Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914–1924 by Mary E. Cox (review)

On August 4, 1914, the British government declared war against Germany and initiated a naval blockade that it continued to enforce, with French support, until July 12, 1919. This blockade—its legality, its enforcement, and its impact—is the focus of Mary E. Cox's new book Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914–1924. Cox has two primary goals in this impressively researched and lucidly written study. The first is to assess how deeply the blockade impacted "the nutritional well-being of German civilians" (12). The second is to "put a human face" on statistical data detailing deprivation (367).

Cox uses both quantitative and qualitative sources to document the blockade's nutritional and social impact. One key resource is anthropometric data. "Prior to the war," she explains, "Germany was a center for studies of human physiology, childhood growth, and nutritional studies . . . anthropometric measurements of growing children had, before the war, become a national craze" (51). Cox makes use of multiple height and weight studies conducted before, during, and after the war, many by German doctors and teachers, some by international aid organizations, to investigate food conditions in wartime and postwar Germany, year by year, and to determine if and how much wealth, gender, and location determined nutritional deprivation. She persuasively argues that socioeconomic inequalities translated into unequal access to food. Wealthier Germans could turn to the black market or partake in "hamstering" to overcome food shortages (83); poorer Germans had fewer options. Using data collected in Leipzig, she argues that, while not every German starved, a significant number, as many as one in seven, did "suff[er] extraordinary nutritional deprivation" (113, 132). Her research also reveals that, among urban populations, it "was women of childbearing age, particularly mothers, who took the biggest hit" and that rural populations perhaps had a "slight" advantage in accessing food (133, 168). But not everyone confronted hunger at the same time. Using contemporary studies of German children, the author explains that "each class reached its nadir in sequence: the working class in 1918, the middle class in 1919, and the upper class in 1920" (198). Cox also uses several qualitative sources, including reports, newspaper articles, letters, and diaries, to examine civilians' perceptions of "wartime conditions in Germany" (14).

The author frames this study of the blockade and its impacts broadly. Chapter 1 examines the blockade—its questionable legality, its scope, and its duration. Cox notes that Britain opted to impose a "distant" rather than a "close" blockade, a decision that proved to be consequential for neutral nations and German food supplies. Chapter 2 details the German government's mostly failed responses to food scarcity. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, respectively, use several anthropometric studies to investigate malnourishment among urban populations, rural populations, and children. Chapter 6 examines the Allies' decision to not only continue the blockade until July 1919, but also to prevent Germans from fishing in the "oceans surrounding them" (216). Chapter 7 details nutritional deprivation in Germany between November 1918 and July 1919. Chapters 8 and 9 document the efforts of international aid societies to feed German children and children's responses to food aid.

Hunger in War and Peace makes contributions to several scholarly fields. The author's analysis of the blockade's legality and implementation adds depth to a topic most texts quickly pass over. Her analysis of postwar negotiations, meanwhile, takes on assertions that German intransigence partly explains the continued blockade. "Foot dragging" by both the Allies and Germans, she argues, played a role (214). The book's documentation of Germans' dwindling access to food, year by year, using the anthropometric data, adds substantively to a rich body of scholarship detailing social conditions in wartime Germany. Moreover, by placing children's nutrition at the center of her study and actively including their perspective, the book makes important contributions to the field of childhood studies...