 flights brought in over 2.2 million tons of supplies, mostly food, coal and medicine. Besides tinned meat, most foodstuffs were provided in dried form – a saving in both space and weight – among them potatoes, vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs and soy beans. For those feeding their families, new strategies in the kitchen were needed to deal with this situation. Strangely the Operation Vittles Cook Book, compiled by an association of American Women in Blockaded Berlin (1949), made no mention of shortages, but depicted German cooks as backward, ignorant and clumsy, with a notorious inclination to serve dark, heavy bread. War and the blockade lived on in West Berliners’ minds. In the 1970s many still had emergency food rations stored in a corner.

Even after the end of the blockade Berlin’s situation remained precarious. A Berlin woman born in 1934 who had a job in West Berlin and lived there in the 1950s made ends meet by shopping for food in East Berlin during her daily lunch break, like most Berliners, since Western currency could be changed into Eastern at rates of one to four or even five. In retrospect she reflected:

it was very sad really, as at times East Berliners had nothing to eat because we all went shopping there. Those in the east came home from work at night only to find that those from the west had already bought up everything . . . for us it was the only way to make a living, right through the 1950s, for others it was rather a sad story.55

Officially the East German regime agreed with this version, but internal papers admitted quite the opposite; food shortages in the East were compensated for by East Berliners shopping in the West.56

The developments of the the first half of the century changed Germans’ eating habits in numerous ways. One of them was a wider acceptance of street food. Until the Second World War eating quickly and in the street had mostly been a necessity for those without hearth and home. For the bourgeoisie the habit was associated with the lower classes. Hardship, hunger and entire cities reduced to ruins made it easy to overcome old behaviour patterns and improvise. Drink kiosks, Trinkhallen or Wasserhäuschen (water houses), as they are called in Frankfurt am Main where they are regarded as a special local phenomenon, had sprung up in industrial areas during the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵⁷ They were the cities’ attempt to contain the workers’ thirst for beer and schnapps by selling recently invented beverages such as carbonated mineral water and other non-alcoholic drinks, later including tobacco and, in defiance of all good intentions, beer and schnapps. Only occasionally was food available in the form of cookies or biscuits. Over time these kiosks, which were not subject to compulsory closing hours, developed into public meeting points as well as small grocery stores, often selling newspapers and food and acting as lottery agencies. In the years immediately after the Second World War they were used, along with improvised shacks on bomb sites, as outlets for whatever food was available, providing a model for a new kind of fast-food outlet. In Cologne, for instance, some offered fondant sweets, potato fritters or fried meat patties. Soon after currency reform, more varied foods were to be had, including goulash and hot sausages. The ‘invention’ of Berlin’s trademark street food snack, Currywurst, curried sausage, is generally agreed to date from September 1949, when it was introduced by a certain Herta Heuwer at her stall on the Kantstrasse in West Berlin. Her creation consisted of a fine-textured ready-cooked pork sausage, grilled and served with a sauce made of tomato purée, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce. In 1959 Heuwer had the preparation registered as a Spezial-Sosse under the name of Chillup. A rival claim, however, dated the invention back two years earlier in Hamburg and ascribed the ketchup and curry powder to provisions a woman received from an American soldier.⁵⁸

Currywurst, Berlin’s trademark streetfood.