“German Women! England has also declared war on you. She is trying to starve out you and yours by blockading imported foodstuffs. Therefore, to arms! The life and death of the Fatherland now hang no less on you, your loyal will, and your crafts and skills than they hang on victory out there in the battlefield.”[1]

With these rousing words, the Wiesbaden Municipal Commission for National Nutrition set out to mobilize German women – mothers, daughters, and wives – for war. Unlike their compatriots, however, they were not being drafted into military service nor even enlisted into the munitions factories which have come to symbolize for many the main war-time contributions of women. Rather, these women were being mobilized for duty within their own private homes. In 1915 the Great War entered the kitchen and as the nation’s men settled into the trench warfare which has become so emblematic of this conflict, German women began their own war of attrition – against privation, hunger, and the nutritional economy of food in Europe’s first “total war”.

This paper examines how German authorities sought to manage the health and behavior of civilians during World War I. Given the severity of the Allied blockade, food—its procurement, management, preparation, storage, and distribution—became an overwhelming concern not just among civilians, but also within the upper echelons of the German military. Not only did they fear how food shortages on the homefront might impact morale, politics, and support for war, but they also worried about the material consequences of poor nutrition on the bodies of the nation’s citizens. Through an analysis of war-time cookbooks, medical studies conducted by nutritional scientists, and information from the War Foods Office on food production and rationing, this research reveals how different communities of knowledge-experts mobilized German women on the home front for war-time aims. Ultimately then, this paper exposes how the management of food in war-time Germany enabled the imperial government to penetrate and even re-shape that most private sphere of the nation—the home, the family, the kitchen, and the body.

[1] Städtischer Kommission für Volksernährung, Anleitung zum Wirtschaften in der Kriegszeit, zugleich ein Kriegs-Kochbuch (Wiesbaden: Heinrich Staadt, 1915), 3.