The Rutabaga Winter
I’m currently working on wartime food shortages in Berlin in the First World War. The short version? Things were rough. Then, in the winter of 1916, things got worse.
You’d like a few more details? Okay then.
Germany was not self-sufficient in terms of food even before the war. The country relied heavily on imported grain and fats, not only to feed its people but to feed its livestock. When the war began, access to imported foodstuffs was greatly reduced. At the same time, both draft animals and farm workers were conscripted into the German army, making it difficult for German farmer to produce crops at pre-war levels. Add in some bad decisions by the German government regarding food distribution and a couple of years of bad weather, and you have a food supply trainwreck.*
Farmers – Do your duty. The cities are hungry
Shortages of grain and bread led desperate German housewives to replace them in the family diet with potatoes, which became scarce in turn. Rising prices and inadequate supplies of meat, butter, and even jam, which poorer Germans turned to when they could no longer obtain dripping or butter to spread on their adulterated “war bread”, made putting food on the table a miserable struggle for everyone except the wealthy.
Berliners called the process of queuing up to buy food the “Poloniase”after the lines of partners in the processional dance of the same name. Women would begin to form lines in front of stores soon after midnight, bringing sacking and light-weight chairs to sit on during the hours of waiting–a darker ancestor of young music fans waiting to buy concert tickets. And like those would-be concert goers, they often sat for naught because there were more people in line than available tickets, or butter. As the war went on, lines became longer and there was less on the store shelves. By October 1915, the combination of crowds queuing for food and the absence of affordable food in the marketplace, led to “potato battles” and “butter riots” in the working class neighborhoods of Berlin, predecessors of the street violence that would be a regular feature of politics in the Weimar republic.
Some Berliners attempted to bypass the official supply chain. The truly wealthy brought in food from their country estates. The well-to-do bought goods on the black market. The less well-to-do took to urban gardening on small plots, raised small animals on their apartment balconies, basements or backyards,*** and traveled to the surrounding countryside on illegal foraging expeditions, known as “hamster-ing.”
Food not only became increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive, it also declined in quality. A wide range of substances were used to “stretch” the flour in bread. Some were perfectly palatable, if not what Germans was accustomed to: flours made from corn, lentils and other legumes, chestnuts, soy beans and bran. Others , such as sand and sawdust, were not even edible. As familiar foods vanished from the shops, manufacturers began to offer substitutes: by the end of the war, more than 11,000 ersatz (substitute) products were on sale in German shops, including thirty-three egg substitutes and 837 different types of different sausage. Some unprincipled manufacturers created ersatz products that had no food value, or were actively dangerous. Even honest attempts to create substitutes were often unpleasant to eat. (One of my sources for this period described ersatz sausages as “little tubes of slime.” Yuck.)
Conditions went from bad to disastrous in the “rutabaga winter” of 1916 and 1917, when the failure of the potato crop due to unseasonably cold and wet weather, and the success of the British shipping blockade left most Germans to subsist on a diet of rutabagas. (For some reason, the German government, which had failed at stockpiling potatoes or wheat, had 80 million tons of rutabagas in storage.) The government attempted to overcome the popular perception that rutabagas were good only as animal fodder by dubbing them the “Prussian Pineapple” and providing recipes not only for soups and casseroles, but for rutabaga cakes, breads, coffee and even beer. No one was fooled by this attempt, and in fact, the propaganda only made Berliners more bitter about the situation when rutabagas in their disappeared in their turn in the spring and summer of 1917.
Rutabaga braised in beef broth and seasoned with a little bacon is quite tasty. Ground dried rutabaga coffee and rutabaga jam sweetened with saccharine? Not so much. (Though possibly better than a little tube of slime.)
*Not the first word that came to mind to describe “a complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation” But I try to limit my use of gratuitous vulgarities,** both on the page (screen?) and in conversation.
** One struggle to find the right word led to another. Not sure whether the word I chose not to use was profanity, obscenity, or something else, I finally opted for the more general “vulgarity.” Here’s a useful discussion of the differences. And yes, I am running down rabbit holes a lot these days.
***Goats were particularly popular. Though probably not on balconies.
Forty-Two Keys for Victory
Rationing, shortages, and the clever ways people coped with them are recurring themes in books about the American home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. (Even the new roles of women in the workplace were the result of a critical shortage of men.) Food and gas rationing, rubber and metal shortages and scrap drives are all very familiar to anyone who spends any time in the period.
Today I stumbled across a new shortage while reading Sigrid Schultz’s letters: typewriters.
My immediate thought was “metal shortage”: that the typewriter shortage was a subset of the same shift in priorities that made it difficult for people to buy household goods like can-openers, paper clips, pins and needles and kitchen utensils. In fact, the typewriter shortage was more complicated than the absence of thumbtacks in the store.
Two forces combined to create a major wartime shortage. Like other manufacturing companies, typewriters companies were asked to retool their plants to produce war material, including machine guns, rifles, bullets, propellers spare part for airplane engines and Hagelin-style cipher machines.* At the same time, tens of thousands of people, mostly “government girls,” filled new defense jobs, where they discovered a serious shortage in office supplies, especially typewriters. Shortly after Smith-Corona, Royal, and Underwood stopped making new typewriters, at the government’s request, the government discovered that quadrupling its civilian work force meant it needed thousands of new typewriters. 600,000 to be precise.
The government found workarounds. Some offices went on a 24-hour schedule so that available typewriters never sat idle. Typewriters were rationed: beginning in March, 1942, you had to have a certificate from your local ration board in order to purchase a typewriter. Assuming that any were available for purchase.
But more typewriters were needed. A public relations campaign called “Forty-Two Keys to Victory” was designed to fill the gap. Individuals were urged to donate late-model, non-essential typewriters to the military. Industries that made heavy use of typewriters, like Hollywood and newspapers, were pressured to contribute one out of four of their machines.
Dr. Seuss drives the point home.
Apparently the typewriter is as mighty as the sword. Who knew?
*I had to look up the cipher machines. Click the link if you want to know more.
From the History in the Margins Archives (more or less): Lest We Forget
Here in the United States, we are heading into the Memorial Day weekend. In the past, My Own True Love and I have always found a way to honor the war dead on Memorial Day. We’ve gone to services in small towns and distant suburbs, usually put on local VFW chapters with a Boy Scout color guard, and visited military museums. In recent years, our go-to service has been the one put on in Grant Park, which manages to have all the emotional punch of a small town service even though it occurs in the heart of downtown Chicago.
In 2018, we had the amazing experience of attending the memorial service at the American Cemetery in Normandy, near Omaha Beach as part of a D-Day tour put on by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.* (In some ways, the entire tour was an extended Memorial Day experience, defined by General John Logan, the official holiday’s founder, as “cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe.”)
We expected the service to be a heart-wrenching experience, but it soon became clear that the official service was too distant to have much impact. For us, the real memorial service occurred when our guide led us through the cemetery, telling us stories about fallen soldiers, love, loss, and heroism. The National World War II Museum had provided us with a flower arrangement and a large number of white roses. One member suggested that we leave the arrangement on the grave of an unknown soldier. Another suggested that the veterans in our group present the arrangement. It was a powerful moment. Tears were shed. (In fact, I am tearing up typing this after the fact.) As a ceremony, it had all the impact that the official celebration did not. Afterwards, we scattered to place individual white roses on graves.**
As I walked back to the bus, I heard the sound of a lone bugle playing Taps at the end of the official celebration. I stopped to listen with a lump in my throat and an ache in my chest. The perfect ending.
Remember the fallen. Thank the living. Pray for peace.
*It appears that I never wrote a blog post about our visit to the museum back in 2015. The short version: it was fabulous. We signed up for an all-day special tour that was remarkable
** I would have liked to place mine on the grave of one of the four women buried in the cemetery. (I am pleased to say that one of the male members of the tour asked where they were buried before I could.) Unfortunately, their graves were in a portion of the cemetery that was roped off to protect the ground due to recent weather conditions. While I am perfectly willing to kick open a door when there is a good reason, this didn’t seem to be one of these times.
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