Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The war nonetheless confounded their expectations. Macke was killed at the Marne, Marc at Verdun. Others, such as Georg Grosz, found the ordeal of the front insufferable and broke down emotionally. At home, disillusionment over the dreary stalemate began by 1916 to register in the German avant-garde. Given the censor’s vigilance, open opposition was difficult, but veiled criticism of the war surfaced in the pages of several cultural journals, of which Paul Cassirer’s Bildermann was the most important. Anti-war readings, poetry, songs, and drama also found a forum in private homes and cabarets, which remained beyond the reach of the censor. This private milieu then provided the network through which more radical opposition spread into Germany during the last two years of the conflict. Born in Zurich, the Mecca of European resistance to the war, Dada, whose very name celebrated nonsense, embodied revolt without the claims of regeneration. Dadaist art was dedicated instead to portraying the utter absurdity of the war, as well as the senselessness of all the institutions and beliefs that had made the conflict possible. Dada’s exuberant nihilism struck root in the German cabaret scene, particularly in Cologne and Berlin. But the censor kept German Dadaism behind the doors of places such as the “Club Dada” in Berlin, until it exploded at the war’s end in the satirical savagery of Grosz and John Heartfield.

  Resistance to the war among these German writers, artists, and intellectuals was an elite phenomenon from the first. The avant-garde milieu never comprised more than a few hundred figures, and even they were by no means united in opposition to the war. Other sectors of the cultural elite, including most of the university professors, supported the German war effort to the end. Those cultural leaders who opposed the war did so on their own terms, which were largely unintelligible to the great majority of Germans. These painters and poets were thus but barometers of growing disaffection. The development of this disaffection into a significant political force in Germany was more commonly couched in the less abstract language of the street. Here it registered above all the deterioration of material conditions.

  Cold and hungry

  The omens in 1916 were not good. The great battles of the year redefined the scale and cost of combat. The reorganization of the German home front turned merciless. Then outside factors intervened to compound the misery. Heavy rains came to central Europe in the late summer. They persisted until the early onset of frost in the fall. The ensuing winter was the coldest in memory, and the weather remained unseasonably cold until May 1917. Given the existing shortages, the wet and cold joined forces at the worst time imaginable; and the attendant problems invaded the remotest corners of life in Germany.

  One problem was to stay warm. Home heating, like industrial production, was dependent on coal, for most Germans heated their homes with coal-burning stoves. Even accounting for shipments from Belgium, coal production in Germany was 10 percent less in 1917 than it had been before the war. The figures reflected major shortages, which began to plague industrial production even as the Hindenburg Program reorganized it. In early 1917, as ice on the Rhine and other rivers complicated further the problem of distribution, the shortages of coal spread to the kitchen and living room, where claims to adequate rations were less compelling than in the war-related factories. The difficulties extended well beyond the inconvenience of wearing gloves, overcoats, or blankets indoors, however. Another problem was to find warm clothing. Owing to the blockade, the demands of the army, and the mounting exhaustion of German agriculture, supplies of cotton, wool, and the other raw materials of textiles also dwindled. “Stretching” natural fabrics with substitutes, such as paper, provided but limited relief (and, when the fabric was wet, more literal relevance to the word “stretch”). Meanwhile, the shortage of leather reduced many of the urban poor to wearing shoes with wooden soles, whose clapping on sidewalks became a common sound of war.

  Still another problem was to stay clean. Because animal fats were also in short supply, so was soap. So was hot water for bathing, because it, too, was normally heated with coal. The public baths, the principal bathing sites for the poor, were among the first casualties to the mounting coal shortages. They shared this distinction with several other public services, such as schools. Excepting only the few areas in Germany (such as the upper Rhine region) that were served by hydroelectric power, most municipalities acquired electricity from steam-powered turbines, which also required coal. The shortages compelled municipal governments to cut back or eliminate tram services, as well as to dim or turn off electric lighting in the streets. Beyond its immediate impact on military production, the coal shortage thus struck at features of daily life that had been taken for granted in a modern society, as it conditioned the physical experience of war on the home front. The effects of the war could now be seen, felt, heard, and smelled.

  They could also be tasted. The dearest casualty of the weather in 1916 was a prop of the German food supply. The potato was a wonderful, serviceable vegetable. It was cheap, easy to grow, flexible, and an efficient carrier of caloric energy. The war only emphasized its importance as a food crop. The potato occupied a central place in the kitchen – particularly in the lower-class kitchen – as a ready, palatable substitute for a growing variety of foodstuffs in short supply. A survey in 1915 found that municipal workers in Berlin and their families were consuming well over a pound of potatoes a head per day.19 Ground into flour, the potato was also a vital supplement to cereal grains in the making of K-Brot, the critical component of the German diet that was variously known as “war bread” (Kriegsbrot) or “potato bread” (Kartoffelbrot). But the potato was also a temperamental vegetable. It insisted on moderate climatic conditions and was easily bruised and difficult to store in bad weather. It reacted to the damp and cold autumn in 1916 by succumbing to phytophthora, a fungus, which had destroyed almost a half of the German winter potato crop by the end of the year.

  The impact of this blight was calamitous. The average per capita consumption of potatoes plummeted in 1917 by more than one-third from its level the previous year.20 Particularly in the first half of 1917, before the harvesting of a new summer crop, the potato’s absence brought a food crisis in dimensions unknown in Germany for almost a century.21 The potato was not only basic to the human diet; it was also a central element in the ecology of German agriculture. It was a staple fodder crop, so farm animals suffered in the crisis, too. Their afflictions translated into the fertilizer supply, thence into diminished crop yields and shortages of essential foodstuffs such as milk, eggs, fats, and sugar. Although harvests improved in 1917 and 1918, insufficient supplies in nearly all categories of food tormented the last two years of the war. Individual cows produced on average one-third less milk and fat in 1917 than they had the year before the war (when there were three times as many of them). Harvests of all grains in 1917 were down 30 percent from prewar levels.22 Undernourishment reached alarming proportions, particularly in urban areas, among those who could neither produce food for themselves nor afford access to the black market. Rationing helped prevent the worst, but its fluctuations registered the problem (see Figure 10). While they revealed that rations quickly fell below 2,100 calories a day – the amount thought to be sufficient for an adult – these figures understated the problem. The ration merely prescribed maximum quantities that could be purchased; it guaranteed the availability of nothing. For long periods, especially during the bleak winter months of 1916–17, difficulties of supply and transport kept available foodstuffs well below even their rationed levels.

  Figure 10 Caloric value of daily rations Source: Bumm and Abel, Deutschlands Gesundheitsverhältnisse, I, 72.

  Hunger became the overwhelming fact of life on the home front, and it retained this status despite a number of attempts to temper it. Attention turned initially to another root vegetable, which rivaled the potato in versatility and nutritiousness but was more resistant to the weather. For humans and animals alike, this ersatz potato was the turnip (or the rutabaga). It was baked, fried, boiled, and put into soups. It was drie
d and ground into flour for use in war bread. It was used to make coffee, marmalade, a variety of other pastes, and in countless other capacities. An exhibition in the town hall in Charlottenburg featured recipes to disguise it in ninety different ways. So omnipresent was the vegetable in the German kitchen that the term “turnip winter” was sufficient to evoke the misery of early 1917: most Germans found the taste of this hardy warrior to be execrable.

  The long, hard winter of 1916–17 lent new urgency to several institutions that municipal authorities had established, with the assistance of private charitable organizations, in order to relieve the hunger and hardship of the poor. Neighborhood centers made used clothing, blankets, and shoes (whether wooden or leather) available at reduced prices. The public soup kitchens, which drew on communal stocks of foodstuffs, were the most important of these institutions. Some 3,000 of them were in operation by the end of the war. Soup kitchens supplied 216,000 midday meals in Breslau in January 1917; in Hamburg they provided over 6 million in April of the same year.23 The activity of these agencies testified to the failure of the rationing system to provide equitable access to scarce food supplies. In the desperate circumstances of the turnip winter, however, considerations of equity yielded to more basic principles. Simply preserving the physical stamina of the workforce was more essential to the war effort, so rations were henceforth scaled in favor of those who performed heavy labor. Despite these measures, the physical condition of the men and women who produced the weapons of war remained a grave concern. “One has only to look closely at the workers,” wrote one informed observer late in 1917, “to see that they are suffering to a great degree from undernourishment and that despite their purportedly high wages, misery stares from their eyes.”24

  The food scarcity weighed as well on the relationship between urban and rural Germany. The shortages seemed, on the one hand, to erase the practical distinction between country and town – between areas in which agriculture was the principal occupation and those areas where it was not. This basic division of labor, which had marked the urbanization of Germany in the nineteenth century, retreated into the wholesale embrace of small-scale agriculture in cities and towns throughout the country. Backyards, municipal parks, and land on the outskirts of town reverted to the farming of fruits and vegetables, as well as the raising of small animals – goats, rabbits, chickens, even pigs – for meat and dairy products. Paradoxically, the war also broadened the gulf between town and country. This small-scale agriculture could never provide more than a supplement; and urban consumers remained profoundly dependent on rural producers for their food supplies. The shortages and the inflation of food prices fueled antagonisms between town and country, however, as did the perception, which was almost universal among city dwellers, that farmers were not only eating well, but were also exploiting urban misery to their own profit.

  This perception was not entirely accurate. Farmers did have more secure access to food, but they faced a multitude of their own problems. The war drained farms of manpower and horses, leaving the arduous business of farming in the hands of women, children, and older men, as well as prisoners of war, close to 1 million of whom were working in German fields in 1918.25 The bureaucratic controls that descended on the food supply affected farmers massively. By the middle of the war regulations had reached into every phase of agricultural production; they dictated the supply and price of fertilizer and seed, the mix of food and fodder crops to be grown, the varieties and quantities of food crops and livestock to be raised and delivered, and the prices at which these commodities were to be sold. The farmers’ loudest complaint, particularly after 1915, was that the controlled prices did not cover production costs; and it was too common to have lacked a basis in fact. Farmers were also notoriously well practiced in evading controls, but in the wake of the food crisis in 1917 they faced more ruthless compulsion in the form of confiscations of their crops and livestock. Smaller farmers in the south and west were particularly vulnerable to all these constraints, for their profit margins were smaller, their crop options fewer, their political influence less, and their access to prisoners of war for use as farm labor more restricted. These disadvantages reflected fundamental, long-standing social inequalities in the German countryside; and they had a regional accent, which surfaced in complaints about “the Junkers,” who were said to “have government and power in their hands.”26 These tensions paled, however, in a community of rural experience, which was animated in the furious resentments that all farmers harbored not only against urban consumers and their importunate complaints but – above all – against the state for having imposed a suffocating system of controls.27

  A wartime community of rural interests could appeal to a long and powerful tradition in German public life. Its urban counterpart was also powerful, but it was rooted less in ideological tradition than in common experiences of wartime scarcity.28 The resentments of urban consumers were directed in the first instance against farmers and “middlemen,” the wholesalers and merchants whose intervention set the prices that consumers paid to producers. The establishment of a nationwide network of local consumer associations provided an organizational forum that bridged several constituencies, as it brought together Protestants and Catholics, working-class organizations, and women’s groups of several descriptions. The forging of a common sense of consumer identity took place less within this formal framework, however, than it did – literally – in the streets, in the long lines that formed in front of shops and market booths that sold food and other precious supplies. Waiting in line, which was known everywhere in Germany as “dancing the polonaise,” marked out a site in which several other kinds of identity were performed as well. The great majority of the “dancers” were women. The image of the German consumer was female; and it inspired respect and fear among public officials.29 In the community of experience that it symbolized, women were united across confessional divisions. Social divisions were another matter, for most of the women who joined the rituals in front of stores were from the working class. Women of means did not have to wait in line; their servants did it for them. To this extent, the “polonaise” was also a stage for the performance of poverty.

  Even as the food shortages set urban consumers against rural producers, they resulted in a final paradox. They bred yet another, broader community of experience, which united town and country in opposition to the state. This community corroded like no other the patriotic symbolism on which the German war effort was based. The war turned private concerns about food and diet into public problems. By the end of 1916, when the potato entered the list of rationed commodities, the free market for foodstuffs was long gone (at least in its legal form); in its place stood sprawling public bureaucracies. While farmers contended with requirements imposed by state officials, urban dwellers were dependent upon public agencies for virtually everything they consumed. Posted in public, in newspapers, or on kiosks, official bulletins announced in the morning what would (or might) appear on the kitchen table in the evening. Whether in the guise of the farm inspector, the policeman in the market square, or the petty official in the rations office, the state intruded into the daily life of every German, where its presence turned food shortages into a political matter.

  The state was the public arbiter of hunger. It was also the symbol of the problem. “The population has lost all confidence in promises from the authorities,” moaned the deputy commanding general in Nuremberg in September 1917, “particularly in view of earlier experiences with promises made in the administration of food.”30 Although much of the criticism of public officialdom was unfair, bureaucratic imperiousness and incompetence were convenient, omnipresent targets of popular frustration and anger. The situation was fraught with tension, for the public administration of hunger also forced unhappy people to congregate in circumstances calculated to make them more unhappy. The “polonaise” was a dangerous phenomenon – the reason why public officials feared women consumers, who chafed increasingly in their role as objects
of bureaucratic regimentation. During the last two years of the war, as the size and availability of rations became explosive issues, crowds of frustrated consumers in Nuremberg and elsewhere became the focus of spontaneous incidents of petty violence, some of which grew into food riots. These episodes spoke to deep problems.

  Criminality and war

  Protest sits awkwardly alongside criminality. The lines that separate criminal behavior from calculated political resistance are blurred, particularly in unstable times such as wars. Studies of revolution have nonetheless identified criminality as an index by which the instability of a regime – its vulnerability to revolutionary assault – might be gauged. Criminality represents, in this reasoning, a refusal to abide by prevailing legal norms, hence an implicit statement of political opposition.

  Exploring this proposition in wartime Germany encounters several difficulties. The most immediate is to determine the extent of criminality. Every society lives with a discrepancy between crimes committed and crimes prosecuted to conviction; but the statistics of criminality rely on the second category. This discrepancy yawned in the wholesale intrusion of the war into the German criminal justice system – a network of institutions that radiated out from state capitals to encompass police, prosecutors’ offices, courts, and prisons. In most places, police forces comprised young men in their twenties and thirties, many of whom were still in the military reserves. They were called up immediately, to join younger prosecutors and judges, as well as private attorneys and law students, who had volunteered or held reserve commissions. As a consequence, countless – and uncountable – crimes, which in ordinary circumstances would have been tried, remained unpunished, unprosecuted, or undetected. A second difficulty has to do with the nature of the “criminal class” in Germany. Prewar statistics from Germany (and other countries) make clear that most crimes were committed by young adult males, who also belonged to the group most likely to be removed into the armed services, where criminal behavior, if it occurred, became the concern of the military authorities. The logical consequences of this situation were two. It resulted in a decline in the number of crimes committed, as well as in the number prosecuted; and it altered the profile of the criminals. A much greater proportion of crimes was committed by “newcomers”: those who stayed at home and had no prior convictions.