Berlin

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.”