[Review of the book Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin]

Journal of Modern History 2002

Healy, Maureen
*Reviewing Author

Originally published by The University of Chicago Press and can be found at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/index.html

Citation: Healy, M. (2002, June). [Review of the book Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin]. Journal of Modern History, 74(2), 440-442. Available from JSTOR website: 10.1086/343439

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Book Reviews

with caution and skepticism once peacetime the First World War viewed propaganda had arrived,the Nazis ascribed to it enormous significance as they preparedfor the next global conflict. In arriving at these judgments, Welch very properly draws on a wide range of sources:propaganda campaigns,monthlygovernmentreportson the mood of the popudebates, and the diaries of insightful observers such as Princess lation, parliamentary Bliicher (while not neglecting the actions and voices of ordinarypeople such as participantsin food riots). He also focuses on the shifting fortunesof the successive war loan drives as a way of gauging fluctuatingsupportfor the war effort. Most commendably,the volume featuresa wealth of excellently renderedandjudiciously chosen illustrationsof war posters, postcards,and cartoons,helping the readerto follow discussions of themes and images. The inclusion of organizationalchartsof the adminbodies is also very useful. istrativedivisions of governmentpropaganda Even more explicit comparisonsand contraststo contemporary ententepropaganda would furtherstrengthenthe work, but its contributionto the growing historiography of the First World War and its social, cultural,and intellectual impact is clear. This book will appealto generalreadersin European historyas well as specialistsin German history or the First World War and is now among the importantworks dealing with as the origins of propaganda a factor in moder politics.
VEJASLIULEVICIUS

Universityof Tennesseeat Knoxville Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. By Belinda J. Davis. ChapelHill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2000. Pp. xiv + 347. $55.00. of In this study,BelindaJ. Davis offers a highly originalinterpretation politics in World to of War I Germanyand makes an importantcontribution our understanding the collapse of the Germanstatein 1918. Over the course of the war, she argues,a majorshift occurredin Germans' expectations of what a state or governmentshould do for its citizens. Collapsing "largelyfrom within,"the state failed "to act successfully in the role of a governmentas the populace now fashioned it" (p. 6). Two things make this course by which Berlinersacknowledged Firstis the demonstrated study pathbreaking. a new site of the Germannation."Womenof lesser means"(minderbemittelte Frauen) came, in the eyes of many urbanresidents, to representthe Germanpeople. Second, Davis convincingly shows that food was centralto the imperialGermanstate's loss of legitimacy. Home Fires Burning is at once a history of everyday life, a history of food, and a shrewd analysis of the way that both shape politics. Insteadof focusing on individual actors, Davis relies on "personae"-composite types that standin for specific individuals. The "womenof lesser means"areone example,andthe "soldier'swife" is another. Davis's access to these women is not unmediated-their words and deeds come to us throughpolice and press reports-and she acknowledgesthatpolice officers andjournalists in turn"drewon the powers"of female consumersto expresstheirown interests. As a history of food, the study looks both at aggregatestatisticsand at rich anecdotes, cartoons, and songs that get at the culturalmeanings of food and the importanceof various foodstuffs to Berliners' sense of Germanness. A skilled story teller, Davis has devised an innovative structurefor the book: each

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season or year of the war is viewed throughthe lens of a particularfoodstuff. Bread, potatoes, butter, milk, and jam all take center stage in turn. She begins with bread fellow shortagesin the fall and winterof 1914-15. Earlyprotestersblamed "traitorous German consumers"(p. 24) for the shortages, and Berliners settled on the unlikely figure of the "soldier's wife," with her unfair privilege, as the primaryculprit. This surprisedofficials, who expected the soldier's wife to be a figureof universalsympathy in wartime.Duringthe potato crisis of 1915, the "womanof lesser means"who lacked privileged access to foodstuffs emerged as a new social protagonist,"constitutedin opposition to the soldier's wife" (p. 39). By 1915, Davis notes that struggles among different categories of consumers receded as many Berliners shifted their anger to merchantsand profiteers.Profit,not privilege, was the new internalenemy. Her overarchingthesis is that poor consumersredefinedexpectationsof the role of the state in German society, and Davis writes of a growing belief across the political spectrum "thatonly deeply interventionistmeasures by the state could returnsociety to order" (p. 46). While consumers rioted over butterand other fats in 1915 and began to demand a "food dictatorship" enforce equitable distribution,the Berlin press reinforcedconto sumers' growing power by equatingthe "poorconsumer"with "we Germans" "the and people"(p. 61). Davis is particularly good at noticingthese linguisticnuances.Evidence that authoritieswere trying to comply with consumerdemands comes in a surprising chapteron the failed mass feeding schemes of the midwarperiod. Mass feeding programs, either dine-in facilities or those that allowed patronsto take food home, might have amelioratedthe food crisis in Berlin, but they met with stunningresistance.To explain this perplexingfailure, Davis draws attentionto the connectionsbetween food and class: the mass feeding facilities were taintedby the prewarstigma of charity.She maintainsthateating a warmmeal aroundthe family table was both a partof a German "bourgeoisideal of nationalculture"and an important sign of dignity andrespectability for the working classes (p. 142). Missing, however, from this otherwise splendid discussion of food and Germannessare the upperclasses. What foods were wealthy Berliners eating, and what culturalmeanings did they ascribe to them?Did restaurant fine dining, a very different kind of public feeding, continue during the war? Answers to these questions may be difficult to recover; after all, the well fed were likely far less vocal about their food experiencesthan the hungry. The mass feeding schemes were exhaustedby 1916. One contemporary explained of lower-middle-classwomen, "They would ratherstarve inside their own four walls than be seen going to a people's kitchen" (p. 141). This raises an importantbut unanswered question: was there starvationin Berlin during World War I? Davis might have articulatedmore clearly the difference between hunger and starvation.The fact that so few Berliners(as few as 3 percent)visited the mass feeding facilities suggests that, at least in 1916, Berliners suffered from the former. The shocking statistic that about 700,000 Germancivilians "died directly from malnutritionduringthe war"(p. of 184) needs to be explained,because from the Starfienbild Berlin thatDavis provides, there do not seem to be corpses in the streets. (At least not humancorpses-there is a vivid descriptionof the frantic,public dismemberingof a horse). Poor consumers continued in 1917 to rail against profit and to demand total, centralizedcontrol of foodstuffs. Davis sees in their demands,and in the state's response, the new conception of the Germanstate taking shape. It was to serve the people rather than be served by them. The establishmentof new food agencies duringthe war-the ImperialGrainAuthority,the WarFood Office, the WarProfiteering Office-suggests that authoritieswere trying to serve the vocal population.The picture we get of late-

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war Berlin is of a city in free fall, with skyrocketingcrime and consumersresortingto "self-help."Following a well-publicizedjam scandaland otherfood exposes, Berliners had by 1918 lost faith in the ability of the state to meet its obligations to the people. of Davis's reinterpretation the existing literatureon the end of World War I might be summarizedas follows: urbanGermansdid not revolt against the total control of the hated war government;in the eyes of poor consumers, this governmentdid not have enough control. of While Davis usefully hypothesizes about the legacy of this new understanding state obligationto citizens in the Weimarperiod,this is really a study of WorldWarI. Her focus on Berlin and not all of Germanyis a welcome decision; whateveris sacrificed in generalizationis made up for in the deep and multilayeredunderstanding of, as she writes, "how politics worked"in Berlin. Many historiansseem at presentto be looking for new ways to write about politics and new definitions of "the political." This is a model study of how it can be done.
HEALY MAUREEN

Oregon State University Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans. By Eric A. Johnson. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. xx+636. $35.00. Currentdebates on the natureof Nazi Germanyhave produceda trend,perhapsepitomized by the work of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,that places the onus for the crimes committedby the regime on the willing complicity of the entirepopulation,spreading culpability as widely as possible. In addition,there has been an increasedinterestin the precise workings of the instrumentsused by the Nazis to control civil society and enforce compliancewith theirpolicies. These studies,most notablyby Gisela DiewaldKerkmann,RobertGellately, and ReinhardMann, have shown that, contraryto much contemporaryopinion, the Gestapo was neither all seeing nor all knowing and that limits on its manpowerand resourcesmeant that its success dependedheavily on cooperationfrom and denunciationsby the civilian population. In this study, Eric A. Johnsonattemptsvery successfully to redressthe balance and of moves the Gestapo and its functionariesback to center stage as perpetrators many of the worst excesses of Nazi terror.In this thoughtfulandbalancedstudy,he examines in detail the Gestapo personnel and organizationin the Rhinelandmunicipalitiesof Cologne and Krefeld. Combining extensive archivalresearchbased on the surviving Gestapo, Sondergericht(special court), and other records with informationgleaned sent to survivingperpetrators, from interviewsand questionnaires bystanders,and victims in these districts,the authorbuilds up a detailedpictureof how the system of Nazi terroroperated. The book is divided into six sections. The first deals with the role of terrorin the Nazi regime and the functions of the Gestapo. In this section, Johnsonposes a series of pertinentquestions that inform the rest of the book and also provides a detailed survey of the historiographyon the subject to date. This attentionto previous scholarship and its integrationinto the research and conclusions provided in each of the subsequentchaptersare a hallmarkof good writing and good scholarship.The next two sections examine how the Gestapo and other agencies carriedout the terrorcampaigns against both racial and ideological opponentsof the regime in the prewarera. Here again, the authorstrikes an excellent balance between analysis and letting the