Berlin’s army of workers, like its armies in the field, could not function on empty stomachs. At first there was little worry about this because the citizenry expected soon to be tucking in to caviar and champagne brought back from Paris by German troops. When, instead of bringing back booty, the military began draining away ever greater quantities of food, prices for basic foodstuffs skyrocketed. Pressured by the Social Democrats, who understood that escalating bread prices could undermine workers’ morale, the government took control of wheat production and distribution in early 1915. An Imperial Allocation Board in Berlin ordered farmers to sell their grains at a standard price set by the government. Resistance to this order was fierce, especially from heavily agricultural states like Bavaria. Count Georg Friedrich von Herding, Bavaria’s prime minister, complained that the sequestration of wheat amounted to an imposition of “socialist principles.”
The hasty creation of centralized war bureaucracies may have helped Germany to stay in the war, but it did not put an end to the bottlenecks and shortages. Germany’s armies ran short of ammunition in the late fall of 1914, precluding any new offensives that might have broken the stalemate. The situation got worse in 1915 and 1916. Enormous battles like Verdun and the Somme used up munitions on a scale hitherto unimagined. The ammunition crisis prompted the introduction of the Hindenburg Program, which was supposed to mobilize the entire economy and society for war. It ceded even greater authority to the military, making Hindenburg and Ludendorff virtual dictators, but it by no means enhanced efficiency. On the contrary, the army “governed” by allowing businesses and interest groups to exploit the conflict for their own advantage; the result was “an orgy of interest politics.”
Governmental ineptitude and private greed, combined with an increasingly effective British blockade, brought growing deprivation to Germany’s cities, including the capital. Shortages of basic foodstuffs became worse despite—and partly because of—the government’s assumption of control over distribution. Berlin was obliged to introduce bread rationing as early as February 1915, and other major cities soon followed suit. The rationing was supposed to ensure adequate supplies for all, but its primary effect was to stimulate the growth of a black market that drove up prices as much as 400 percent. Of course, the wealthier classes were often able to obtain items that were supposedly unavailable. The manager of one of the fancy hotels, for example, ordered his chambermaids to give him their butter allowance, which he then sold to rich guests. There was no shortage of fine food at the Adlon, which became home to many of the top war bureaucrats. Because of their presence, recalled Hedda Adlon, “not a room stood empty in our hotel during the entire war.”
For the vast majority of ordinary Berliners, who could only dream of dinner at the Adlon, the hunt for sustenance became ever more challenging. Some had relatives in the hinterlands whom they could tap for extra supplies, but many raided surrounding farms and orchards, a tactic that greatly exacerbated old tensions between the capital and its rural environs. Another expedient was to plant vegetables on every conceivable plot of land, no matter how small. Tiny truck gardens sprouted up in vacant lots and along the banks of the Spree; many survive today in the form of Schrebergärten (garden colonies).
Urban gardens, however, could hardly cover the growing deficiency in food staples, and Berliners, like other Germans, were obliged to consume vile concoctions containing cheaper ingredients. The first of these innovations was “K-Bread”—the K standing either for Krieg (war) or Kartoffeln (potatoes), the main component. Felix Gilbert recalled the war bread as “very heavy, very dark,” and containing what seemed to be pieces of wood. This stuff confronted him with a dilemma, because he could neither eat it nor discard it at his school, which would have looked unpatriotic. Thus every day on the way to school he surreptitiously dropped his bread ration into the Spree, hoping not to provoke a feeding frenzy among the seagulls, which would have given away his game. But he had no reason to worry: “Even the sea gulls realized that the bread was unpalatable.”
By the winter of 1916/17 potatoes, too, were in short supply, so they were replaced by turnips, which Berliners had always regarded as animal fodder. The ubiquity of this bitter-tasting lumpen-vegetable prompted a new title for the national anthem: “Dotschland, Dotschland über Alles” (Turnip-land, Turnip-land Over All). As butter became increasingly scarce, the authorities urged people to spread their K-Bread with jam. But there was no jam to be had either. When an emergency shipment of plum jam failed to arrive in the capital, Berliners suspected that officials of the Ministry of Interior had colluded with speculators to send it elsewhere to make a profit for themselves. They also blamed the government for the proliferation of Ersatz (substitute) products, which were designed to mimic the physical appearance, but certainly not the taste, of the goods they replaced. Thus Berlin was inundated with ash masquerading as pepper, extract of fruit pips claiming to be oil, and a mixture of soda and starch pretending to be butter. With the proliferation of ersatz foods, anything natural was prized, including stray cats and even rats. People joked that there would soon be no rats in Berlin, only rat substitute. If a horse died in harness it was unlikely to make it to the knacker. Asta Nielsen recalled seeing a horde of Hausfrauen butcher an old nag as soon as it dropped in the street: “They fought each other for the best pieces, their faces and clothing covered in blood. Other emaciated figures rushed over and scooped up the warm blood with cups and napkins. Only when the horse was reduced to a skeleton did the scavengers disperse, anxiously clutching bits of flesh to their hollow breasts.” Rumor had it that some Berliners were stuffing the bodies of departed relatives into closets to evade registering the death and losing the deceased’s ration card. By the end of 1916 even some of the better-off elements were becoming un-fashionably thin. “We are all gaunt and bony now,” noted Princess Blücher, “and have dark shadows around our eyes, and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering what our next meal will be.”
Hungry Berliners carve up a horse cadaver, 1918
In their bitterness over the lack of decent food, Berliners often asserted that other parts of Germany, such as Bavaria, had it better. They also complained that refugees were “picking them clean.” Not surprisingly, the rest of the nation rejected such complaints as typical Berliner whining. Pointing to a fifty-gram increase in the meat ration for Berlin’s industrial workers, Bavarians claimed that it was the capital that was unjustly privileged.
Although Germans might argue over which part of the country suffered the worst shortages, none could dispute the fact that the poor in every major city, including Berlin, suffered the most. Starting in late fall 1914, long lines formed outside bakeries in the capital’s proletarian districts; often there was nothing left when people finally got to the counters. Berlin’s first serious food riots occurred in the working-class districts of Lichtenberg and Wedding in October 1915. Proletarian women, who bore the responsibility of finding food for their families, led the demonstrations. In one instance a group of them descended on a butter store whose owner had jacked up his prices. When he responded to their complaints by telling them that they’d soon be paying six marks for a pound of butter and “eating shit for dessert,” they beat him up and smashed his windows. A little later a mob of women stormed a meeting of the Social Democratic leadership to protest the party’s inaction in the food crisis. As the Socialist politician Otto Braun recalled, they threw stink bombs, cursed their leaders as feige Lumpen (cowardly rogues), and suggested that they be sent to the trenches. “The comrades from other parts of the Reich got a very graphic demonstration of the unspeakably low level of political discourse in Berlin,” commented Braun in his diary.