Rationed Life

Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918

Rudolf Kučera

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331299
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: World War I

Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres—food, labor, gender, and protest—that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

Chapter 1

Rationed Satiety: The Politics of Food

“In this war one thing would delight me,
O Dumpling, thy breadcrumbs enslave me!
I dream of thee, Dumpling dear, nightly,
Floating in meat sauce and gravy”

— Karl Kraus, Die letzen Tage der Menschheit¹

An Unexpected Visit

The afternoon of Monday, November 29, 1916 began just like any other in the villa of textile factory owner Ludvík Jelínek in the Prague neighborhood of Libeň. Jelínek stayed home after breakfast and was likely working while his wife was overseeing the preparation of lunch. His maid lit a fire in the stove and placed two raw goose thighs and half a kilogram of lard on the table, which was to be the basis of the day’s lunch. But just before she could place the thighs into a hot roasting pan, the idyllic afternoon was disrupted by an urgent knock on the door. Before anyone in the family could react, the quiet Monday suddenly turned into a nightmare. Policemen burst into the villa and without hesitation went straight into the kitchen. Everything happened so quickly that nobody in the family or any of the servants could put up any resistance. The two goose thighs, the roasting pan and the melted lard were seized as evidence,² and Ludvík Jelínek was served with a summons to the local police station, where he was requested to give a statement regarding the misdemeanor charge of violating the imperial decrees no. 218/1916 from July 14, 1916 and no. 285/1916 from September 1, 1916 on meatless days. Both of these decrees forbade the sale and consumption of meat and meat products on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This applied to butcher shops, restaurants and public kitchens as well as to individual households.³ The punishment for violation was a fine of up to 5,000 crowns or imprisonment for up to half a year.⁴

Due to the small amount of meat seized and its private usage, the Prague municipal office punished Jelínek’s forbidden lunch with a fine of 500 crowns. Ludvík Jelínek, however, fought back. Through his attorney, Richard Singer, he filed a suit against the municipal office’s sentence with the administrative court, in which he demanded a revision of the fine. Singer argued that Jelínek did in fact violate the decree, but that the forbidden act of consuming meat at the time of the police raid was merely attempted, for the goose thighs, as the official report states, were lying on the table and had not yet been eaten. Furthermore, according to Singer, the evidence could not prove that Jelínek had not intended to eat both goose thighs on the following day, when consuming meat was permissible by law. The fine should therefore either be rescinded or, at the very least, reduced.

Unfortunately for Jelínek, however, the court did not agree with this legal argument. Although the goose thighs were not yet eaten at the time of the police raid, the judge deemed the fact that the hot roasting pan was greased with lard irrefutable proof that, were it not for the timely intervention of the police, meat consumption would certainly have taken place. Also, the use of lard for cooking was the legal basis for the fine, for according to the judge the consumption of meat or meat products was not understood merely as the act of eating, but also of their further usage in the preparation of meals.⁵

In June 1917, the court upheld Jelínek’s fine. The famous Prague glove and fur manufacturer, however, continued to see 500 crowns as a rather inflated price to pay for two goose thighs, especially when they had been seized by the relevant authorities. Despite the court’s decision, he stubbornly refused to pay the fine even after many reminders, giving in only when the Prague municipal office handed down an order of repossession.⁶

A week after the unpleasant visit to Jelínek’s Libeň villa on that Monday morning, another impatient knock was heard, this time at the doors of the Prague apartments where the workers František Žižka and František Chlupatý lived. Both spent Monday morning at work and so the act of standing by during a humiliating police raid was left to their wives, in Anna Žižková’s case accompanied by the incessant crying of two small and hungry children. Here, too, sufficient incriminating evidence was collected. Roughly 60 grams of beef, which Žofie Chlupatá was warming up for lunch, was convincing enough proof for the police, along with the roughly 125 grams of horse meat that Anna Žižková was preparing for her family. The meat and its juices and sauce were seized, and both women were summoned to give their statements.⁷

Žofie Chlupatá defended herself by citing her abject poverty, which official Prague reports confirmed. With a husband working as an assistant galvanizer, they could not afford to get anything more to eat than what their extended family could provide for them due to the rising prices of all necessities. The seized meat had been brought by her sister the day before the police inspection, while the roughly 60 grams of evidence was, according to the official statement, “hard and of a bad quality.”⁸

As a mother of two children, Anna Žižková received government alimentary benefits, but even her family’s situation did not allow for much luxury. The 125 grams of horse meat confiscated during the morning inspection was supposed to feed her, her husband, who was providing for his family by working as mechanical worker, and their two children until the next day, when the family was to receive more ration cards.⁹

None of the women could afford legal assistance, and their financial situation ruled out the possibility of imposing a fine. The only thing that the Prague municipal office could do in this case was to sentence them to jail. The length of the sentence is not mentioned in the sources, nor is the fate of the children of the Žižka family, who had nobody else to take care of them.

The Dream of the Perfect Fuel

The unfortunate episodes in the lives of the families of factory-owner Jelínek and the workers Chlupatý and Žižka show just how significant the regulation of food consumption was in the everyday life of the Habsburg Monarchy during World War I. With no regard to differences in social standing and status, three families were subjected to the same harsh disciplinary regime under conditions of dwindling resources. The merciless system of control—in this case the control of meat consumption—did not stop at the doors of private apartments and houses, thus perfectly illustrating the new, state-regulated social order that had emerged in August 1914.¹⁰

As the war continued, worsening food shortages began to dominate life in the monarchy, eventually paralyzing the whole war effort. This chapter will focus on this aspect, that is, on the questions connected with obtaining and consuming basic foods, which greatly influenced everyday life in the Bohemian lands. The first part analyzes the changing relationship between the consumption of food and manual labor. The focus will be on natural science discourse, which largely determined the understanding of the nature of food and how its consumption could contribute to defeating the enemy. This discourse also prescribed how the food requirements of individual social groups were to be satisfied during the war years. The second part examines the influence of this discourse on the wartime “politics of food,”¹¹ that is, the public articulation and satisfaction of (or overlooking of) demands for certain foods, and the influence of these politics on the transformation of the working class. It was precisely the politics of food that upset the prewar social divisions and caused both the establishment and subsequent disintegration of the wartime social order. And, as the urban industrial working class was the most affected by the changed socio-economic transformations of the wartime state, it played a central role in the final collapse of the monarchy in the fall of 1918.

In order to understand the relationship between nutrition and wartime industrial production it is necessary to look back to the prewar decades. Prior to 1914, the biblical adage “he who does not work may not eat”¹² underpinned the liberal economic order in most of industrialized Europe. The more or less unrestricted market oversaw food production and distribution, particularly in urban centers, and access to food was thus tied to the salaries earned through paid work. On the other hand, the nexus between work and nutrition underwent a dynamic change during the second half of the nineteenth century, resulting in a totally new conceptual framework that would eventually determine everyday wartime reality in the Bohemian lands.

The sea change in understanding what manual labor actually was occurred in the years 1847 and 1865, when Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolf Clausius published the first two laws of thermodynamics about wireless energy transfer in isolated systems and loss of energy (entropy) occurring whenever energy is transferred from a warmer object to a colder one.¹³ Together, these discoveries created the basic conceptual framework that structured thinking about human labor in the second half of the nineteenth century. The principle of energy transfer and the possibility of conserving or losing energy meant that labor was conceived as a process of energy transformation: input energy was transformed into labor output. Labor thus ceased to be imagined in categories of Christian morality and was integrated into the discourse of modern physics. It became an objectively defined quantity measurable in precisely determined units—joules.¹⁴ The word “labor” in the second half of the nineteenth century thus became a general term, first in German and French and later in other languages, denoting any creative activity that entailed the output of energy regardless of whether this energy was expended by inanimate machines or living humans.¹⁵

This blending of human and machine labor created a new language to describe the workings of the human body. While the understanding of bodily functions until the mid nineteenth century was based on the dominant metaphor of the human body as a mechanical machine, by the end of the nineteenth century the new thermodynamic discoveries of von Helmholtz and Clausius brought about a gradual change in the ideas about what the human body really was and how it worked. The research on the human body and how it functions when it receives and transforms energy amassed evidence that the human body, unlike the classic mechanical manual drive machines, is active even when it is not working, because even in an idle state it releases an appreciable amount of thermal energy. Thus, instead of the dominant metaphor of the human body as a mechanical machine, the conception of the human body as a modern motor—a motor driven by various fuels—slowly gained ground. Like the human body, such motors release energy even in an idle state, i.e., on standby, when not engaged in any work.¹⁶ In the second half of the nineteenth century, practically all of industrial Europe was using a new scientific language of labor that did not differentiate between human labor and the labor of the newly installed gasoline or electric motors. At the end of the nineteenth century, the human body was no longer seen in the imaginations of physiologists, biologists, biomechanics, or diet specialists as an analogy of the industrial motor, but as one of its types. As one of the founders of modern physiology, Carl Ludwig, said: “The steam engine has done a greater service to our science than to any other.”¹⁷

Right before the start of World War I, this new paradigm of the natural sciences was rooted in a hybridization of mechanical machines and human bodies that scientific language could no longer separate in many cases.¹⁸ Synthetically, this defining framework for understanding the human body was summarized by probably the most prominent representative of continental biomechanics, the Parisian professor Jules Amar. His book symptomatically titled The Human Motor and the Scientific Foundations of Labor quickly became a classic in the field and the basic compendium of scientific research on industrial labor. Amar argued that just like gasoline or electrical motors, the human motor is also subject to...