5
ATINA GROSSMANN
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care, and necessary social services.
—From Article 25, Section 1, of The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
By the spring of 1945, when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich’s defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of Allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead cautioned American policymakers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of food rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them (in deceptively gender neutral language), “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover, she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”1
Mead’s concerns about adequate food provision fit squarely into the New Deal-inflected language of human rights and social security central to the American case against fascism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms address to the 77th Congress on January 6, 1941, designed to prepare the nation for possible participation in World War II, asserted the primacy of a right to “freedom from want” alongside the basic freedoms of speech and worship. The Atlantic Charter, proclaimed by Churchill and Roosevelt on August 12, 1941, as they vowed to support Great Britain and the Soviet Union with Lend Lease aid, promised all states—and significantly both “victor or vanquished … access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” The Charter elaborated the vision articulated by Roosevelt, announcing that the peace resulting from the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” would “afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”2
Indeed, the dream of establishing the United Nations organization arguably first began with an international conference focused on food. A May 1943 gathering at Hot Springs, Virginia, led to the formation of an interim international commission that became in 1945 the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the new UN.3 In November 1943, in the midst of brutal warfare in Europe and the Pacific and in the face of the ongoing Nazi extermination project, forty nations agreed to establish UNRRA as the international agency mandated to deal with an expected massive flow (and hoped for repatriation) of displaced persons and refugees.4 In his 1944 State of the Union address to a nation at war, FDR reiterated the principle that political and civil rights were inextricably connected to material entitlements; food was a basic inalienable human right. “A man in need is not a free man,” he stated unequivocally, and warned that “people who are hungry and out of jobs are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”5 Thus, the basic tenet that everyone had the “right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger”—which would eventually be enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—was integrated into Allied war aims. Between 1945 and 1948—and in many ways into the 1950s—these putative “rights” would be severely tested on the ground, in conflicts over food rations and entitlements that roiled occupied and defeated Germany.
The Politics of Rationing
As Mead predicted, in the aftermath of unconditional surrender in 1945 and the influx of millions of refugees into the Western occupation zones, differential access to food supplies or goods that could be exchanged for food became a key gauge of the occupiers’ favor, and even denoted a rough classification of groups or individuals as victim, perpetrator, or bystander during the Nazi regime. For displaced refugees in a war-torn Europe without legitimate borders or national institutions, access to adequate food and disputes over the meaning of “adequate” also served as markers of Allied and international commitment to the realization of the Allies’ lofty war aims. After Germany’s unconditional surrender, the Allied powers—especially the U.S. Military Government—took on the ultimate responsibility for feeding the local population and the masses of refugees streaming into occupied Germany, including up to 14 million ethnic German refugees and expellees from the Eastern territories conquered by the Red Army.6 Together with UNRRA and associated nongovernmental aid organizations, the Military Government also confronted millions of Nazi Germany’s victims: prisoners of war (POWs), forced laborers, liberated concentration camp inmates (KZNiks), and over a quarter-million mostly Eastern European Jews who had survived the Final Solution.7
During the war, economist John Maynard Keynes reportedly “scoffed” that President Roosevelt’s interest in food relief led him to “start with vitamins” as the “best strategy for postwar reconstruction.”8 As it turned out, vitamins, and especially calories, did become a fulcrum of wartime planning, as well as of postwar and then Cold War occupation and reconstruction politics. The calorie, as historian Nick Cullather has detailed, invented in 1896 in an “airtight chamber” in a Wesleyan University basement, became an important measure of “social and industrial efficiency” during the Progressive Era and an “instrument of power” for military planning and humanitarian relief operations during and after World War I.9 During and especially after World War II, calories—and what they could and could not provide in terms of food and sustenance—became a measure of the Allied commitment to human “welfare” and rights noted by Mead, proclaimed by the Atlantic Charter, and finally codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
For the occupiers, questions about food supplies for displaced persons (DPs) were inextricably linked to disputes about adequate nutrition for the Germans—how much they needed and how much they deserved. Did they require just the minimum to prevent epidemics and serious social disorder or enough to actually satisfy the population? These questions were, of course, both political and practical. Food politics had become part of the “arithmetic of standards” that marked welfare state and humanitarian activism in the second half of the twentieth century. UNRRA, which was responsible for aid to “non-enemy nationals,” had declared a (frequently unattainable) daily intake of about 2500–2650 calories to be adequate, the amount that the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations had set in 1935 as the global standard for the working adult.10 Despite Allied planning based on the principle that defeated Germans should not have more food than the most hard-hit Allied nation, SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) originally set German rations at 2000 calories, which was no less than for liberated countries such as France or Belgium. However, when local supplies, including the contents of well-stocked German military depots, ran low, official rations for the defeated were quickly reduced, initially to a low of 1000 to 1250 calories daily.11
Under the chaotic conditions confronted by U.S. Military Government and UNRRA at war’s end, and throughout the occupation, a complex and in many ways quite novel, language of grams of fat and total daily calories, vitamins, or cigarettes and coffee allotments emerged. It calibrated new (and constantly shifting) standards of victimization and entitlement—and importantly—recognition among the many different groups present in the American occupation zone. During a period of tumult and extreme scarcity, defeated Germans and surviving Jews competed against each other, and also among themselves, for the favors of the “good parent,” embodied by occupiers (coded as military and male) and international relief organizations (often represented on the ground by female social workers). Each group resented the ostensible (and in reality extremely limited) privileging of the other, maintaining that their political innocence or severe suffering entitled them to precious supplies or a higher level of rations. To extend Mead’s analogy, the “parents” discriminated among their various children who in turn squabbled over who was more entitled or deprived. “‘Calories’ became a kind of magical concept” and rationing categories not only established daily allotments but also delineated differential degrees of victimization, criminality, or complicity, providing in visceral form a measure of “transitional justice.” They worked as a “universal currency” defining standards of justice and efficiency that operated in tandem with the informal currency of coffee, cigarettes, and nylons supporting the postwar black or “gray” market barter economy.12
In this calculus, ration levels set by degrees of guilt and work capacity often doubly jeopardized women, even as, in a world of “surplus women” and men missing in action or prisoner of war camps, women were generally responsible for food provision and distribution. Deployed as Trümmerfrauen to clear the rubble, often (but certainly not always) as punishment for having been members of, or married to members of, Nazi organizations, women were also most likely to be classified as “unproductive” Hausfrauen, thus eligible for the lowest level ration card, dubbed the Himmelsfahrtkarte (ticket to heaven) because it could not provide a livable diet. At the same time, there was no clear standard for what constituted a livable diet. American occupation officers, constrained by regulations which reminded them that, “You are entering Germany, not as a liberator, but as a victor,” were constantly balancing the desire not to “pamper” the Germans with the need to maintain order and prevent epidemics.13 In an ironic reference to the erstwhile national anthem, the sometimes still irrepressible Berliner Schnauze lamented, “Deutschland Deutschland ohne alles [without everything], without butter, without fat, and even the little bit of marmalade is eaten up by the occupiers.”14 But, as Americans did not tire of pointing out, German outrage at the low level of provisioning was also influenced by the enormous quantities they had been accustomed to consuming before, and even during, the war: up to an average of 3000 calories per day, including a good deal of alcohol, much bread and potatoes, and an astonishing 106 grams of fat—always the marker of an ample diet. Even at the height of the war in 1944, with German cities under severe bombardment, the average intake stood at a generous 2000 calories a day.
Annoyed that the Soviets, following their more explicit policy of fraternization with (often newly converted) supportive “anti-fascist” elements, tried to gain political advantage with generous soup kitchens, the U.S. Commander in Berlin, Colonel Howley groused: “Where the Russians parceled out extra bits of food in return for services rendered and for general political loyalty, I distributed food to the Germans to keep them from starving on our hands. I was not, however, in favor of giving them American sirloin steaks every night.” Howley, who emerged from his tour of duty a rabid anticommunist, found that Germans nevertheless reviled him as the “beast of Berlin” for his food politics.15
Relatively quickly, however, political considerations changed and adequate amounts—of both calories and types of foodstuffs—were increasingly likely to be set with reference to not only the recent Nazi past but also the Cold War present. The Americans (and British) had been determined to impose punitive measures on the Germans—assuring for example that their diet should at least not exceed the low standard of postwar Great Britain, which had only instituted severe rationing after the war in order to manage the immense occupation costs. But their trepidation about being outdone on both the propaganda and provisioning front by the ever more troublesome new antagonists in the East, the Soviet Union and its German communist allies, proved a powerful counterweight.16 Notwithstanding the Red Army’s record of rape and plunder as the Soviets battled their way toward and into Berlin, the Americans feared potential popular support for a Soviet occupation driven by Stalin’s conciliatory vow that “the Hitlers come and go but the German Volk remains.” German officials were adept at playing on anxieties that too severe a stance would turn the defeated Germans toward communism. In her famous album, Fatherland Rest Quietly, the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White displayed a scarily “Aryan”-looking female “Professor Koch” (Cook) into whose mouth she put the lines that Americans imagined all Germans to be perfecting: “America must supply food, or Stalin will have an easy time.”17 Others ominously rhymed, “Our food needs must be met, otherwise Hitler we cannot forget.”18 Adequate food offered not only a bastion against “anarchy” among the displaced but also a bulwark against revanchist Nazism and now communism. American occupiers fretted that if there was “a choice between becoming a communist on 1500 calories and a believer in democracy on 1000 calories,” low or decreased rations would “pave the way to a Communist Europe.”19
These tensions later culminated in the dramatic conflicts of the Berlin Blockade and Airlift in 1948, which unfolded just as the General Assembly in New York promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on December 10, 1948, one day after the same body had unanimously passed the Genocide Convention. During the blockade, the communists hoped to lure West Berliners into the East with promises of full shops and adequate food supplies, while the West tried to score points by airlifting tons of supplies. However, West Berliners neither yielded to Eastern propaganda nor subsisted solely on the much-heralded supplies flown in from Frankfurt’s Rhine-Main air base, managing instead with a combination of Allied goods, foraging in the countryside, and furtive shopping in the East.20
It was just this ability of Germans, occupied but nonetheless still living in their own familiar country (a perception that extended to German expellees and refugees who were also uprooted), to supplement low rations by recourse to relatives in the countryside or the goodwill of their customary grocers or butchers that infuriated their former victims during the immediate postwar months and years. Surviving Jews were embittered by what they perceived to be grudging treatment as troublesome foreign refugees and “homeless foreigners.” For them, privileged food rations were more than an urgent necessity; they also represented political recognition and an initial form of reparation. Contemporary human rights activists have argued that states have the obligation to protect and facilitate access to food supplies for those who might be disadvantaged in receiving food. In the case of occupied Germany, where there was no state authority to carry that role, the Jewish DPs expected UNRRA; the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or Joint), the main Jewish relief agency; and, finally, the Military Government, which held quasi-state responsibility, to fulfill that role. They resented the limited and, above all, unappetizing rations supplied by their American protectors and UNRRA, as well as the patronizing and bureaucratized manner in which aid was distributed by international and Jewish aid organizations.
Even in the most drab transit camps or assembly centers, Jews maintained the emphasis on holiday feasts, occasions for which they demanded and received special allotments and shipments, involving, for example, the resumption of matzo baking at the Sarotti plant in Berlin and the shipment of kosher wine from Palestine.21 Survivors’ attitudes reflected “deeply held beliefs about food as an entitlement,” and hence they were even more resentful and suspicious of the minimalist rations provided by aid groups and the Military Government.22
Conflicts about food certainly marked and perpetuated the bitterness between Germans and Jews. In the fall of 1945, with the memory of liberation still fresh and the Nuremberg Trials about to begin, a Jewish aid organization acknowledged that “No doubt the children loitering in railway stations or wandering on the roads, suffer cruelly at the approach of winter from a total lack of food and clothing,” but insisted, however, that the countryside, if not the cities, “almost everywhere [is] intact, the herds of horses, of cows, of sheep, are well fed, the barnyards are well, even very well stocked.”23 In outraged missives, representatives from American Jewish aid organizations, soldiers, and chaplains eloquently challenged the litany of complaints from Germans about the privileges in housing and food granted to Jews: “I don’t wish to be depressing darling,” a Jewish officer wrote to his wife in December 1945, but the stark fact was that SS and Wehrmacht prisoners and German civilians received “more calories per day than the people who really suffered under the Nazis.”24
At the same time, Germans, often seen as undeservedly well fed by allies and Jewish survivors, for their part quickly positioned Jews as “privileged.” Germans resented Jews’ guaranteed access to UNRRA rations in displaced persons camps, the generosity of individual American Jewish soldiers and chaplains, and the much-envied Joint supplements, which provided not only dried food but also chocolates, coffee, and above all, the cigarettes that were central to black-market trading. To Germans—as well as to some occupiers and UNRRA officials—it looked like the sensational report submitted by President Truman’s special envoy Earl Harrison decrying the terrible conditions endured by Jewish survivors in DP camps and supporting Jewish demands for autonomous all-Jewish camps, cemented Jewish survivors’ position as having a “privileged status well above that of any ordinary displaced national of the United Nations.”25 But it did not feel that way to the Jewish DPs, and much of that sense of disappointment, bitterness, and lack of recognition congealed around food. Their mood was later captured in the 1950 Hollywood film The Big Lift by the gruff honest Sgt. Kowalski, Montgomery Clift’s Polish-American (and in some ways, one suspects, a stand-in for a Jewish) GI sidekick, who says of the Berliners he is protecting from the Soviet threat, “They can’t remember Dachau, Lidice, Buchenwald, Rotterdam, Warsaw. That they can’t remember, but that they couldn’t get meat last week, that they remember.”26
American requisition of German homes and apartment blocks to house the increasing population of Jewish “infiltrees” from Eastern Europe seeking refuge in the American zone further inflamed German rancor. By 1947, the keen sense of unfair and arbitrary treatment by the victors led the Deutsche Städtetag to avail itself of the new occupier-provided rhetoric and explicitly protest such evictions as human rights violations.27 When official rations in the British zone were reduced to 1550 calories in March 1946, German physicians were not above making comparisons to starvation conditions in concentration camps. In 1947, a particularly harsh year in which “a worldwide scarcity of foodstuffs, a hard winter, exhausted soil, and problems with the distribution system” for food exacerbated an already difficult situation, the defeated Germans responded to a reduction in rations with sporadic strikes and unabashed appeals to “international law.” Local political leaders claimed that by reducing rations the Allies were violating the terms of the Atlantic Charter which, after all, pledged that the result of the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” would be peace, economic prosperity, and “freedom from fear and want” for both victor and vanquished. In June of that same crisis year, the German Chamber of Physicians, meeting in Bad Nauheim, appealed to the international moral conscience: “The whole people, once vigorous and healthy has been weakened by starvation, and is now utterly incapable of work and is on the verge of manifest infirmity.”28 In a pervasive “narrative of hunger and victimization,” as historian Alice Weinreb aptly characterized a persistent German discourse starting with the Allied “hunger blockade” of World War I and the provisions of the Versailles Treaty and extending to territorial readjustments and Allied rationing policies after World War II, Germans fashioned themselves into victims of hunger. Their food rations were restricted by vindictive occupiers and their food supplies were looted or unfairly traded by “homeless foreigners,” especially Jewish DPs, fattened up by the favor of the Americans and their access to goods supplied by international Jewish relief organizations.29
Undoubtedly, ordinary Germans in cities were suffering from a rationing system much more onerous than that imposed by the Nazi regime. A cartoon in the Berlin women’s magazine sie from January 1947 from January 1947 shows a son asking his mother “cooking over an improvised stove … ‘Mother, do we always have to eat calories? Couldn’t we occasionally eat a nice piece of cake?’”30 In general, however, even sympathetic occupation officials agreed that Germans greatly exaggerated reports of malnutrition; While German rations were indeed lower than those granted to Jewish displaced persons and officially designated “victims of fascism,” the calorie counting inscribed into ration levels was deceptive.
Most Germans did not have to rely only on official rations. Unlike DPs, who, especially in the early period, were trapped in the confines of their camps, both by regulation and fear, Germans had access to nonrationed and fresh food. As “natives,” or even as ethnic German refugees, they could more easily resort to contacts in the countryside or with familiar and friendly grocers. Germans were hardly suffering from famine, unimpressed and irritated occupiers noted; it was just that they were so accustomed to a substantial diet and even saw obesity as a sign of health. Disgusted by the plump women he saw in Celle (and it is interesting to note the gendered quality of complaints about German corpulence), the town adjoining Bergen Belsen KZ in the British zone, which had been essentially undamaged by the war, a British officer remarked that, “If slimness is fashionable among German women, then Celle was certainly a most unfashionable place.”31 Margaret Bourke-White also reported that “Especially the Fräuleins,” the object of so much controversy about fraternization, were in “good shape, their teeth are the giveaway. Much better than in any German occupied country.”32
To Jewish survivors and many Allied observers (especially, but not only, American Jewish servicemen, chaplains, and aid workers) defeated Germans still seemed relatively well-fed, well-scrubbed, and prosperous, particularly in the rural areas where many of the larger Jewish DP camps were located. This perception held despite the mass influx of ethnic German refugees from the Red Army and Soviet-occupied territory in the East into rural areas. For many Allied occupiers, the shock was not the extensive destruction of Germany (and now much discussed victimization) but how unscathed much of it still appeared. The relative comfort and the highly developed self-pity of the defeated Germans—so frequently described as “sullen”—is a strikingly consistent theme.33 Jewish DPs deeply resented the seemingly willful misapprehension of their unique situation, expressing bitter frustration at what they came to call “the enigma of German irresponsibility.”34 If the Allies’ juggling of entitlements in regard to rations angered ordinary Germans, who found themselves officially disadvantaged, Allied food policy nonetheless seemed pathetically inadequate to the survivors, given both their experience and formal status as victims.
The Political, Bureaucratic, and Emotional Economy of Food
Food was, indeed, a politically volatile issue. But it was primarily expressed, not in the language of rights, or even entitlement or humanitarianism, but in terms of grams and calories. UNRRA files are filled with careful charts on the caloric value of foods, more meticulously broken down than in any diet book, ranging from beef carcasses (544 cal/lb) to sweets and candies (1680/lb).35 DPs were continually subjected to nutritional studies and mass weighins by (usually female) public health workers, the necessary and standardized corollary to medical examinations and, as a hygiene measure, dusting with the pesticide DDT.36 DP camp Food Offices kept careful records of all foodstuffs and cigarettes delivered by the Joint, noting precisely (at least on paper) when and how many goods were received and then distributed. Long lists tracked the goods, many of them scarce and valuable, that entered the DP camps: American cigarettes, tobacco, and canned meat, followed by marmalade, sardines, powdered and condensed milk, potatoes, bread, butter, flour, fat and Schmalz (chicken fat), fish, powdered eggs, cocoa, some nonspecified (and probably dried) vegetables, followed by—and often listed separately—precious extras such as sugar, chocolate, biscuits, salt, and coffee. Sick and pregnant residents received ration cards for half-liters of milk from the camp store.37
For Jewish survivors, therefore, for whom food supplies were generally—at least after the early period of chaos—adequate, especially when measured by numbers of calories, the issue became, just as Margaret Mead had sensed, one of quality rather than quantity. DPs who had access to milk and grain, and who sometimes became quite plump, wanted more than rations measured by calories. Indeed, the fresh fruits and vegetables they craved and which were essential for health had only negligible caloric value. Food was, in most cases, plentiful, carbohydrate-laden and hence calorie-laden, but it was unappetizing and monotonous. The “bare essentials” were not good enough, and demands for separate kosher kitchens or ritually slaughtered meat required by Jewish dietary laws added another layer of conflict to already contentious postwar food politics. The definition of “adequate” therefore was bitterly contested. DPs in occupied Germany demanded satisfaction according to their interpretation of “adequate.” It signified precisely what FAO officials specified as adequate only many years later; namely, food that was available, culturally acceptable, able to supply “essential nutrients” such as vitamins (not just some allotted ration of calories), safe and free of toxins, and last, but certainly not least, “of good quality.” A far cry from postwar notions predicated on caloric content, the human right to nutrition now requires, at least theoretically, food that tastes and looks appetizing and provides the “dietary diversity” necessary for good health.38 It also insists that recipients (or claimants in current language) are presumed to be knowledgeable and trustworthy about their needs and that their views are respected. Again, this is quite a different perspective from the postwar context in which aid organizations were willing to grant some self-government in the interests of better and more efficient management but certainly not willing to grant the survivors an “expert voice” in their care.39
Clearly, food was defined according to an emotional as well as a physical and political economy. Occupied Germans viewed the DP camps as a kind of Schlaraffenland (wonderland) of “sugar and spam, margarine and jam, plus cigarettes and vitamized chocolate bars” ready for lucrative sale on the black market and sullenly protested the puny privileges granted to the Jewish victims.40 Americans worried about alienating Germans by setting rations too low and giving the impression of indulging unruly displaced persons, while simultaneously laboring to assure American Jews and antifascists that they were not pandering to former Nazis. Jews often suspected that German suppliers deliberately offered them bad food or withheld good fresh, food. DPs who maneuvered to supplement their (somewhat more ample but unequal) rations were condemned and not infrequently arrested (even in at least one notorious case, killed) by German police, who were conditioned to identify Soviet POWs and DPs in general as perpetrators of food crimes and, in a continuation of specific anti-Semitic prejudices, especially viewed Jews as food speculators and black marketers.
Increasingly, survivors were seen, by defeated and occupier alike, not as victims of National Socialism, but simply as intrusive “foreigners” (Ausländer). The fact that within a year of the war’s end, Jewish DP camps were crowded with “infiltrees” from newly communist Poland, most of whom had been repatriated from their harsh but life-saving wartime refuge in the Soviet Union and could therefore be labeled as victims of communism rather than Nazism, only reinforced these perceptions.
In 1947, in response to the difficult food situation, the heating up of the Cold War, and the shift toward reconciliation with the former enemy (in the service of anticommunism and German economic recovery), the United States replaced the hard-line Joint Chiefs of Staff Order 1067 decreeing de-Nazification and demilitarization with a much less stringent directive, and the Military Government eliminated its policy of assigning higher food rations to the victims of Nazism. Numerous policy changes in 1947 signaled an end to Jewish DPs’ (relative) “golden age” of special access to American power, protection, and rations. Yet, Germans continued to openly protest what Kathryn Hulme, an adventurous young American UNRRA worker, portrayed as the continued treatment with “kid gloves” of the “prima donnas of the DP world.” Jewish survivors, on the other hand, underscored the second half of her statement, stating that “perhaps they deserved the rating” and insisted on the painful inadequacies and ironies of their situation as homeless refugees or disowned former citizens in the “blood-soaked” land of their tormentors.41 Jews protesting conditions in Föhrenwald DP Camp asserted: “They, who are guilty of our sufferings and tortures, they who robbed us of our fortunes, they must be forced to feed us during the time we are compelled to stay in this country in order to make it possible for us to regain our health.”42
Food, its quantity, quality, and distribution, was central therefore—both practically and symbolically—to these polarized understandings of wartime and postwar experience. As the anthropologist Mead understood, food crucially defined people’s sense of how much they were recognized and valued as human beings rather than as DPs, who were frequently labeled as the miserable and unwelcome “human debris” of war and genocide. For the survivors, calorically adequate food was simply never enough. Once the early supply problems were solved, DPs continued to complain—obsessively it was said—about the amounts and taste of food; it was never enough and never good enough. American white bread and the hated UNRRA green peas could not satisfy. Drawing on the psychoanalytic understandings that dominated mental health practice in the 1940s, social workers and psychologists were quick to discern unhealthy and self-destructive patterns of “reckless eating” and “excessive desire for food,” especially “sweets, chocolate, coffee and pastry.”43 They perceived refugees’ preoccupation with food as symptomatic of the regression to an infantile state, complete with a childlike “[in]ability to plan,” “apathy … helplessness … maniac excitement … aimless aggression” that the dependent DP existence fostered.44 At best, their analysis of the emotional economy of food interpreted these reactions as a displaced response to catastrophic loss. The many grievances about the quality of food, clothing, and housing were seen as both legitimate and the product of a deep and ultimately insatiable longing for care and dignity, which no amount of institutional improvements could assuage.
Food desires, relief workers concluded, were not rational. As one frustrated but understanding UNRRA pediatrician reminded her calorie-counting superiors, “people do not eat calories, but food,” and that food had to be appealing.45 “How are we going to live—on calories?” one DP bitterly asked an American visitor, and, like many observers, she realized that “Calories in the DP camps had ceased to be a heat or food unit but had become the symbol of the drab, squalid existence” of the refugees.46
It was the desire for food that was more appetizing and more nurturing, rather than, as most critics insisted, the drive for profit and luxuries or even the search for necessities such as fresh milk for children, that pushed people toward the black—or more properly, gray—market. DPs aimed for access to the fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables that their German neighbors were able to take off the land or acquire from friendly shopkeepers, and that occupiers and aid officials took for granted. Trade in food—often carried on among women—provided an occasion for resentment and skirmishes over entitlements, as well as a crucial site for negotiations among Jews and Germans: about revenge, guilt, and victimization, but also about how to coexist in the post-Nazi present. Ita Muskal, a young refugee from Romania, for example, recalled with some pride how at age eighteen, she became a “businesslady” and a bit of a “big shot” as a Feldafing DP camp black marketeer. On a larger scale, UNRRA officials sometimes found that German farmers were reluctant to hand over milk from their cows or other supplies, but in this gray market, Ita could go to her “best provider,” a German woman with a lovely garden filled with flowers and fresh produce. She brought her cigarette wages and treasures from the camp kitchen where she worked—margarine, peanut butter, dried and canned goods such as Haferflocken (Quaker Oats), peas, sardines, and tuna fish—that the Germans prized and the DPs disdained. She would collect Marks and goods and take them to the nearby villages or into the Bourse—the main black market on Möhlstrasse—in Munich for serious trading. Decades later, she still vividly remembered the deep satisfaction of walking the two and half miles to a nearby village café with her cash and ordering a German pastry, just like the “businesslady” she was, or the defiant pleasure of going to the German grocer, ordering bread, salami, and buttermilk, and insisting on real Swiss cheese. The grocer wanted to sell her an inferior, smelly cheese, Schmierkäse, but Ita would have none of it. “Too expensive,” he told her, but Ita said no, “I have money and ration cards, I want the cheese with the holes.” And then she would treat herself to the short train ride home, munching her cheese on the way. When Ita took her wares all the way to Munich, she even collected real dollars from the storekeepers, using them for further luxuries such as a dress or a pair of shoes for which the skilled DP shoemakers and tailors would charge $10 in hard currency. Armed with a picture from an illustrated magazine, she could take her dollars to the shoemaker and get the shoes she wanted, just like in the German paper. And sometimes she went into Munich with her husband Sam and played the “big shot.” They would go out, to the theater or circus, even to a real restaurant to eat the “Liverwurst” that she loved.47 Such transactions provided a means of gaining agency and overcoming the (putatively childlike) dependency that characterized refugee life. Good food, whether fresh meat or vegetables, a pastry or a rich liverwurst, offered respite from packaged rations and the regimented managed life of the postwar “refugee nation.”48
Ironically, therefore, the victims, classified as stateless refugees or “homeless foreigners” (heimatslose Ausländer) dependent on “handouts,” were inevitably cast in the position either of “nudging” mercenary complainants or as “privileged” when they received or demanded the paltry benefits they had been granted in recognition of their past suffering. Germans, for their part, especially as the Cold War progressed, increasingly expected to be rewarded for their good (that is, docile) behavior in the present rather than punished for possible crimes in the past. This enabled them to contrast their position as citizens in their own renovating country, simply demanding their rights to the satisfaction of basic needs, with the undeserved “special pleading” and advantages of their victims. In one of the many strange reversals of the postwar years, Germans were able to make universalizing claims as “victims” in need of internationally guaranteed human rights, while Jews, whose suffering had initially offered the paradigm for a necessary human rights regime supported by the United Nations, turned to particularism to assert their own needs and rights.49
The Jewish struggle in occupied Germany for the “right” to sufficient and culturally meaningful food reinforced for Jewish survivors a basic lesson: to secure rights in a world of nation-states, Jews would need a nation of their own. Their vulnerable and often begrudged status as needy supplicants led surviving Jews to a growing recognition that the key to gaining human rights that were just and universal, and more than mere benefits and privileges, was a claim to nationhood and national identity. This was a central conclusion of the DP era in occupied Germany: the human rights of Jews could only be guaranteed if they, like the other signatories of the United Nations, had their own sovereign nation-state. Even Roosevelt’s iconic “freedom from want” had been phrased in national terms, as creating “economic understandings which will secure to every NATION a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.”
The experience of the Holocaust and life as displaced persons framed the demands for a nation-state within which human rights could be granted and protected. Indeed, the collective environment of the camps mitigated against the elaboration of abstract individual rights claims. Jews formulated their calls for rights differently: in political demands for entry to Palestine and a Jewish state, and for the fulfillment of concrete material needs of everyday life, like food and housing.50 Most Jewish DPs were determined to grasp for themselves the protections of a nationalization that was, as they imagined, entirely their own and therefore able to guarantee their universal human rights.51 European Jews had learned that the minority rights their representatives had fought for after World War I, and that the League of Nations had supposedly guaranteed, could not protect them. At the same time, they learned that citizenship of the nation-state in which they resided did not also necessarily protect them. For the exhausted and traumatized displaced Jews of occupied Europe, the dream of citizenship in a specifically Jewish nation outside of the Europe that had betrayed them as a novel guarantee of human rights was not much of a stretch. Moreover, given the reluctance of the United States to admit them—at least until the passage of the quite limited 1948 and the more expansive 1950 DP acts—the Zionist path also seemed the only solution to endless displacement likely to be politically viable in terms of superpower support among the United Nations.
Survivors understood on literally a gut level what the UN World Congress on Human Rights posited it in its 1993 Vienna declaration: “The right to take part in the conduct of public affairs enables people to change their food or health situation at a political level.”52 This right to have rights, to use Arendt’s formulation, was precisely what the DPs and the stateless did not possess. Political agency depended on recognition as a national collective and this was a status that Jewish DPs aspired to via a passionate Zionism, which, in some ways, allowed them to act like a proto-state even while they were still displaced and in transit in occupied Germany.53 Unlike the ethnic German refugees who were citizens of occupied Germany, and, after 1949, then citizens of an essentially (officially “semi”) sovereign Federal Republic of Germany, displaced Jews could claim no political rights as citizens. For DPs, the allotment of basic benefits such as food worked as a concrete manifestation—and representation—of their human rights.
UNRRA’s definition of “relief and rehabilitation” tended to separate psychological needs—which were recognized to only a limited degree—from the more immediate urgent requirements for food, medical care, and shelter. But in fact, the two were inextricably linked. In spite of the sometimes egregious—and even at the time widely publicized—inadequacies in relief efforts, immediate needs were met relatively quickly and with remarkable efficiency. Food and feeding could not, however, be disconnected from the symbolic and emotional; they were intensely political and personal. Food remained a key issue well after the initial problems of severe hunger and malnutrition had long been solved. Not only the numbers of calories but the kind and quality of food available to Germans and Jews, especially fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables (as well as proper clothing, rather than worn and faded cast-offs), often came to stand in for the highly contested recognition of relative suffering and the entitlement to human rights and dignity. The experience of Jewish survivors as displaced persons in postwar occupied Germany underlines therefore how much the universal human rights declared by the United Nations are dominated on the ground by basic economic and social human needs such as food and delimited by access to nationally defined and codified citizenship.
NOTES
Adapted from “Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949,” by Atina Grossmann, Central European History 44, no. 1 (March 2011): 118–48. Copyright © 2011 Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
1. Margaret Mead, “Food and Feeding in Occupied Territory,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Winter 1943): 618–28, 619–20.
2. For an incisive critique analyzing the limitations of this universalist vision as it developed in the postwar politics of human rights, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
3. Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 23.
4. On UNRRA see Susan T. Pettiss with Lynne Taylor, After the Shooting Stopped: the story of an UNRRA Welfare Worker in Germany 1945–1947 (Victoria, BC: Trafford Press, 2004); Francesca Wilson, Aftermath: France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia 1945 and 1946 (New York: Penguin, 1947); and George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, vol. 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). On conditions in occupied Germany, see also Jessica Reinisch, “Public Health in Germany under Soviet and Allied Occupation 1943–1947” (PhD diss., University of London, 2005).
5. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 115–18, 303–4. Here Roosevelt echoed Herbert Hoover, the engineer who had organized U.S. relief operations after World War I and who had warned that “famine breeds anarchy” and Bolshevism. Quoted in Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 350. See also Asbjørn Eide, “The Human Right to Adequate Food and Freedom from Hunger,” FAO Corporate Document Repository, 1998 (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1987/8.
6. This is the latest estimate for ethnic German refugees, cited by Frank Biess, H-German, March 7, 2006, in a (highly critical) review of Dagmar Barnouw, The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Earlier estimates usually cite a figure of 12 million.
7. In addition to Jews who had survived death and labor camps, in hiding, or with partisan units, up to two hundred thousand mostly Polish Jews who had either fled or been deported to the Soviet Union joined the influx into the American zone. I discuss these complicated and confusing issues in detail in Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
8. Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 116.
9. Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 340, 339.
10. Ibid., 355. It is not clear whether this “working adult” standard was intended to apply to both men and women.
11. Malcolm J. Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939–52: A Study in Forced Population Movements (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 318–19. See also chapter 11 “Jewish Refugees,” 172–73.
12. For further analysis of the concept, see Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). On calories as a “magical concept,” see Hermann Glaser, 1945. Beginn einer Zukunft: Bericht und Dokumentation (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2005), 127. “Universal currency” is Cullather’s term.
13. Dale Clark, “Conflicts over Planning at Staff Headquarters,” in American Experiences in Military Government in World War II, ed. Carl J. Friedrich and Associates (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1948), “Rules for Occupation Officers,” 233.
14. Quote is from “Preisausschreiben. Berlin 1945. Wie ich es erlebte,” essay contest sponsored by Berlin Senate on Berliners’ experiences in 1945. Rep. 240, Acc. 2651/748, Landesarchiv Berlin/. Irmgard Heidelberg had submitted her mother’s diary about her experience of defeat and occupation. My discussion here draws on research about Berlin; see also Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
15. Frank Howley, Berlin Command (New York: Putnam, 1950), 85, 87.
16. See Reinisch, “Public Health in Germany,” 16 and especially ch. 6.
17. Margaret Bourke-White, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s Thousand Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), caption on photo before p. 7.
18. Grigor McClelland, Embers of War: Letters from a Quaker Relief Worker in War-Torn Germany (London: British Academic Press, 1997), 145.
19. Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” quoting General Lucius Clay, 363.
20. See Steege, Black Market, Cold War.
21. Quarterly report, AJDC, March 1–June 1, 1946, p. 41 in YIVO Leo W Schwarz Collection (LWS) 294.1/516/R45, also in 446/R37. On food and Jewish survivors in occupied Germany, see also Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, esp. 174–78.
22. See Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 147–50.
23. Report on the Situation of the Jews in Germany (Geneva: Union OSE, 1946), 11, 18.
24. Letter from officer stationed near Dachau, September 17, 1945. American Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York, file 399A.
25. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 325. For current reflections on these vexed issues and the argument that “As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were granted full status of political victims,” see Gerard Daniel Cohen, “The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and Human Rights Debates 1945–1950,” Immigrants and Minorities 24, no. 2 (July 2006): 125–43.
26. The Big Lift, produced by William Perlberg for Twentieth Century Fox, directed by George Seaton (1950). Filmed on site during the Berlin Airlift.
27. For different perspectives on these German perceptions, see Ulrich Müller, Fremde in der Nachkriegszeit. Displaced Persons-zwangsverschleppte Personen in Stuttgart und Württemberg-Baden 1945–1951 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990) and Susanne Dietrich and Julia Schulze-Wessel, Zwischen Selbstorganisation und Stigmatisierung: Die Lebenswirklichkeit jüdischer Displaced Persons und die neue Gestalt des Antisemitismus in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998). On the connections between anti-Semitism and conflicts over food, see also Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany, trans. Frank Templar (Oxford: Pergamon, 1992), 107.
28. Reinisch, “Public Health in Germany,” 284. Food riots had already broken out in some areas in spring of 1946.
29. See Alice Weinreb, “Matters of Taste: Hunger, Food, and the Making of Two Germanies” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009), an excellent and provocative analysis of the politics and culture of food and hunger in postwar Germany.
30. Steege, Black Market, Cold War, 48.
31. Reinisch, “Public Health in Germany,” 284–88, quote on 291.
32. Bourke-White, Fatherland, 33, 61.
33. This ongoing discussion has produced a flood of books in the past decade (including republished literature), articles, and films on German civilian suffering in World War II. See for example, Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Munich: Propylaäen, 2003), American edition, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003). For a fine resumé of the German victimization debates ignited by the approach of the sixtieth anniversary of the war’s end, see Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies,” History and Memory 17, no. 1/2 (Fall 2005): 147–94. For discussion of this perception of defeated Germans as “sullen” and unregenerate, see for example, Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, ch.1.
34. Moses Moskowitz, “The Germans and the Jews: The Postwar Report. The Enigma of German Irresponsibility,” Commentary 2 (1946): 7–14.
35. See for example, “Feeding,” S-401 Box 7, File 1, UNRRA Archives.
36. These scenes are recorded in numerous Army and JDC (Joint) newsreels and films. See the Steven Spielberg Video and Film Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
37. See for example, 294.2 MK 483. Roll 61. Folder 850, Farflegungsamt Landsberg DP Camp, YIVO.
38. See Eide, “The Human Right to Adequate Food and Freedom from Hunger.”
39. See Lawrence James Haddad and Arne Oshaug, “How Does the Human Rights Perspective Help to Shape the Food and Nutrition Policy Research Agenda?” International Food Policy research Institute, Food Consumption and Nutrition Division (FCND) Discussion Paper Nr. 56, February 1999.
40. Kathryn Hulme, The Wild Place (Boston: Little Brown, 1953), 211–12.
41. Ibid.
42. Notes on hunger and work strike of all 3441 Jews in Föhrenwald on November 15, 1945, DPG 294.2/584/MK483/R44, p. 36, YIVO.
43. Stefi Pedersen, “Reaching Safety,” in H. B. M Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, with contributions by Eduard Bakis, Miriam L. Gaertner, F. F. Kino, Stefi Pedersen, Maria Pfister-Ammende, Maud Bülbring, Louise Pinsky, Sal A. Prins, Esther Ryssdal, Henri Stern, Libuse Tyhurst, Elisabeth Nagy (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 41.
44. H. B. M. Murphy, “The Camps,” in Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, 59. On the not dissimilar reactions of social workers to survivors who reached the United States, see Beth D. Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). On the role of social workers and psychologists in Europe, see Tara Zahra, “‘The Psychological Marshall Plan’: Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II,” Central European History 44, no. 1:37–62 and her Lost Children: Displaced Families and the Aftershocks of World War II in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
45. See for example, “Feeding,” S-401 Box 7, File 1, UNRRA Archives.
46. Marie Syrkin, The State of the Jews (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1980), 46.
47. Oral history interview with Elizabeth Muskal, Yonkers, New York, June 16, 2003.
48. See Daniel Cohen, “Remembering Post-War Displaced Persons: From Omission to Resurrection,” in Enlarging European Memory: Migration Movements in Historical Perspective, ed. Mareike König and Rainer Ohliger (Ostfildern: Thorbecke Verlag, 2006), 87–97.
49. On the impact of the Jewish Holocaust experience on notions of human rights and the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see for example the journal Commentary from1945 to 1950 and Contemporary Jewish Record 8 (1945): 207–9. For analysis of these debates and the role of Jewish public intellectuals in them, see especially Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 104–48. See also Daniel Cohen, “The ‘Human Rights Revolution’ at Work: Displaced Persons in Post-War Europe,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and his new book, Europe’s Displaced Persons: Refugees in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); also Rainer Huhle, “‘Jewish Rights are Human Rights’: Jewish Contributions and Controversies in the International Establishment of Human Rights after 1945,” in Human Rights and History: A Challenge for Education, ed. Rainer Huhle (Berlin: Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, 2010), 37–49; on claims to food see Weinreb, “Matters of Taste.”
50. See the astute discussion of rights versus duties and the universal versus the particular in Kenneth Cmiel, “Review Essay: The Recent History of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 117–35.
51. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1958), 269. As Mark Mazower pointed out in his “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47 (2004): 379–98, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights actually represented a weakening of international enforcement authority compared to the post–World War I League of Nations system of collective minority rights, but this shift to declaration without enforcement was probably the necessary price of both U.S. and Soviet support for passage.
52. See for example, Dr. Birgit Toebes, “Human Rights, Health, and Nutrition,” Abraham Horwitz lecture, ACC-SCN Monitor, no. 18 (1999).
53. On Zionism and the DPs, see especially the fine account by Zeev Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For an interesting analysis of the possible benefits of statelessness for efforts by both Jewish and non-Jewish DPs to claim political and cultural space and gain political agency in occupied Germany, see Anna Marta Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).