[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
440
Book Reviews
the First World War viewed propagandawith caution and skepticism once peacetime
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:propagandacampaigns,monthlygovernmentreportson the mood of the population, parliamentarydebates, and the diaries of insightful observers such as Princess
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 administrativedivisions of governmentpropagandabodies is also very useful.
Even more explicit comparisonsand contraststo contemporaryententepropaganda
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 Europeanhistoryas well as specialistsin German
history or the First World War and is now among the importantworks dealing with
the origins of propagandaas 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.
In this study,BelindaJ. Davis offers a highly originalinterpretationof politics in World
War I Germanyand makes an importantcontributionto our understandingof 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
study pathbreaking.Firstis the demonstratedcourse by which Berlinersacknowledged
a new site of the Germannation."Womenof lesser means"(minderbemittelteFrauen)
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
Book Reviews
441
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
shortagesin the fall and winterof 1914-15. Earlyprotestersblamed "traitorousfellow
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"to enforce equitable distribution,the Berlin press reinforcedconsumers' growing power by equatingthe "poorconsumer"with "we Germans"and "the
people"(p. 61). Davis is particularlygood 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 importantsign 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 restaurantfine
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 contemporaryexplained
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.
184) needs to be explained,because from the Starfienbildof 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 WarProfiteeringOffice-suggests
that authoritieswere trying to serve the vocal population.The picture we get of late-
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Book Reviews
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.
Davis's reinterpretationof 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.
While Davis usefully hypothesizes about the legacy of this new understandingof
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 multilayeredunderstandingof,
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.
MAUREENHEALY
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
moves the Gestapo and its functionariesback to center stage as perpetratorsof 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
from interviewsand questionnairessent to survivingperpetrators,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