Adults were unnerved not just by the unruliness of youth or its greater public visibility but also because they sensed a power shift taking place. The high wages that older male adolescents could earn in war industries made them families’ primary breadwinners and the way in which these male teenagers used their new income added to adult anxieties. They drank in bars, went to the cinema to see trashy films, bought penny dreadfuls and rowdily caroused with female youths in public. In the minds of officials and many grown-ups, this ‘immorality’ merged with the crime wave to produce a general impression of an epidemic of youth delinquency. In Germany from the autumn of 1915 and in Austria, where the public debate about delinquency started later and was to an extent imported from the north, from the summer of 1916 decrees were issued banning adolescents from visiting bars or coffee houses in the evenings, smoking in public, gambling or watching films not approved for children. In Berlin, Cassel and, briefly, Hannover, mandatory savings decrees were issued by district military commanders, restricting the spending of those under eighteen. Their wages were paid into special accounts and if they wished to spend more than eighteen marks in a week, they or their families had to apply to the community administration for permission. In Berlin, the measure resulted in a huge sum, 8¾ million marks, being forcibly deposited in 104,000 savings accounts. Some 3½ million marks were paid out during the war. The remainder was released to its unhappy owners only after the Armistice.93
The crime wave reflected a breakdown not only in central European societies’ food supply but also of trust. This had many other manifestations. One of the most prominent, stemming from hunger, fatigue and the fact one had to cheat the system to survive, was paranoid ‘food fantasies’. People imagined their neighbours hoarding fantastical quantities of food, and denunciations swamped police desks. By popular demand, police in Vienna began carrying out house searches. Spot checks were also made to ensure that residents were observing legally imposed ‘meatless days’. Other Habsburg cities instituted similar practices, which in the minds of some residents amounted to not local but rather centrally imposed arbitrariness. Aleksandra Czechówna in Cracow, for example, anxiously noted in her diary in March 1917 the arrival of ‘a commission from Vienna which goes around the houses and takes private supplies, leaving only a very small amount’.94 If the neighbours were dishonest, then citizens were certain that people elsewhere were even worse. Newspapers stirred up resentment. Five months before Czechówna wrote her diary entry, the Viennese Welt-Blatt, part of the city’s gutter press, reported on exactly the sort of inspections that so worried her, although carried out not by a Viennese Commission but by the Cracow police. ‘The checks’, the paper reported in an article provocatively entitled ‘How one lives in Cracow on meatless days’, yielded ‘a very interesting result’:
It turns out that in the middle, apparently less affluent layers of the population even on the ‘forbidden days’ (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) meat is consumed – and what is more, in very large quantities . . . The police checks, which will be continued, have also proven that the richer parts of the population . . . dispose of considerable supplies and not only lack nothing but currently, regardless of the prices of food, lead a significantly better life than in peace.95
Communal identities, which had been crucial in supporting the national and imperial war efforts in 1915, were now subverted to promote regional jealousies. In Germany, Hamburgers were convinced that Berliners were given first pick of available food. Wiesbadeners considered it ‘a fact that Wiesbaden has the worst and lightest bread’.96 All north Germans eyed the south with envy. It was common knowledge that cattle-rich Bavaria had banned the private export of food across its borders to the rest of the Reich and that it issued its people double or even triple the meat ration usual elsewhere. Bavarian particularism also flared. The flow of visitors into the state intent on sharing in its bounty, and the removal of foodstuffs by hamsters and smugglers to other parts of the country, caused resentment. Grumbling about having to fight ‘Prussia’s war’ grew from 1916. These tensions were further fuelled by the fact that rations genuinely did become more differentiated the longer the war lasted. Implicitly acknowledging that ‘hamstering’ could not be stopped, the authorities made individual rations dependent on the size of communities. Residents of large cities were given a relatively large meat allowance, as their inhabitants had little access to farmers. Cities of between 50,000 to 100,000 people were given less and towns that were smaller were allocated the least. Yet the efforts of the War Food Office were in vain, merely creating the illusion that large cities were privileged when in fact they remained poorly provisioned. The worst sufferers were industrial communities full of fractious Social Democrats in the Rhineland, Westphalia and Saxony.97
The Austro-Hungarian Empire also started to fragment through even starker regional tensions. The earliest division was between Austrians, regardless of ethnicity, and Hungarians. The former were livid at being cut off by their neighbour and by the reports, some true, others exaggerated, of better Magyar rations. Local politicians whipped up this anger to deflect blame for miserly rations from themselves. Mayor Weiskirchner of Vienna provocatively compared ‘chubby’ Johann Hadik, the Hungarian Minister of Food Supply, with the ‘withered almond’ who performed the same role in Austria. Hungarians, he told his citizenry, are ‘out of spite . . . more interested in seeing us starve to death than the English are’.98 Hatred mounted. Agitated rumours soon circulated widely that the Hungarians preferred to sell their potatoes to Prussian Silesia than to their fellow Habsburg subjects in Austria. Some wished for just retribution: ‘the Russians should just come to Hungary,’ yearned one Austrian German in 1916. ‘If they would only come in and eat all the miserable Hungarians’ pork[!]’99
Yet anti-Magyar sentiment produced no pan-Austrian solidarity. On the contrary, food shortages reopened and exacerbated the national enmities of peace. In Bohemia, Germans held Czech farmers responsible for the dearth. Czechs, by contrast, were certain that shortfalls were caused by the export of Bohemian crops to the German Reich. Hate mail was sent to the German consulate in Prague, and already by the spring of 1916 rumours circulated that the Central Powers would lose the war and that an independent Bohemian Kingdom would be established under Russian or British protection.100 Similar resentments were expressed elsewhere. In Tyrol, for example, Habsburg Italian speakers complained that their German neighbours were better provisioned. Nationalist activists worked hard to exploit the discontents and show the people that these social problems had only national solutions. The Habsburg state’s war was blamed as the root cause of the deprivation. Nationalist-dominated charities and voluntary welfare organizations offered material help and with it won recruits for their ideological aspirations.101
The fracturing of German and Austro-Hungarian society was also marked by an upsurge of anti-Semitism. In the Reich this had a primarily political character; in Austria, it was more of a social phenomenon. The accusations were identical in both states, however. Jews were presented as arch violators of a war culture based around sacrifice and community. They were accused of the two cardinal sins of this culture, war profiteering and draft dodging. Often these went together: an early public rebuke of Jews by a Catholic Centre Party deputy in the Reichstag in August 1915 claimed, for example, that they dominated the Reich Cereals Board and were using their positions to shirk active service. In Germany, anti-Semitism was at first unrelated to deprivation. Rather, it was, and remained, a tool of the far right, which worried that Bethmann Hollweg’s conciliatory Burgfrieden policies would bring democracy and a diminution of conservative power in Prussia. Already in 1915 the far right sought to tar prospective reform by condemning it as intended for the benefit of Jews. However, as sacrifices mounted and scrutiny of compatriots’ conduct became more paranoid, others joined the racists in demanding checks on whether Jews were fulfilling their national duty. In October 1916, Matthias Erzberger, the influential Centre Party deputy, called in the Rei
chstag’s Budget Committee for Food Supply Issues for a survey of the War Corporations’ personnel to determine gender, income, religion and how many were of military age. The purpose of the measure was to ascertain whether rumours of Jewish over-representation in these key wartime economic institutions were true, but it met resistance from both Socialist deputies and imperial officials.102
Erzberger’s initiative was probably inspired by a notorious census ordered earlier in the month by the Prussian War Ministry, aiming to count how many Jews were serving at the front, in the rear and at home, how many had volunteered, been killed and won distinctions. Whether this census was a purely anti-Semitic measure or the product also of other efficiency-related issues is disputed.103 The anti-Semitic attitudes within the military leadership are undeniable: the Prussian officer corps had refused before 1914 to commission Jews and the rise of the Third OHL in August 1916 had brought some radical anti-Semites, notably Erich Ludendorff’s right-hand man, Colonel Max Bauer, close to the centre of power.104 On the other hand, the autumn of 1916 was a period of intense manpower strain. Not only was the army suffering heavy casualties on the Somme but the Third OHL was planning an economic remobilization requiring large numbers of new workers, and it was not clear from where they would come. Denunciations of Jewish draft dodging, officers’ traditional anti-Semitic prejudices, and an efficiency drive combined to motivate the census. Careful statistical investigation by Jewish organizations proved after the war that claims of Jewish draft dodging were groundless. They also demonstrated that in the army under the Third OHL, pragmatism trumped ideological racism. Whereas there had been no Jewish officers before the war, the urgent need for educated men to serve in leadership positions meant that by its end, the army had commissioned 2,022, making Jews slightly over-represented in the wartime officer corps.105 However, the leaked news of the census and the War Ministry’s subsequent refusal to publish its results gave ammunition to the anti-Semites and raised public suspicions of Jewish shirking; this was disastrous as, with deprivation worsening, dark rumours were already circulating of Jewish food wholesalers and businessmen pushing up food prices. Given the signals from the centre, it was unsurprising that some Home Military Commands were reporting rising anti-Semitism within the German population by the end of 1916.106
In Austria, unlike in Germany, neither the government nor the military succumbed to pressure to discriminate against Jews. Yet within society anti-Semitism had long been stronger and more widespread than in the Reich. Whereas German Jew-haters had never enjoyed much electoral success, in Vienna the Christian Social Party under its anti-Semitic leader, Karl Lueger, had dominated municipal politics for two decades.107 Jews were both more numerous in Austria (4.6 per cent in contrast to less than 1 per cent of Germany’s population) and more visible, for many, Galician and Bukovinan Orthodox Jews in particular, remained unassimilated.108 Moreover, during the war anti-Semitism had radicalized in reaction to the flood of dirty, diseased and desperate Jews from the east into the Empire’s major western cities in 1914. Vienna was the reluctant home to 185,000 refugees in early 1915. Other cities faced smaller deluges: 20,000 Galician Jews sheltered in Budapest and around 15,000 in Prague.109 These refugees quickly became firmly associated with profiteering and smuggling. Not only the press but also Mayor Weiskirchner of Vienna in February 1915 publicly rebuked them for raising prices.110 The accusations had some basis of truth, not because Jewish refugees were, as anti-Semites claimed, naturally materialistic and unprincipled, but because the authorities had left refugees with few other options. State support had been sufficient to cover only one-third of living costs in 1914, and by the summer of 1917 galloping inflation had reduced this proportion to one-eighth. Worse still, Vienna’s municipal authorities, fearing that these eastern European Jews might settle and stay, illegally obstructed their efforts to work. Receipt of a work book, which was a prerequisite for legal employment, was deliberately made conditional on presentation of full documentation, which municipal authorities and police knew would be impossible for most refugees. Only in November 1916 did manpower shortages force an end to this policy. By that time, however, the work-shy criminal Jewish refugee was a fixed stereotype attracting intense popular resentment. The prediction, made two years earlier by Viennese police, that refugees would be subject to violence if the food supply did not improve, came true in 1917, when in Vienna and Bohemia Jewish traders were beaten and shops plundered.111
The deprivation not only rent society, but also undermined two other key relationships on which rested the war efforts of the Central Powers. First, the hierarchy of sacrifice universally accepted in the war’s first years came to be challenged as civilians began to wonder whether their own suffering was not, after all, worse than that of better-fed soldiers. By October 1917, the Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants in the Kingdom of Bohemia could warn the Austrian Interior Ministry starkly that ‘the conditions brought about by the war weigh on the population so heavily that victims in the rear threaten to exceed the bloody sacrifices’.112 Such direct contestation of the relative value of home and front sacrifice was rare, yet reading between the lines in letters, there are hints that civilians had started to believe that at the very least some thanks should be flowing from front to home. In the Kohnstern family, Anna repeatedly assured Albert that however bad life was in Germany, his ordeal was worst. His siblings were less certain, however. In January 1917, for example, his sister, Gerda, wrote him a letter, which she began with the news that the family had sent off a parcel for him that morning, containing a home-made cake and ‘a few blocks of Gartmann chocolate’. Tracking down even this modest quantity of chocolate and the ingredients for a cake at the beginning of 1917 was a Herculean task, doubtless involving many hours of queuing, considerable self-denial, and possibly haggling with black marketers. Gerda did not go into details. Instead, she signalled to her brother how grateful he should be more subtly, yet devastatingly effectively, by making just a passing mention of the family’s own diet: ‘Every day now bring turnips, turnips and still more turnips.’113
The second relationship to be undermined, in this case much more threateningly and decisively, was that between civil society and the state. By the winter of 1916–17, popular blame for the shortages had shifted decisively from the British blockade towards the Central Powers’ own governments. Their inability to organize sensible, adequate and fair food distribution was vociferously criticized. Their peoples were frustrated by queuing and the impossible maze of regulations, and infuriated by rumours of official waste, incompetence and corruption. The sanctity of their laws, and with it state legitimacy, was undermined, for to attempt to obey meant starvation. It infuriated citizens that although both regimes had introduced anti-profiteering measures, they appeared incapable of suppressing the ‘real’ criminals: supposed domestic ‘traitors’ like large landowners, avaricious farmers, cheating food traders and, in Austria, Jewish refugees. Desire for peace grew. So too did bitterness. As one Czech put it dramatically, ‘the state is murdering our children’.114
The consequence of desperation and alienation was growing unrest. Strikes increased. In Germany, from a mere 14,000 strikers and 42,000 days lost in 1915, the figures rose the following year to 129,000 strikers and 245,000 days lost.115 In large cities, disorders also mounted as food queues dissolved into protests and hungry demonstrators marched to town halls to demand that local officials provide higher rations. The hunger riots in the suburbs of Hamburg in August 1916 exemplify the tensions. Disorder began in the working-class district of Barmbek on the evening of 18 August, when crowds of women, teenagers and children surrounded bakeries and tried without coupons to get bread. It was no wonder that they felt entitled to a ration supplement, for the previous months had been inordinately tough. Throughout June and July, there had been no potatoes. Suddenly, at the end of July, so many had arrived at once that not all could be delivered to the shops, and many had rotted. The elusive tuber had then once again vanished fr
om Hamburg’s sales outlets. The accumulated frustration manifested itself that night in violence: bakeries’ windows were smashed and their contents looted. The following day saw further disorder not only in Barmbek but also in another suburb, Hammerbrook. Police with sabres clashed with looters and military units were called in to restore peace. Sixty shops were plundered, thirteen people seriously wounded and thirty-seven arrested. The local Deputy Commanding General, reacting to the part played by minors in the disturbances, banned children under fourteen from appearing on the street after 8 p.m. without an accompanying adult.116
Similar scenes were seen with increasing regularity not just in Germany but also across the Habsburg Empire. In Bohemia, for example, food riots doubled from thirty-five in 1915 to seventy in 1916. They would expand even more in the following years, reaching 252 and 235 public demonstrations respectively in 1917 and 1918. They also became larger: forty had over 1,000 participants and some, such as one that took place in Königgratz, had over 10,000.117 Yet the fact that deprivation was worse, the wartime regime more repressive, and there was no safety valve due to the continued closure of parliament and strict press censorship, gave Austrian fury more explicitly political expression as well. The build-up of anger among opponents of the war was dramatically revealed on 21 October 1916, when Friedrich Adler, the radical pacifist and Socialist son of the venerable Social Democrat leader Viktor Adler, publicly shot Minister President Stürgkh in a hotel restaurant in central Vienna. The assassin was a lone wolf. Within his party, he was a bitter but isolated critic of Socialist collaboration with a warmongering regime. Friedrich Adler was frustrated that his anti-war writings were suppressed by the censor and that like-minded comrades had been conscripted by the army. His violent protest was an act of depression and desperation. Nonetheless, his speech during his trial damningly and accurately indicted the Empire’s leaders and their decision to wage the war not with the peoples’ consent but by repression. He had, Friedrich argued, committed the same crime as the government: killing without the assent of the people. His act was legitimated by Stürgkh’s unconstitutional means of rule and the lack of any other way to protest:
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