Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 1945-1971 by Alice Autumn ...

424 Pages·2009·1.83 MB·English

by  Alice Weinreb

Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 1945-1971

by

Alice Autumn Weinreb

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in the University of Michigan
2009

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Kathleen M. Canning, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Scott D. Spector, Co-Chair
Professor Geoff Eley
Associate Professor Alaina M. Lemon
Acknowledgements

The fact that I would become a German historian had never crossed my mind ten
years ago – that the past decade has made me one is entirely due to the remarkable
number of people who have helped me in ways that even now I cannot fully grasp.
Nonetheless, I suppose that these acknowledgements are as good a place as any to start a
lifetime's worth of thanking.
It all began at Columbia, where Professor Lisa Tiersten suggested that I go
abroad, a suggestion that sent me for the first time to Germany. Five years later, when I
first considered going to graduate school, she was the person I turned to for advice; her
advice, as always, was excellent – and resulted in my becoming a German historian.
During my first chaotic and bizarre years in Berlin, Professors Christina von Braun and
Renate Brosch went out of their way to help a confused and hapless young American
integrate herself into Humboldt University and get a job to pay the admittedly
ridiculously low rent of my coal-heated Kreuzberg apartment. Looking back, it still
amazes me how their generosity and willingness to help completely transformed my
future.
It was my years living in Berlin, of course, that made me decide to become a
German historian, and especially one interested in the history of the GDR. Certainly the
city itself – in all its glory and insanity – deserves mention. It is hard to spend time in
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Berlin and not become some sort of historian; this was especially true when I moved
there in 1999. Most of all, however, it was the people there who inspired and interested
me, my friends from what were once East and West Germany, from Slovakia, France,
Spain, Poland and so many other places. Slavo Szabo kept me going at my most
miserable moments, and his wife Ines Koeltzsch has made everything better for both of
us. René and Mandy Krüpfganz, and indeed the entire Krüpfganz family, are some of my
greatest friends in Germany (and Spain and Switzerland!), and talked patiently with me
about the GDR while feeding me delicious meals. Florence Vittu got me to fall in love
with Paris on a steady diet of croissants and chocolate. Victoria, die kleine Berlinerin, is
one of my very favorite people, and the only German I have ever met who is as loud as I
am. Carla not only has an amazing six-pack, but is an all-around amazing person. Sasha
was my best friend growing up in Berkeley, and then moved to Berlin and became my
best friend there.
If the people and space of Berlin made me think about German history for the first
time, it was the University of Michigan, and especially my advisors Kathleen Canning,
Scott Spector and Geoff Eley, who made me a German historian. Kathleen and Scott
convinced me to go to Michigan, something that I have increasingly realized was one of
the best decisions that I have made. Geoff told me that I was a German historian long
before I believed I was one myself. When I arrived at Michigan, I made many wonderful
friends who kept me going during the traumatic transition from Berlin to Ann Arbor, and
continued to keep me together afterwards: Justyna, Angie, Ross, Anne, Ema, Josh, Kisha,
Susanne, Lenny, Mia, and Roberta. Meeting Latha Reddy on an insane trip to South
Africa was one of the best things that happened to me during graduate school.
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Researching and writing this dissertation was inappropriately pleasurable, and not
only because my topic allowed me to eat a great number of delicious meals 'from East
and West' all in the name of research. Thanks to the generosity of the DAAD, the Berlin
Program of Advanced German and European Studies, and the Social Science Research
Council’s IDRF program, my research time was incredibly well funded and well
organized, something that greatly simplified completing this comparative project.
If anyone is looking for a way to have a truly fantastic German archival
experience, I can suggest where to begin. Dagmar Kollhof, the librarian of the Deutsches
Institut für Ernährungsforschung, began helping me even before I officially began
working on my dissertation, and throughout the process kept me supplied with primary
and secondary sources, anecdotes, friendly smiles and queries, interviews with current
and former nutritionists, and, above all, sincere interest in my project. I must also
mention the incredible generosity of the East German nutritionists who met with me at
the Institute and answered my questions openly and enthusiastically; in particular I would
like to thank Dr. Martin Zobel, with whom I enjoyed several wonderful lunches, and
whose fascinating life could itself be the subject of a dissertation. Last but not least, the
Institute is home to a fantastic canteen with truly affordable prices, ensuring that I
sincerely looked forward to lunch every day.
I cannot imagine that many places are as wonderful to work at as the library of the
Dresden Hygiene Museum: an amazing collection of primary sources, a gorgeous room
in a fantastic museum, and remarkably friendly and helpful staff. Susanne Roeßiger,
Marion Schneider and Ute Krepper made my time in Dresden a pleasure. I am certainly
not the first person to have discovered the glories of the Landesarchiv Berlin, but I would
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like to specially acknowledge the generosity of archivist Klaus Dettmar, who, not once
but twice, gifted me with the remarkable two-volume edited collection of Berlin's
Magistratsprotokolle (a wonderful source for anyone interested in postwar German
history.) In addition, the archivists at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and Berlin, and at the
city archives of Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Leipzig, all went out of their way to
answer my vague questions about 'food and politics,' teaching me as much about my topic
with their thoughts and memories as with the materials that they gathered for me.
The fact that writing this dissertation was almost as much fun as researching it
was due entirely to the support of my advisors, colleagues and friends. As all of her
advisees have noted in their own acknowledgements, Kathleen is a remarkable teacher
and reader, simultaneously critical and supportive. Scott pushed me in all the right ways
and on all hard questions (ideology . . . identity . . . agency . . .). Geoff has mastered the
art of letting you do what you want to do while at the same time ensuring that it is at least
half-way right. Looking back at where I was when I first came to Ann Arbor in 2003 and
where I am now (a German historian!), I can honestly say that it is largely due to the
three of them. My studies at Michigan went so smoothly thanks to the work of the
History Department staff, in particular Sheila, Lorna, Diana and Kathleen.
Many other people provided invaluable feedback and support along the way. In
particular, Atina Grossmann, James Vernon and Ulrike Weckel read my scattered
chapters and discussed unfocused ideas with enthusiasm and great intellectual generosity.
Their thoughts and suggestions were tremendously helpful and personally inspiring. A
Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship allowed me to move to the Big City and dedicate
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myself to writing. During my year in Chicago, it was Michele, Tara, Aaron, Leah and
my orange cat Macaw who kept me from being too lonely to write.
Above all, I am thankful for my family. My father died when I was nine, but gave
me enough love in those nine years to last a lifetime. David brought me into his heart
and made me part of a new and wonderful family. Maddy is about the coolest little sister
a person could hope for. And at the very beginning, of course, was my mother – who
raised me with a never-ending supply of stories of injustice, wonder, suffering and
possibility that have taught me the power of history since the day I was born. This
dissertation is dedicated to her.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ……….……………………………………………………………....ii
Abstract .………………………………………………………………………………….ix
Chapter
1. Introduction. Food, Hunger and German History..……………………………..1
Food and the Postwar…………………………………………………….13
Rethinking Production and Consumption in German History…………...29
Chapter Summaries……………………………………………………....26
2. The Origins of Postwar Hunger: Food, Life and Death in the Age of Hitler…33
The Making of a German Hunger: Food and Nazi Ideology…………….41
A War for Food and a World of Hunger ………………………………...62
Confronting Hunger in Postwar Germany: Allies, Germans and Other
Victims …………………………………………………………………..74

3. Realizing Their Fate: Hunger and the Creation of a Postwar Identity in
Occupied Germany ……………………………………………………………...88

Claiming Victimhood: German Bodies as Hungry Bodies………………93
Dissenting Voices: Rejections of the German Hunger Narrative ……...103
Sein oder Schein: Hunger-Disease as German State of Being ………...115
Unwanted Appetites: Non-German Hunger during the Occupation……125
4. Cold War Hunger: Battles over Food between Socialism and
Capitalism ……………………………………………………………...142

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Starving Berlin: Hunger as Cold War Salvation ……………………….146
Still Hungry after All These Years: Keeping Hunger Alive in Divided
Germany. ……………………………………………………………… 160

Our Hungry Brothers: Hunger in the ‘Other Germany’ ………………..180
5. Work for Food or Food for Work? Canteens and the German Worker ……..197
Feeding the Volk: Collective Feeding from the Kaiserreich to the Third
Reich …………………………………………………………………...201

Enabling Labor in the Socialist Canteen ……………………………….221
Nourishing the Individual with the Collective: Factory Canteens in the
FRG …………………………………………………………………….235

6. Feeding Germany’s Children: the Fate of School Meals in East and
West …………………………………………………………………………....250

No Free Lunch: School Lunches and the Changing German Nation.......251
In Bad Taste: School Lunches during the West German
Wirtschaftswunder ……………………………………………………..266

Lunches for All: Liberating Mothers and Strengthening Children in the
GDR ……………………………………………………………………284

7. Love, Labor or Leisure: Women's Work in the Private Kitchen………….....302
Modern Traditionalism in the German Kitchen ………………………..306
Feeding Families with the Home-Cooked Meal ……………………….325
A Labor of Love: Cooking between Production and Consumption …...338
8. Conclusion. Alles Bananen ………………………………………………….362
Bibliography……... ……………………………………………………………………374
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Abstract

"Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 1945-
1971" traces the political and cultural economy of food in East and West Germany during
the first two postwar decades. By using food as its primary lens of analysis, the
dissertation develops a new analytical and methodological approach to modern German
and Cold War history. It does so by exploring the ways in which food concerns and
hunger fantasies determined the trajectory of the two postwar German states. This
approach reveals the interconnectedness of the GDR and the FRG and challenges many
of the chronological and geographic divisions that have defined twentieth century
German historiography. It also highlights the ways in which ideas of gender, nation and
race, particularly the categories of Slavs and of Jews, were implicated in the everyday
food practices of the populations of the two German states.
The postwar era followed a war whose scale and impact were measured in terms
of food lost and people starved. This was a time when the recognition of the global
ramifications of hunger ensured that postwar reconstruction efforts centered on nutrition
and food distribution. Allied attempts to resolve the food crisis in occupied Germany
was one of the opening acts of the Cold War, and made the divided country a crucial
stage for the development of an international food economy that incorporated issues as
diverse as agricultural policy, global food aid and societal models of gender relations.
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"Matters of Taste" shows how ideas of cooking, shopping, eating and feeding
others were central to postwar definitions of modernity, communism, capitalism, and
democracy. The study offers the first in-depth comparative analysis of mass feeding
programs in the GDR and the FRG, focusing on school lunches and workplace canteens.
It shows how economic, family and social structures were constructed literally and
figuratively through public and private eating patterns. In addition, this dissertation
argues that hunger defined German memory of the past – of the two World Wars, the
Third Reich and the Holocaust, and the postwar occupation – as well as determining the
contours of the Cold War division of the country.

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