Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Rebuilding legitimacy ultimately depended on the new organization’s success in putting food in Austrian bellies, and that was determined above all by whether Hungary could be prevailed upon to release more supplies. By the end of 1916, two fairly centralized but independent food administrations existed in each half of the Empire. Cooperation between them remained weak. The AOK, which took hypocritical care to preserve the independence of the military food supply while anxiously carping about the looming catastrophe in civil provisioning, as ever thought that it could do better and proposed a united food authority led by a general. Tisza categorically refused. When a Common Food Committee (Gemeinsamer Ernäherungsausschuß) was eventually set up under General Ottokar Landwehr von Pragenau on 27 February 1917, it was a vehicle facilitating communication between the two governments, not the executive organ that Conrad von Hötzendorf had imagined, with the power to shift food around the Empire. A second attempt made at the end of the year to coordinate military and civilian needs more effectively in both parts of the Empire suffered from the same problem. Hungary would remain better provisioned than Austria throughout the war.53

  To fulfil popular expectations of an equitable distribution of adequate food, the primary tool to which states turned was rationing. In Germany, this began in Berlin with flour in January 1915, and was rolled out across the country from the following month. Ominously, already in March, the initial daily allocation of 225 grams per person was reduced to 200 grams. The Austrians issued ration coupons for flour and bread in April 1915. The Hungarians, thanks to their greater agricultural wealth, avoided this measure until January 1916. As items ran short, the list of rationed goods lengthened. In the Reich, potatoes were rationed from the spring of 1916, and local rationing of meat began around the same time, although only in the autumn were coupons issued nationally. Fats were rationed from July and milk from late August. All major foodstuffs were obtainable legally only with ration cards by the winter of 1916. The Austrians took longer to organize themselves. Sugar was put on the ration almost a year after bread and flour cards were issued, in March 1916. Thereafter, further controls followed quickly. Milk cards were introduced in May, coffee cards in June and cards for fats in September. Only in October 1917 was a potato card introduced.54

  Rationing appeared to be a food-saving device tailored for the Burgfrieden ideal. Theoretically, it spread sacrifice evenly and ensured the well-being of even the lowliest subject. In practice, getting rationing right proved extraordinarily difficult. Ration coupons were most effective when applied to scarce goods such as butter, sugar, flour or soup which required salespeople merely to act as distributors. Items that needed processing at the shop level before being handed over to the public, however, offered plentiful opportunity for abuses, personal jealousy and animosities. Meat is a good example. Butchers received carcasses, which they then trimmed, divided up and sold to consumers possessing ration cards. If the central authorities were too generous in their allocation, the butcher would have meat left over, which would be sold to favoured customers under the counter for prices above the legal maximum. If too little was supplied, the meat would run out before the needs of all customers entitled to buy had been satisfied. A further complication was that not all meat was of the same quality. The best cuts were likely to be saved for favoured customers or held back for illegal private sale.55

  Public faith in the rationing system was undermined by two integral problems. The first was the frequent unavailability of the goods that the ration cards promised. This was why queuing was so ubiquitous. If shops ran out of food, then, as a satirical postcard of 1917 suggested with heavy sarcasm, people had nothing to eat but the cards themselves:

  Sunday Roast 1917

  Take the meat ration card, coat it in the egg card and fry until nicely brown with the butter card. Steam the potato and vegetable card until pleasantly soft and thicken them with the flour card. – As dessert brew the coffee card, add the milk and sugar card and use the bread card for dunking. – After the meal wash your hands with the soap card and dry them on the ration coupon.

  _______________________

  But we Germans see it through! We do it gladly!56

  Most depressingly, even if people had the money and were successful in collecting all the food to which they were entitled, this exercise in survival was in vain as the ration was set so low. Contemporary nutritionists reckoned on a grown man needing 3,000 calories per day (modern estimates suggest 2,500). Theoretically, the Reich’s basic daily ration at first offered 1,985 calories, but this quickly dropped to 1,336 and then, in the summer of 1917, to 1,100 calories. Hungarians received 1,273 calories, which was less, as a contemporary expert pointed out, than a sleeping person needs for life.57 Austrians, and especially the Viennese, were even worse fed. The basic ration in the Habsburg capital started at 1,300 calories and had fallen to 830.9 by the Armistice.58 A nutritionist who attempted to live solely off the Reich’s ration lost a quarter of his body weight in seven months. The public did not need such experiments to tell them the obvious: one woman in Upper Silesia wryly summed up Germans’ dilemma when she complained that the official ration was ‘too little to live on and too much to die’.59

  The ration also failed to guarantee that hunger was spread equitably. Even agreeing on what was fair and equal proved difficult. From the first, it was clear that allocating the same amount of food to each individual was not the answer; when German Imperial Grain officials set rations for children aged between one and eight years old at half the adult level, some in the public were aghast at what was perceived to be official profligacy. Public jealousy focused on mothers, who were accused of unfairly benefiting from the oversized rations of their offspring.60 The population was instead categorized according to the perceived needs of the individual and her or his service to the state. At least initially, there was broad consensus that some people had special needs. When milk went on the ration in the summer of 1916, breast-feeding mothers, invalids and infants were designated highest priority in both Austria and Germany. Especially in large cities, the supply of milk fell catastrophically; in Vienna it plummeted over the course of 1916 to half its peacetime level. In Berlin, already early in the year supply had dropped to just 20 per cent. Only the privileged had a chance of getting hold of what became known as ‘white gold’.61

  Much more controversial was the division of the population according to occupation. The basic split was between producers and consumers. Farmers were designated as Selbstversorger, or ‘self-feeders’, and in order to encourage them to deliver, their rations were set much higher than that of the ordinary city dweller: in Germany, they were permitted more bread and double the normal meat ration. A substantial section of the population fell into this category: in Austria, they accounted for over one-third of the population. Great variations existed, however, between different regions: whereas over half of people in rural Bukovina and Galicia were ‘self-feeders’, only 12 per cent of ethnically German Lower Austria was so designated, and less than 10 per cent of the inhabitants of Dalmatia and Istria.62

  Wartime administrators also divided consumers, creating a new, heterogeneous mix of interest groups whose loyalties and membership shifted with changes in the distribution systems. The most important division was between recipients of the standard ration and the ‘heavy worker’ undertaking hard and critical labour for the war effort, who was allocated a supplement. This distinction was introduced in some Austrian and German cities during 1915. In June 1916 the practice was nationalized in Germany, and a new category, the ‘heaviest worker’, was introduced. Substantial supplements accrued to these people. ‘Heavy workers’ received 100 grams of bread daily on top of the usual ration of 200 grams, whereas the ‘heaviest workers’ received 600 grams and were entitled to a double ration of potatoes. Initially, only positions occupied by men were placed in these coveted categories, but in late October 1916, just as the Third OHL’s new armaments drive began, the list was widened to include women war worke
rs. Simultaneously, the ration for all other people was cut. Mounting complaints that the system was unfair prompted German and Austrian authorities to reduce these workers’ privileges in early 1917 and institute new supplements to help the worst off.63 Nonetheless, being designated a ‘heavy worker’ or ‘munitions worker’ continued to offer nutritional advantages for large sections of the population. In Düsseldorf, one of Germany’s most important industrial centres, around one-third of the population qualified by 1918. In Austria, although less industrialized than its ally, five million people, around a third of all non-self-feeders, were also eventually given ‘heavy worker’ privileges. In addition, there were other favoured groups. From November 1916, German police were designated among the ‘heaviest workers’; by this point, the necessity of keeping security forces loyal was daily demonstrated, as markets filled with hungry shoppers and city centres became increasingly unruly places. In Vienna, unlike in Berlin, the civil service privileged itself by opening food outlets exclusively for its staff in 1916. As the hungry public blamed the administration’s incompetence for the food shortages, this move was not calculated to increase its authority nor the regime’s legitimacy.64

  The failure of rationing to guarantee a constant or equitable food supply encouraged officials to seek other solutions. Their efforts resulted in one of central Europe’s most distinctive wartime institutions: the public war kitchen, known also in Germany as ‘People’s Kitchens’. These used and expanded the soup kitchens of peacetime municipal poor relief, but were inspired by very different ideals. They were intended to cater for the entire national (or, in Austria-Hungary’s case, multinational) community. They offered a new model of mass eating for the Burgfrieden age. Great efficiencies were expected. Supply would be streamlined: it was easier to guarantee regular deliveries to a limited number of large feeding centres than to thousands of competing shops and outlets. Precious fuel would be saved, for cooking in bulk consumed less coal or gas than if millions of portions were heated up by individual households. The new centres would also eliminate the need for queues, as diners would sign on and surrender their ration coupons a week in advance, so the caterers would know how many portions to cook. The risk of rioting by empty-handed and disgruntled shoppers would be eliminated. The civilian population, spared of the need to stand in line overnight, would be better fed and less exhausted, which would impact positively on war production. A single masterly policy appeared to offer the solution to all supply, health and public order problems, while simultaneously reaffirming the commitment of governments to the Burgfrieden. Prussian authorities acted with alacrity. In mid-April 1916 the Interior Minister ordered all large cities to integrate and expand their network of kitchens. By October, 1,457 public kitchens together capable of cooking nearly two million portions daily were operating across Germany.65

  Advocates of wartime mass catering were disappointed when it became clear the people had little appetite for it. The problem was not that the ‘People’s Kitchens’ served bad food. Especially in Austria, some of the early descriptions of the meals on offer are mouth-watering. Prague’s first dining hall sold meatloaf, pork belly and potatoes, and, for dessert, apple strudel. Salzburg’s hall, which opened in November 1916, was probably more typical in offering more modest but cheap and nutritious fare. For 60 hellers, diners there received three-quarters of a litre of soup and half a litre of vegetables and potatoes. On Sundays, holidays and whenever else available, a small portion of blood sausage or meatloaf was added.66 Even in Germany, where complaints were heard about repetitive servings of gloppy stew, known in wartime slang as ‘mass cow’, the public kitchens were at least a source of cow in a land otherwise short of meat, dairy products and, ultimately, every other form of nourishment. The ‘People’s Kitchens’ were instead rejected by anyone with other dining options simply because they were too reminiscent of poor relief. The lower middle classes had earned scarcely more than skilled workers in peacetime, and during the war their salaries were frequently less than the wages of war workers. Class identities thus depended to a great extent on maintaining the appearance of a bourgeois lifestyle. Eating in the mass halls or queuing in the street to buy a portion of stew from one of the roving army-style ‘goulash guns’ was a sure way of losing face in the neighbourhood; one sacrifice too far to the Burgfrieden. To overcome this resistance, separate ‘middleclass’ kitchens with food costing twice as much were established. This response not only was unsuccessful, but undermined the egalitarian ideal supposed to underpin the scheme and damned the kitchens for workers too, who also had their pride and objected to any implication, however inaccurate, that they were living off charity. In Berlin, where resistance to use of the halls was strongest, many had closed by August 1917.67

  The ‘People’s Kitchens’ nonetheless provided an indispensable safety net for the impoverished, whose numbers swelled the longer hostilities lasted. In Germany, the use of ‘People’s Kitchens’ peaked during the terrible winter months at the start of 1917, but even two years later, as the war reached its end, almost 9 per cent of the inhabitants of German metropolises were eating in them regularly. Outside Berlin, the number of halls actually doubled between 1916 and the war’s end. In the Habsburg capital, where food shortages were far worse, mass catering played an even more important role in keeping the population alive. In 1916, Vienna had twenty-eight war kitchens to accompany an already extensive network of poor relief dining halls. By the last year of hostilities, sixty-eight war kitchens were feeding an average of 150,000 people per day. Dining halls fed an additional 134,000 daily and private charitable institutions handed out bread, warm soup or hot drinks to another 120,000, in total 404,000 residents, around one-fifth of the city’s population.68 The number of meals dispensed free of charge offers an index of the growing impoverishment of citizens during the war (see Table 12). In cities in war-ravaged Galicia, the deprivation reached extraordinary levels. In Lwów, which never recovered from the damage to its transport links and supply caused by invasion, over 70 per cent of citizens needed some sort of food aid by January 1918.69

  If central governments were unable to realize visions of equitable and adequate eating, this was not their fault alone. The task was made more difficult by the competition that grew at lower levels of administration. Provincial and municipal officials who recognized themselves to be in a zero-sum game in which somebody would go short formed alliances and lobbied frantically. The Städtetag, the assembly of Germany’s major municipalities, was so successful in defending its access to food (a fact that many citizens would admittedly have found difficult to believe) that in May 1916, Germany’s rural districts similarly banded together in order to protect their interests. Regional and municipal officials travelled to Berlin or Vienna and circulated the many food offices, pestering the staff to increase their town or city’s rations.70 In Austria, they even cheated to improve their supply situation. Local authorities’ false reporting of stocks and obstruction of attempts to remove food from their areas hamstrung any attempt to centralize the allocation system in the west of the Empire. A report of November 1916 presented a disturbing picture of how far the strain of shortages and public pressure had fragmented the imperial administration. ‘Mutual distrust and under-handedness’ were encountered ‘all along the line’, it complained. ‘One state does not trust the other [meaning Austria and Hungary], inside the states neither do the Crownlands and committees, inside these nor do the districts and municipalities, and so on. Each tries thus to secure its own food supply, conceals its stocks and shuts itself off, in order not to lose anything.’71

  Table 12. Free meals dispensed at Viennese soup kitchens, 1914–18

  Source: H. Loewenfeld-Russ, Die Regelung der Volksernährung im Kriege (Vienna and New Haven, CT, 1926), p. 354.

  Nonetheless, without the work of local officials, many of whom were tireless and imaginative in seeking remedies, shortages would have been much worse. Surplus land was put to the plough as municipalities turned to self-help i
n order to solve their supply problems. The star performer was Ulm, in the south of Germany, where with impressive foresight the city fathers as early as 1914 had ordered potatoes to be planted on municipal grounds. The measure cushioned its residents from the worst of the shortages two years later. Other cities made bulk purchases to supplement the diets of their poorer citizens. Berlin, for example, spent over 14 million marks accumulating a store of smoked and salted meat.72 Councils intervened in distribution, a step unimaginable before the war. In Lwów, for example, half of all sugar sold in 1916 passed through municipal sales outlets. The German city of Freiburg adopted even more innovative and interventionist local policies. When its council suspected milk dealers of exploiting dearth to raise prices, it acted to ensure a supply of reasonably priced milk for residents by buying a controlling interest in the largest local milk cooperative. To raise production, it also opened a sewage drainage field for grazing. Almost 4 per cent of the city’s milk came from 177 cows fed on its grass.73 A good head for business, imagination and the self-assurance to act beyond the normal bounds of peacetime local governance were all qualities needed by wartime administrators. So too was tact and a little flexibility in dealing with merchants who knew their scarce goods gave them unmatched bargaining power. A good example is offered by Thorn, a city on Germany’s eastern border 170 kilometres from the sea, whose council did a deal with a Hamburg fish merchant to set up shop and sell cut-price salted herring, a nutritious alternative to scarce pork, to its citizens. When, after six weeks of successful sales, the female proprietor announced that labour costs would necessitate a jump in the price of the fish, there was despair. A discussion soon clarified what the proprietor was really after. Her husband was, as luck would have it, a soldier in Thorn’s fortress garrison. The city council arranged for him to be furloughed from the army. Frau Frisch, the clever proprietor, duly announced her labour problems solved, and the good citizens of Thorn could continue to fill themselves with cheap salted fish.74