As if the increasing scarcity and cost of food were not bad enough, it also declined in quality. The rye and potatoes used since 1914 to cut wheat flour ran short, forcing their substitution with less appetizing alternatives. Ground maize, lentils, peas, chestnuts, soya beans, clover and bran were all used to ‘stretch’ bread. So too were sand and sawdust, although this was illegal. Legitimate grains were milled less finely than in peacetime, allowing husk to enter the bread, which made it difficult to digest. The taste of war bread had generally not been too bad in 1914, when rye and potato were used; the worst gripe was that it lacked the crispiness of a white loaf. Later, however, war bread became vile: ‘you couldn’t slice it,’ remembered one Cracovian with disgust decades later, ‘you broke it up with your hands. It was yellow, sticky, not good.’11 Some loaves made with rotten flour and poor ingredients had alarming effects on the body. ‘I have been vomiting,’ one woman told relatives in April 1918, when she was living off the poor-quality bread available on Bulgaria’s ration. ‘I feel burning from my mouth to my chest as if there is a fire and I feel heaviness as if there is a stone inside.’12
As familiar foods vanished from shops, a hunt began to find replacements. Historians scoured books for evidence of what their ancestors had eaten in times of dearth. Chemists attempted to extract oils from mustard, grape and poppy seeds.13 Private enterprise participated eagerly. By the war’s end, more than 11,000 ersatz (substitute) products were on sale in Germany, including thirty-three egg substitutes and 837 different types of substitute sausage. Before mid-1916 there was no official regulation, so manufacturers shamelessly cheated hungry customers. Some ‘egg substitutes’ were nothing more than coloured maize or potato flour. One ‘substitute pepper’ was 85 per cent ash. In Austria, an item marketed as ‘coffee with sugar’ turned out to have sand as one of its main ingredients. Some ersatz products were dangerous. ‘Flour’ made up of gypsum was among the lethal concoctions sold.14 Even where an honest attempt to simulate the original product was made, the result was often unpleasant. Ersatz sausages, for example, were little tubes of slime. They could legally have up to 70 per cent water content, as not only meat but also the flour needed to pad them had run short. Central Europeans’ beverage of choice, coffee, also deteriorated drastically. Even before 1914, only the rich had consumed expensive pure-bean coffee; the less wealthy had drunk it adulterated with chicory, grain or ground acorns. War shortages, however, prompted producers to experiment with other ingredients. By 1918, walnut shells, plum stones, even turnip heads and bark were all used to manufacture Coffee-Ersatz.15
Individuals fought against deprivation. Upping earnings was one obvious strategy, for food was always available outside official channels to those who could pay cash. In Germany, contrary to what has long been assumed, there was no sudden rush of women taking their first job, and with it their first step towards emancipation, during hostilities. Overall female employment remained at a level similar to that in peacetime. What changed, however, was where women worked. Hundreds of thousands left low-paid jobs in the textile industry, domestic service and, despite official attempts to hold them there, agriculture, for the better wages offered by war industries. This was also true in Austria-Hungary, albeit to a lesser extent due to the land’s smaller industrial base. In the west of the Empire, around 40 per cent of the war industries’ workforce was female by 1916. In the Magyar half, the number of women working in manufacturing industries increased by 65 per cent, from 137,075 to 209,833 between December 1914 and May 1916. Other women took over their conscripted husbands’ positions. By the autumn of 1915, a fifth of the 14,000 female employees working for German tram companies, for example, were the spouses of drafted tram workers. For soldiers’ wives with small children, home work, like sewing sandbags or assembling gas masks, could provide a small but useful supplement to state support.16
Family members worked together for survival. In the war’s early years, food had flowed from home to front, but this partially reversed in 1916 as worried soldiers bought up foodstuffs in the occupied territories and sent them to their families. Anna Kohnstern was fortunate to have a brother serving in the military staging areas in Belgium who, after he came home on leave and saw how she was living, began to send her beans, butter and meat. Combat soldiers like her son, Albert, had less opportunity to buy food, but many sent money.17 Adolescent daughters and sons also contributed to families’ shared income. Girls had few opportunities for high wages, and so took over household tasks like cooking, cleaning, looking after younger siblings and queuing while their brothers or mothers went to work. For teenage boys, by contrast, war work became attractive and, for those over sixteen once the Auxiliary Service Law was passed in December 1916, compulsory. The proportion of industrial positions occupied by youth rose from its pre-war level of 16 per cent to over 25 per cent in 1916. Adolescents exploited the wartime economy’s manpower shortages, switching jobs on average three or four times per year in order to get the highest possible earnings. In the munitions factories, their wages not only rose quicker than those of their mothers, but actually exceeded them by 1918.18 Men, women and children in the factories worked extremely long hours. In peacetime, a 57-hour week, comprising six 11½-hour days, inclusive of two hours compulsory but unpaid rest, had been the norm for men in metalworking factories. These long days became still longer in wartime; some male workers were at their benches for 15 or even 18 hours per day, while women in the munitions industry worked 54–60 hour weeks. Unskilled workers were especially prone to work long hours in order to compensate for their low standard rate of pay with overtime supplements. Labour at night, on Sundays or holidays could attract bonuses of 40 or 50 per cent.19
Their weekly wages in their hands, workers hurried from work in search of food. In the cities, the front line of this hunger war, shops were bare and queues long, so people headed to the countryside to bypass the official supply system and buy direct from farmers. ‘Hamstering’ (Hamstern), as these illegal foraging trips were known, took place on a huge scale during the second half of the conflict. Travellers on rural railways on Sundays, the one day of rest, were so numerous by 1917 that in some areas police intervention had become impossible. Security personnel were posted at stations and bans issued on carrying rucksacks into the countryside, but the ‘hamsters’ resolutely worked around all obstacles. Field tracks were used to avoid police posts on the main roads, and journeys were made under cover of darkness. Women sowed pockets into their undergarments, thwarting the police, who lacked the female staff needed for body searches. Other women simply posted the food to themselves, until the authorities realized what was happening and started checking packages. Some women used ingenious disguises. There were some who feigned pregnancy, strapping cheese and butter to their bellies. In a strange twist on the fear at war’s outbreak that enemy agents were disguising themselves as nuns, some ‘hamsters’ donned robes and wimples in the hope of passing untouched through the food checks.20
‘Hamstering’ marked the limits of Germans’ and Austrians’ wartime solidarity. The switch to individual (or familial) self-preservation as hunger increased was understandable, but it undermined the official supply system, and with it the Burgfrieden. Stuttgart’s milk deliveries offer one striking illustration of how detrimental smuggling was for the official food supply. As a result of weekend ‘hamstering’, the city received just one-sixth the quantity of milk on Sundays and Mondays compared with what it received on other days. When the railway timetable was altered, making it impossible to reach a nearby farming region after work hours, the city’s official supply system immediately received an additional 500 litres from that area.21 In fairness, hungry foragers were not solely to blame. Smuggling was big business, carried out by chains of professional criminals. Black-market food in relatively well-off southern Germany cost at least twice as much as its official price and four to five times as much as what the item would have been sold at in peacetime. In Austria where food shortages were extreme, the diffe
rences were even greater: white flour, for example, was selling in 1917 on the black market in western Galicia at nearly six times the official price, and more than fifteen times its peacetime price.22 The authorities, although they prosecuted hungry ‘hamsters’ and professional smugglers, were just as guilty of disregarding official prices. The Habsburg War Ministry and other central offices paid premiums already in 1916, simply because there was no other way to obtain certain foods in anything like sufficient quantities. Some municipalities bought foodstuffs at illegal prices.23 Big armaments firms like Thyssen and Krupp undertook huge illegal food purchases with the connivance of military officials. The nutrition was distributed in factory canteens or given to employer-owned ‘yellow unions’ to keep workers fit and compliant, and was therefore doubtless beneficial for munitions production. Yet its removal meant hardship for everybody else.24 The black market blossomed after 1916, and by 1918 between a third and a fifth of Germany’s agricultural produce was sold through illegal channels, including between one-eighth and one-seventh of potatoes and bread, one-quarter to one-third of butter, milk and cheese, and one-third to half of all meat and eggs.25
Germans and Austrians did not just look to farmers for additional nutrition; they also grew their own food. Food shortages sponsored an enthusiasm for urban gardening in both countries. Some 200,000 square metres of land was turned over for allotments in Vienna’s Prater district and by the autumn of 1918, 157,300 of the city’s residents were cultivating their own ‘war gardens’.26 The rearing of small animals also captured the interest of desperate people. Cats and dogs were abandoned in favour of edible pets like rabbits, ducks, hens and geese. Goats in particular became very popular. While other cattle stocks plummeted during hostilities, the numbers of goats grew by nearly a million in Germany over the four war years. They were a source of scarce milk, easy to look after and required so little pasturage that apocryphal stories circulated of goats being kept on apartment balconies.27 While some people gardened, others sought to increase their purchasing power by joining in food-purchasing cooperatives. Often these were organized through work, and many built on initiatives already begun in peacetime. Galician railway workers, who were especially active in this field, gave their food-purchasing associations worthy names like ‘Solidarity’ and ‘Thrift’. Hard-pressed middle-class groups like teachers set up similar organizations. There were also informal and smaller-scale initiatives: Prague University’s Law Faculty, for example, split a calf, acquired through official connections, between the staff every week in 1917.28 Other cooperation was more exploitative. Anna Kohnstern, for example, unable to afford the meat to which she was entitled under the ration system, swopped her coupons with another woman, who gave her sweets in return. The woman could use the coupons to supplement her own diet or sell the meat that they brought her for a large profit. Still, from Anna’s perspective, the otherwise useless coupons gave her ‘something’, as she said, ‘with which one can drive away the hunger’.29
Regardless of what they did, be it gardening, ‘hamstering’ or working long hours of overtime for the money to buy food on the black market, central European civilians suffered terribly from the food shortages. They lost weight and became weak, exhausted and more vulnerable to illness. The extent of Germany’s problem is illustrated by the fact that even soldiers, the best (or least worst) supplied section of the populace, were affected. A medical inspection of recruits at Infantry Regiment 46’s depot in rural Posen found at the end of 1916 that after one month of training 15 per cent had lost weight, a few by as much as seven kilos. The cause was found to be underfeeding: the troops were getting four-fifths of their carbohydrate, half the protein and about a quarter of their fat entitlement. The army doctor who carried out the investigation warned of damage to the young soldiers’ bodies and military performance if rations were not increased.30 Civilians, who underwent exactly the prolonged undernourishment feared by the doctor, vindicated his warning. The food shortages wreaked terrible damage, especially on vulnerable groups like children and adolescents. Doctors in Munich found in 1916–17 that, compared with heights and weights before the war, children were 2–3 centimetres shorter and 2–3.5 kilograms lighter.31 In Austria too, deprivation marked the young. Six- to thirteen-year-olds simply stopped growing during the last year of hostilities, and twelve- to fourteen-year-olds in Vienna looked like sickly eight- to ten-year-olds. In the barren Alpine lands, some children were so malnourished that they lacked the strength to walk.32
Whether civilians actually starved was, and remains, highly controversial. In the aftermath of the war, German authorities claimed that there had been 763,000 excess civilian deaths. Recent work by the historian Avner Offer has called that figure into doubt. Food was adequate, he argues, apart from during the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 and the summer of 1918. It helped that people’s need for calories declined as they lost weight. Supporting his point, infant mortality in the Reich barely budged, and in fact was slightly lower for much of the war than it had been in peacetime (see Table 7).
However, the poorest and hungriest are not well represented in the wartime studies on which Offer’s work leans. All investigations also agree that even if people were not actually starving, they were dangerously malnourished, exposing them to disease. As a result, civilian deaths rose by one-third, and much more if those killed by the influenza epidemic of 1918 are counted. Significantly, the upward trend in German female deaths started in 1916, just as the food crisis became serious. The old as well as the young were very vulnerable. Tuberculosis, pneumonia and other lung diseases were major killers. Consequently, a somewhat revised excess fatality figure of 424,000, with another 209,000 deaths from the influenza of 1918, appears entirely plausible.33
Austria-Hungary’s wartime public-health crisis was even worse. However, whereas after the war German civilian casualties prompted passionate debate and symbolized the wrongs inflicted by the Allies, the Habsburg Empire’s non-combatant dead attracted little discussion – one mark of the greater value set on western than eastern European life throughout the twentieth century. Estimates extrapolated from deaths in Bohemia put the Empire’s civilian war losses at 467,000.34 The Habsburg population was three-quarters that of its ally, so this figure implies approximately equivalent civilian death rates in both Central Powers. There are, however, good reasons to believe that it understates overall civilian mortality. First, Bohemia was Austria’s most fertile region and, along with Galicia, one of its most important agricultural centres. Together with its neighbours, Silesia and Moravia, it grew over three-fifths of the western half of the Empire’s barley and more than a third of its potatoes and wheat before the war. Supply was thus likely to be better here than elsewhere. Second, and supporting this point, there was clearly much variation among different Crownlands. The estimate can make no allowance for the invasion-related mortality in Galicia, where in 1915 the underfed and poorly sheltered population was ravaged by epidemics of cholera, typhus and dysentery.35 Although their accuracy is questionable, there were also later reports of famine in South Styria and starvation in Croatia.36
Table 7. Infant mortality, 1914–18 (per cent of live births)
* Refers only to the area that later became the Austrian Republic.
Sources: R. Meerwarth, ‘Die Entwicklung der Bevölkerung in Deutschland während der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit’, in R. Meerwarth, A. Günther and W. Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges auf Bevölkerungsbewegung, Einkommen und Lebenshaltung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig and New Haven, CT, 1932), p. 65, and K. Helly, ‘Statistik der Gesundheitsverhältnisse der Bevölkerung der Republic Österreich in und nach dem Kriege’, in C. Pirquet (ed.), Volksgesundheit im Kriege (2 vols., Vienna and New Haven, CT, 1926), i, p. 20.
Ration allowances also indicate that life was harder even in the relatively well-supplied east of the Habsburg Empire. In April 1917, German daily rations of meat, fat, flour and potatoes totalled 615 grams per head. Hungarian potato-producing regions rec
eived 595 grams, other Magyar districts 331 grams, and even less went to people in the Austrian half of the Empire.37 The patchy statistics available for Austrian lands imply a crisis of unrivalled proportion. German infants in their first year of life, unlike young children, generally escaped the worst of the deprivation because they were breast fed and because birth rates dropped drastically. However, in the Austrian part of the Empire infant mortality rose during the war (see Table 7). For other age groups, the upward trend in civilian deaths began earlier than in the Reich, already in 1915.38 The worst conditions were to be found in Vienna. There, starvation, not mere malnutrition, did kill. Doctors estimated lack of food to be the direct cause of around 10 per cent of wartime deaths and a contributory factor to 20–30 per cent of deaths. Germany teetered on the brink of starvation during the second half of the war. In the Habsburg lands, parts of Austria went over the brink.39
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