Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War

Heather Merle Benbow, Heather R. Perry, Heather Merle Benbow, Heather R. Perry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030271381
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce—it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany's turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences "from below" reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.

© The Author(s) 2019

H. M. Benbow, H. R. Perry (eds.)Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27138-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Hunger Pangs: The Contours of Violence and Food Scarcity in Germany’s Twentieth-Century Wars

Heather Merle Benbow¹ and Heather R. Perry²

(1)

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

(2)

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

Heather Merle Benbow

Heather R. Perry (Corresponding author)

End Abstract

With the publication of his seminal works Sweetness and Power and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the widely acknowledged “father of food anthropology” Sidney Mintz urged anthropologists and other scholars of food culture to pay closer attention to how food—foodstuffs, food preferences and food rituals—were deeply and historically rooted in structures of power, knowledge and location. The culture and meanings of food were neither immutable nor timeless; and, even more importantly, he demonstrated that with careful examination these complex food histories could be uncovered and used to illuminate new aspects of human culture and society.¹

For Mintz, the “large-scale and general case” of war presented an ideal opportunity for examining the different ways that power could inform food choices and meanings.² For instance, in one of his more well-known examples, he revealed how military planning and organizational structures combined with wartime battle conditions and soldier patriotism to fundamentally shape the emotional meanings of Coca-Cola among US soldiers in the Second World War—and afterward. The “single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience,” Mintz argued, was war:

In time of war, both civilians and soldiers are regimented—in modern times, more even than before. There can occur at the same time terrible disorganization and (some would say) terrible organization. Food resources are mobilized, along with other sorts of resources. Large numbers of persons are assembled to do things together—ultimately, to kill together. While learning how, they must eat together.³

Nevertheless, despite the growth of food studies and the rise of scholarship focusing on the social and cultural significance of food in history, historians of modern wars and conflict have been slow to embrace what Sidney Mintz saw as both important and obvious: the analytical potential of food-centered research to shed new light on modern conflicts or their aftermath. To be sure, scholars have examined the impact of food insecurity on populations at war—most notably the role food plays in international conflicts over natural resources or as the fulcrum around which home-front morale fundamentally pivots. Yet, while scholars of military strategy or wartime policy have included discussions of the origins, experiences and impacts of siege warfare on home-front food supplies or political stability, significant research lacunae on the cultural, social and emotional significance of food in warfare remain. This is even more surprising given the turn in the late twentieth century from more traditional, operational histories of war to newer research on wartime gender , culture and economy—a trend more generally understood as the study of War and Society.⁴ The essays collected in this volume represent a significant step toward filling this scholarly gap through examinations of the different cultural saliencies of food and their relationships to German identity in the nation’s war-torn twentieth century.

Thanks to Mintz and other scholars, the field of food studies has emerged from the ethnographic shadows of Anthropology and Folklore programs to achieve widespread recognition as a fundamental lens through which to study and understand religious, ethnic, gender and cultural identities.⁵ Scholars from many disciplines have come to recognize the centrality of food and foodways in the shaping of cultural practices and imaginaries and the sub-disciplines of Food Anthropology, the Sociology of Food and Food History are well established. And, as one might expect, scholars in the early decades of the twenty-first century are increasingly heeding the call to examine how human relationships with and emotions surrounding food have been transformed and amplified—in both positive and negative ways—under conditions of conflict and resource scarcity. However, few of these focus specifically on wartime Germany .⁶ Indeed, somewhat ironically, in spite of the abundance of research on Germany’s bellicose twentieth century, few scholars have concentrated on developing a picture of the cultural significance or historical meanings of food across the nation’s hot and cold global wars of the modern era.⁷

Beginning in the 1990s, scholars began publishing cultural histories of food in wartime with a particular focus on the First World War and a relatively small amount of cultural history research on German experiences of food and hunger .⁸ Even those studies which offer cultural analyses of food experiences or meanings in Central Europe, focus rather on top-down governmental policies during a single war or particular political regime—or even gloss over the war, viewing it as a temporary disruption and not a significant focal point.⁹ While Alice Weinreb looks at the geopolitics of food in the short twentieth century, including the role of the food system in the “making of war and peace,” only Corinna Treitel’s monograph on the history of “natural eating” and vegetarianism in modern Germany offers a glimpse of what a study of food from the “bottom up” looks like.¹⁰ And still none of these works offer readers the opportunity that this volume does: The occasion to examine the multi-valency of Germany’s food experiences across the twentieth century within the contextual pressures and changing dynamics of modern warfare.

Volume Aims and Thematic Constellations

The collection of essays in this volume examines the social, cultural and emotional significance of food and hunger in Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century—with especial attention to two key forces: war and identity. The essays represent emerging research from new and established scholars and concentrate on the three German-centered conflicts which defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War . All of the essays analyze Germany’s modern wars through food-centered perspectives and experiences “from below” that suggest broader and more significant political, social and cultural consequences of these conflicts. We examine the analytical saliency of food when studying Germany’s violent and turbulent twentieth century while consciously pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Through the essays gathered here, our aim is to interrogate and reconsider the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars. In particular, we find that the research presented here makes the following significant contributions:

1. 1.
   it looks beyond the food experiences in “hot zones” of armed conflict in order to include other important wartime food spaces such as public kitchens, occupation zones, medical encounters and reconstruction programs;
2. 2.
   it considers not only “top-down” policies and practices around food provision, but also individual experiences and histories of food in wartime and postwar eras, thus yielding new syntheses of the varied meanings of food in times of conflict;
3. 3.
   it uses national, transnational and cross-cultural perspectives to examine the experiences and effects of wartime eating, shortages and hunger; and finally
4. 4.
   in examining the different meanings and changing German experiences of food across the three major conflicts of the twentieth century, the volume enables us to see more easily the continuities, changes—even significant ruptures—in German food culture and history that more traditional military or political frameworks obscure.

Moreover, in addition to these contributions in the study of German history and culture, we find the volume brings important new scholarly dimensions to the two broader research areas of food and culture studies and war and society studies.

In putting together this volume, we have found that a number of “thematic constellations” suffuse the experiences and practices of all three conflicts. Because they recur throughout the volume more explicitly in some places than others, we think they bear emphasizing at the outset. The first, and most obvious, is the constellation of FOOD, POWER AND AUTHORITY in wartime. The control of food resources and access to food becomes critical during times of war and can cement, disrupt, determine or challenge peacetime power relationships. This is true at a transnational and at a personal level. It is also true of the power of food as a symbolic object—hence its frequent deployment in wartime propaganda. Food, in the pressurized context of conflict, is power—yet it is often a power that poses a significant challenge or subversion of peacetime authority.

The power exerted over food in war often manifests in an important corollary to the above, which is our second thematic constellation: HUNGER, DEPRIVATION AND SCARCITY. The devastating consequences and enduring legacy of the Entente Blockade during the First World War informed the food and population policies that underpinned the Second and cemented itself in German cultural memory even after that second devastating conflict that deployed mass civilian starvation on an unthinkable scale. Even the lesser deprivations such as the “stretching” of basic foodstuffs caused corrosive civilian resentment with the power to turn the tide of conflict from the First World War through to the Cold War.

Analyzing Germany’s twentieth-century wars through the lens of food draws our attention to its material role as an object of CONSUMPTION, TRADE AND COMMERCE—our third thematic constellation. Germany’s rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century had created an empire that—in spite of its rich natural and industrial resources—was not “food independent” or self-sufficient. Throughout the mechanized total wars of the twentieth century, Germany’s defeat ultimately hinged more upon the nation’s agricultural resources and food supplies than its military might or prowess. The focus of much existing scholarship on the German home-front deprivation and scarcity in the First and Second World Wars has also perhaps obsc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Hunger Pangs: The Contours of Violence and Food Scarcity in Germany’s Twentieth-Century Wars
• 2. Onward Kitchen Soldiers! Gender, Food and Health in Germany’s Long Great War
• 3. Food, Drink and Hunger for World War I German Soldiers
• 4. Public Feeding in the First World War: Berlin’s First Public Kitchen System
• 5. Coping with Hunger in the Ghettos: The Impact of Nazi Racialized Food Policy
• 6. Bee Stings and Beer: The Significance of Food in Alabamian POW Newspapers
• 7. The Productive Heimat: Territorial Loss and Rurality in German Identity at the Stunde Null
• 8. Postwar Food Rumors: Security, Victimhood and Fear
• 9. The Taste of Defeat: Food, Peace and Power in US-Occupied Germany
• 10. Cold (Beer) War: The German Volksgetränk in East German Rhetoric (1945–1971)
• 11. Brewing Global Relations During the Cold War: Coffee, East Germans and Southeast Asia, 1978–1990
• Back Matter