Table 1 Food prices in Karlsruhe, 1914–15
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Price in marks
June 1914December 1914June 1915
Bread (per kg) 0.27 0.34 0.42
Pork (per kg) 1.60 1.84 3.10
Butter (per kg) 2.40 3.00 3.20
Milk (per liter) 0.22 0.24 0.26
Potatoes (per 100 kg) 6.38 7.00 11.50
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Source: Statistische Mitteilungen über das Grossherzogtum Baden (8 vols., Karlsruhe, 1914–15), VII, 95, 192; VIII, 106.
By the end of 1914 it was clear that price controls were merely distorting the operation of market forces and that these controls alone could not regulate the food supply. The only alternative appeared to be the suspension of the market mechanism altogether and the regulation of the entire agricultural cycle, from production to consumption. Rationing was the device. From the start, however, it took shape haphazardly, too. It began with bread. In January 1915 the Bundesrat established the Imperial Grain Corporation within the federal Office of the Interior. This body resembled the industrial corporations that now inhabited the War Ministry, insofar as it was composed of the sector’s leading capitalists, the grain farmers and wholesalers who were empowered to buy up the entire grain crop at controlled prices. This corporation then rationed grain, via an assortment of state and provincial bureaus, to local governments throughout the land, which in turn rationed it out to their citizens at prices that climbed perhaps a little less rapidly for being controlled.
The Grain Corporation provided the model for the administration of rationing in virtually all sectors of German agriculture during the next two years. By 1916 there was even a War Corporation for Sauerkraut. The process of control was painful and reluctant, and it came in response to crises that descended serially on the supply of meats, vegetables, fruits, oils, and potatoes. In hopes of bringing a measure of oversight and control to the whole system of regulation, the Federal Council established an independent War Food Office (Kriegsernährungsamt) in 1916. The lawmakers failed to invest this office with effective powers of compulsion over either the military or civilian agencies, however, so the Food Office became “a blunt sword” – yet another, albeit central, factor in a bureaucratic morass.9 In the end, the administrative network that regulated the German food supply was populated by interested federal and state ministries, forty different imperial food corporations and their attendant bureaus, offices of military procurement, and thousands of municipal and communal governments, whose own bureaucracies became bloated with agencies to coordinate the purchase, storage, processing, and distribution of scarce food supplies to their beleaguered populations.10
In the distribution of food – and many other essential household items likewise in short supply – Germany was thus transformed into a command economy, in which market forces yielded, at least in theory, to the rule of law. Farmers and other producers had to frame basic economic decisions on the basis of legal constraints. The moral basis of this system was never made explicit, but it inhered in the “spirit of 1914,” the proposition that the burdens of the conflict ought to be equitably shared – as well as in the calculation that a major portion of the population would otherwise starve.
It did not work well. While the system nourished a maze of bureaucratic regulations, the food supply itself was an enduring nightmare, the principal object of domestic discontent among hungry and frustrated consumers. Popular cynicism about regulations was widespread. It surfaced in the joke, heard in Berlin later in the war, that the best way to ensure the removal of snow from the city’s streets was to establish an “Imperial Snow Corporation,” which would, like nothing else, ensure the disappearance of the snow supply. Not all the difficulty was due to administrative confusion, however. Local systems of distribution were generally effective; and towns that enjoyed local access to farm products fared better than did larger cities, which relied on long-distance transport for much of their food. Crippling bottlenecks, which accompanied the strains of war on the country’s rail system, constricted the flow of foodstuffs towards local points of distribution. The impact of the blockade is difficult to overstate.11 It produced critical shortages in basic areas, particularly in fertilizers and fats, which translated into diminished or erratic supplies of many staple commodities (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 German agricultural production, 1912–18 Source: Jens Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie: Ländliche Gesellschaft, Agrarverbände und Staat 1890–1925 (Bonn, 1978), 84–6.
In these circumstances, official rations soon ceased to describe what Germans could in fact purchase. The nutrient quality of food also declined, to say nothing of its palatability. The search for alternatives to foods in short supply lent a new, pejorative, meaning to the German words Ersatz (“substitute”) and strecken (“stretch”). Coffee made of tree bark became a familiar item on German tables, as did milk and beer that were “stretched” with water. So did bread that was made from coarsely milled grains or laced with potato flour, corn, lentils, rice, sawdust – or worse: in Freiburg a consumer discovered a mouse in a bread loaf.12 By the war’s end, some 11,000 different ersatz products – including over 800 varieties of meatless sausage – had found their way into general circulation.
All these vexations bore witness to the structural difficulties of regimenting the food supply. The suppliers were too numerous and savvy. Peasants greeted the incursions of regulators into their lives with an arsenal of evasions, which ranged from simple hoarding and hiding to elaborate schemes to misrepresent the size of their crop yields. This behavior was not, as some critics charged, a sign of want of patriotism among the rural folk. Farmers were responding rationally to a simple fact: the market for agricultural produce had not disappeared. Rationing had merely driven the free market underground and colored it black.
This black market survived as the competitor to the administered food supply. The forces of supply and demand thrived here, and practically any foodstuff could be found – for a price. The prolongation of the conflict fed the black market to the point that it became far more than just a supplement; in the estimation of the authorities, Germans were purchasing fully one-third of all food on the black market by war’s end. The twin of the black market was the so-called Hamsterfahrt. Despite the persistent efforts of the police and army to suppress it, this “foraging jaunt” occupied multitudes of Germans in visits to relatives, acquaintances, or anyone else in the countryside who might be persuaded – for a price – to part with some of their produce.
These alternatives to the official food supply were not available to all Germans. They were expensive and hence increasingly inaccessible to the poor. The Hamsterfahrt required proximity to farmland. The logic of this situation assembled the problems of food shortage above all in Germany’s large cities, particularly those in the northwest, which were dependent on long-distance transport to feed large populations of poor people, who had little opportunity to supplement their rations. Because these cities were also the centers of Germany’s armaments industry, they became neuralgic points as the war dragged on.
The food supply was a source of grave concern for the duration of the war. Because every German experienced it to some degree on a daily basis, it was an immediate source of discontent. During the first two years of the conflict, however, the problem remained within bounds better described as vexing than critical. Good harvests in the late summer of 1914 and in 1915 relieved the pressure, while the initial enthusiasm and the attendant hopes of a short war survived to ease material burdens.
The mobilization of morale
The mobilization of society for war was not limited to regimenting material resources. It extended to the hearts and minds of Germans on the home front, most of whom experienced the war as growing sacrifice and material hardship. The effort to maintain their moral support for the war demanded the rationing of information, the administration of the war’s meaning.
The language of patriotism governed the official rea
ding of the war. Its terms prescribed the meaning of the war effort in a way that comported with the “spirit of 1914” – that the conflict was necessary, just, and destined for vindication, and that, whatever the sacrifices it required, opposition to it was unthinkable. This reading was organized in the national symbolism. These symbols had carried heavy military implications before the war, and they now became as omnipresent as the uniforms worn by an ever-growing segment of the population. An essential additional component of this symbolism emerged in the first days of fighting, in the form of a powerful countersymbol. This was not Russia, whose specter had haunted the final diplomatic crisis. It was instead Britain.13 Anglophobia had a long tradition in Imperial German politics, and it had been fueled by colonial and naval rivalry before 1914. With the outbreak of war it became a passion. “Now that England has showed its cards,” proclaimed the semi-official Kölnische Zeitung on August 7, “everyone can see what is at stake: the most powerful conspiracy in the history of the world.”14 This belief directed the military crusade foremost against a sinister power, which – for reasons of envy and greed – loomed as the driving force behind the hostile coalition against Germany. “May God punish England!” – a motto that became almost a form of address in 1914 – captured the intensity of this sentiment, as well as the compelling sense of moral orientation that it provided. The Allied blockade, which was principally the work of the Royal Navy, became the enduring symbol of this hatred, as well as a catch-all explanation for the material miseries of life on the German home front.
The initial mobilization of German opinion came spontaneously in August 1914, and it required neither official encouragement nor compulsion. Thereafter, the great challenge became to sustain this mood of commitment, if not euphoria, in the more trying circumstances that followed the failure of the German armies to win the war in 1914. The principal responsibilities for this undertaking fell onto official and semi-official agencies of communication and opinion formation, which enjoyed an interpretive monopoly in representing the war to a broad popular audience.
Newspapers remained the principal medium of communication on the home front, so they occupied a central place in the calculations of the country’s leadership.15 While it was possible for Germans to purchase newspapers from abroad via the neutral lands, particularly through the Netherlands and Switzerland, most people learned about the war from newspapers published in their own country. The importance of managing news about the war was transparent in the interests of security as well as public morale. Through neutral countries, enemy agents, or German soldiers captured in battle, information published in Germany could easily find its way into the wrong hands. From the start, this truth governed the way troop movements were reported in the press; and it extended quickly to obituary notices, which were purged of information about the fallen soldier’s unit or the locale where he met his end.
While foreign military reports were regularly published in the German press, the German news from the front was thus censored from the first day of the war. Reports from units in the field proceeded first to staff headquarters in the eastern and western theaters, and from there to central staff headquarters in Berlin, where the army’s press department digested them. Only then was the news made public. Most of the news releases were distributed nationwide via the national wire service (called the WTB) or representatives of the major papers in Berlin. The result was to produce identical reports of battlefield operations in local papers throughout the land. The Battle of the Marne was in this respect an exemplary occasion.16 During the last week of August the press reports sang vaguely but in unison of a general German advance and the retreat of French and Belgian armies. On September 5 the reports at once became more fragmentary; accounts of German advances were punctuated with ambiguous reports of enemy attacks (successfully repelled) and German “repositionings.” The real news lay in the orchestrated silence of the reports, which failed to bring the eagerly awaited announcement of a breakthrough in the west; instead, they turned with more enthusiasm in mid-September to developments on the eastern front.
Reporting the “facts” of military operations represented but a minor facet of censorship. Placing these facts in a broader context – endowing them with interpretive coherence and meaning – was a more sensitive problem. The fact that masses of young men were being killed could not be concealed, and its interpretive implications were dangerous. So this information was kept incoherent. Local papers were allowed to report only local casualties, unaccompanied by statistics or cumulative lists. The operational reports from the front never once mentioned a German defeat until the fall of 1918, when the whole propaganda campaign collapsed along with the army. Other agencies found it more difficult, but no less necessary, to disguise the fact that the war was not going well. Many of these agencies, such as the Foreign Office, the Naval Office, and the Office of the Interior (which oversaw the food supply), ran their own press offices or otherwise managed what the public learned about their endeavors.17 In hopes of coordinating the distribution of information, the government began late in 1914 to stage regular press conferences in the capital. Here the Berlin correspondents of major newspapers congregated for briefings (both on and off the record) by representatives of the army and navy, as well as the principal civilian offices. Once they had cleared the censor, reports filed from these conferences found their way into the local press.
Despite the hopes of the officials who fed the press in this fashion, the newspapers that served thousands of localities in Germany were not the pliant vessels of news that was managed in Berlin. The government’s claims to interpret the war did not go uncontested. The local press was in the hands of local editors, who themselves attempted to make sense of the reports they received. Their power resided in the editorial commentary with which they garnished the official reports, as well as in their control over the content of their papers. In a large majority of cases, these editors remained sympathetic to the official reading of the war; but the prolongation of the conflict and the injection of contentious issues of domestic and foreign policy nourished interpretive dissension.
The government attempted early in the conflict to define the limits of permissible dissent. In October 1914, in the aftermath of the Marne, a central office of censorship was set up in Berlin, for whose guidance the chancellor promulgated a number of guidelines.18 These directed that nothing was to challenge the impression of German domestic unity and resolve, while in the official reading German troops remained in the field in order to defeat Russian despotism and British designs on world hegemony. Criticism of high policy was proscribed, as was discussion of war aims. The guidelines themselves suggested that tensions had already begun to build on some scores, but they also allowed the venting of criticism on a range of other matters, particularly when these were of local concern. The officials who oversaw municipal rationing procedures were hence more vulnerable to criticism in the local papers than were military and civilian leaders in Berlin.
The obstacles to the public expression of dissent of any kind were nevertheless high. Institutions of censorship permeated the country. At the most basic level, in the communities where local editors had to submit copy before they published it, responsibility for managing information lay in the hands of the army, specifically in local censors’ offices, which were manned by military officers or civilian policemen. These officials were in turn responsible to the deputy commanding general in each corps district. Despite the creation of the central office of censorship and, in October 1915, of a War Press Office within the War Ministry, attempts by military and civilian agencies alike to enforce common guidelines for censorship foundered on the autonomy of the deputy commanding generals. Standards of tolerance varied accordingly throughout the country. Censorship was particularly tight in Berlin and its environs – the domain of the Third Army Corps – and in the working-class centers of the Rhineland and Westphalia, which lay within the realm of the Seventh Corps, while regulations tended to be more permissive in
Bavaria. The hand of the military censor was heavy everywhere, however. It registered with increasing frequency in the columns of local newspapers, where empty white spaces announced editorial transgressions, the specific character of which was left to conjecture.
Censorship represented the negative facet of rationing information. The term “propaganda” suggests another, more proactive side: the systematic attempt to read the war in an optimistic light and to encourage the patriotic resolve of those whose enthusiasm had begun to wane in the face of food shortages, high prices, and the deaths of loved ones. In addition to commanding a monopoly on the news of events from the front, the government could mobilize an extended network of civilian public agencies whose impact on opinion was direct. The public display of flags and the staging of parades to celebrate happy occasions, such as the Battle of Tannenberg, were not spontaneous. The corps of available public employees comprised school teachers at all levels, who interpreted the war for their charges. The same principle applied to the Protestant clergy, whose enthusiasm for the war was both uncritical and unrivaled. The Catholic clergy operated in a more complex relationship with state power, but Catholic pulpits likewise functioned for most of the war as centers of moral mobilization.
Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 Page 7