Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (review)

Davis makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of World War I in her new book on the effects of economic warfare in wartime Berlin. Her thoughtfully argued and solidly researched work reveals the significance of both nonmilitary aspects of the war and of World War I as a new kind of total war. She demonstrates how carefully the government responded to the actions of wartime, predominantly female, consumers and how their demands shaped wartime policies and postwar politics. The political and social significance of women as consumers emerges as one of the most important aspects of this book. As de facto heads of households, women consumers in wartime Berlin stood between their families and starvation, and became mediators between the populace and the state.

Home Fires Burning is a combination of political, social, and cultural history. Using police reports about the activities of civilians and newspaper coverage of wartime Berlin as major sources, Davis reconstructs not only riots and other public responses to the shortage and cost of foodstuffs but also the ways in which the government shifted gears, trying to meet popular demands rather than merely suppressing them. She documents the growing political importance, as conditions worsened, of "women of lesser means" as emblematic "front soldiers" in the economic war. In addition, Davis provides an overview of society in wartime Berlin, carefully noting, for instance, the fluidity of class because of war-induced poverty and the resulting anxiety over the breakdown of distinctions between the lower-middle and working classes.

Davis also pays fascinating attention to the cultural meaning of food in Berlin. She points out that "the pleasure of good taste and flavor, or what was constituted as such, was tightly imbricated with notions of sharing in Germanness" across class lines (29). Davis then demonstrates the ways in which such foods as rolls, butter, or potatoes had a cultural significance, serving as markers of regional or class identity, that mattered as much as their caloric value. Thus, she deftly illustrates the signicance of food shortages well before the infamous "Turnip Winter." Far in advance of this threatening depletion of calories, Berliners felt deprived literally of "comfort" food.

Davis provides a wealth of detail that may overwhelm those unfamiliar with German history or the history of World War I. Nonetheless, for anyone interested in the history of modern Germany, twentieth-century wars, or modern European women, this book has much to offer.