Modern Hungers

Alice Weinreb makes a compelling case for conceptualising much of German twentieth-century history along the spectrum from hunger to satiety. This type of broad history written by focusing on the single element of food is becoming more and more popular, with Lizzie Collingham’s book, The Taste of War (2011; rev. ante, cxxviii (2013), 1,306–7), widely recognised as the standard-bearer of this charge in English. These works encourage different ways of thinking about food and history, especially how food underscores the very social, political and economic currents that can often form the primary focus of analysis in national and military histories. Two of Weinreb’s arguments deserve particular attention in this respect, not because they are particularly new, but because they are so well elucidated. First, how the experience of German hunger was woven into the fabric of National Socialism and Germany’s trajectory to war. While it is commonly understood that the hunger blockade of the First World War and post-war privations encouraged the Nazis to push for autarky by securing food and land in eastern Europe, Weinreb traces how this policy filtered down from government into the daily routines of ordinary Germans and how it was implemented (with equal importance) by housewives in German kitchens and soldiers at the front. Second, how Germans successfully re-imagined and cast themselves to the major powers after the Second World War as victims of hunger rather than as the beneficiaries of their army’s wartime mass starvation of (mostly eastern) Europe. They did so by drawing on an emerging international human rights discourse that posited the protection from hunger as the fundamental human right for all. The German innovation was to stress that their fundamental human right should be met first because of their racial superiority in comparison to their former victims

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