Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany

During World War I and II, modern states for the first time experimented with feeding--and starving--entire populations. Within the new globalizing economy, food became intimately intertwined with waging war, and starvation claimed more lives than any other weapon. As Alice Weinreb shows in Modern Hungers, nowhere was this new reality more significant than in Germany, which struggled through food blockades, agricultural crises, economic depressions, and wartime destruction and occupation at the same time that it asserted itself as a military, cultural, and economic powerhouse of Europe. The end of armed conflict in 1945 did not mean the end of these military strategies involving food. Fears of hunger and fantasies of abundance were instead reframed within a new Cold War world. During the postwar decades, Europeans lived longer, possessed more goods, and were healthier than ever before. This shift was signaled most clearly by the disappearance of famine from the continent. So powerful was the experience of post-1945 abundance that it is hard today to imagine a time when the specter of hunger haunted Europe, demographers feared that malnutrition would mean the end of whole nations, and the primary targets for American food aid were Belgium and Germany rather than Africa. Yet under both capitalism and communism, economic growth as well as social and political priorities proved inseparable from the modern food system. Drawing on sources ranging from military records to cookbooks to economic and nutritional studies from a multitude of archives, Modern Hungers reveals similarities and striking ruptures in popular experience and state policy relating to the industrial food economy. In so doing, it offers historical perspective on contemporary concerns ranging from humanitarian food aid to the gender-wage gap to the obesity epidemic.

About the Author :
Alice Weinreb is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.

Review :
In this fascinating analysis, impressive in its nuance and complexity, Weinreb addresses issues such as warfare, modernity, gender, race, and divergent political regimes to demonstrate that concerns over food and hunger were constitutive of economic systems, political policies, and sociocultural structures between 1914 and 1989....Weinreb shows how Germans were reintegrated into the global community as victims, rather than perpetrators, of hunger in the immediate post-WW II and early Cold War years, enabling a distancing from the Nazi past. Highly recommended. Alice Weinreb's imaginative study reveals how outsized a role the production, distribution, and consumption of food has played across Germany's twentieth century Finally we have a book that recovers the remarkably stubborn and yet changing experience of hunger in Germany across the twentieth century. Weinreb's deeply researched and majestic analysis takes us from global politics, to national systems of rationing and welfare, to the intimate and everyday forms of government that took hold of households and bodies to explain who got what to eat. An important and impressive achievement. In this fascinating and highly original study of 'food and power', Alice Weinreb deftly analyzes the significance of food, its production, consumption, and acquisition, as well as the discourses it produced, for the construction of German identity, both as victims and villains, over the course of a tumultuous twentieth century and multiple regimes. Combining wide-ranging theoretical reflection with deeply researched detail on everyday life and perceptions, this book combines transnational food studies with an innovative account of the peculiarities of German history. Weinreb encourages us to see the long arc of twentieth-century German history in novel ways...An extremely original and thought-provoking book. Modern Hungers contributes to a growing trend in German historiography of bridging rather than assuming (or even highlighting) ruptures of state and society in the twentieth century. Indeed, central to Weinreb's argument is that the particular pressures of the two world wars, the depression, dictatorship, and the cold war critically informed the trajectory of the modern politics of food...Modern Hungers offers a readable, teachable, and accessible master class in biopolitical analysis of modern statecraft. The politics of starving bodies, raced bodies, gendered bodies, and fat bodies in the twentieth century is not a story unique to Germany; it is rather an ongoing story to this day...Interdisciplinary scholars of food, hunger, and satiety in almost every context would do well to take note of this important book and consider its applications for their own fields of study.