Category Archives: Hunger

Eavesdropping

02 Friday May 2014

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I was working on my book at a café-bakery the other day and eavesdropped on a short conversation.

A man who looked to be in his late 70s had just paid for a loaf of bread. The cashier asked him if he had a Brotkarte (bread card). The old man seemed confused. “That’s all over with.”

“Pardon?”

“We haven’t had bread cards since after the war.” The man left with his bread.

The cashier, who was maybe my age, noticed me, and rolled her eyes as if to say, “What was that old fogey going on about?” A modern bread card is just a credit card-sized paper that gets stamped every time you buy a loaf of bread at a certain bakery. After 10 stamps, you get a free loaf. This is good. Germans bake some of the best bread I’ve ever had.

The cashier didn’t know, or didn’t care to remember, that a bread card used to be the ration stamps families were forced to use during and after World War 2. Depending on how old the man really was, he spent part or all of his childhood hungry. A bread card was immensely important to his survival. If ration cards were lost, they couldn’t be replaced.

No wonder when he heard the word Brotkarte, he thought of something that hasn’t existed in Germany in almost 70 years.

When pigs eat better than children

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Do hard times bring a people together?

They can. But in postwar Germany, in many instances, they didn’t. Especially in the hunger winter of 1946-47.

Hunger drove the people living in the ruined cities out into the countryside. They 414px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S80285,_Bahnhof_Gorgast,_'Hamsterfahrt'traded anything they could spare for food. The “hamsters” from the industrial Ruhr area clogged trains heading north to the farms in Lower Saxony, or south to the Eifel region. In backpacks and suitcases, they carried their crystal and porcelain, their damask table cloths and silver mirrors.

When the hamsters arrived in the countryside, they went on a humiliating round of the farms – begging to trade. The problem: the farmers had everything already.

Back then, Thea Merkelbach was 8 years old. Her anecdote in the book Hungerwinter sticks in my mind as a sign of how cruel people can be to others – without realizing it.

Once my mother asked for a little milk from a farmer who had 10 cows. The farmer’s wife was baking. The cookies were too dark and hard to her, so she wanted to toss them to the pigs. My mother asked for a few: ‘Give me a few before the pigs get some!’ The farmer’s wife did. She wouldn’t have thought of it herself.

In another anecdote, a boy who was 11 years old at the time told how a farmer tossed potato peels onto a dung heap for the children to eat.

From the farmers’ perspective, the hamsters from the city were a plague. Wolfgang Herchner said in Hungerwinter:

The hamsters overran the land like locusts… They stole from the farmers, sometimes in a massive way! Some fields were half dug up because cabbage or carrots had been planted there.

Even farmers who sincerely wanted to help the hungry couldn’t give to even a fraction of the people flowing in from the cities. There simply wasn’t that much to go around.

And maybe after the Nazis trumpeted the Volksgemeinschaft (a unified community of the German people) for years, some people had enough of sacrificing for others. In postwar Germany, it was every man for himself.

*Photo:Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S80285 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Hunger Winter

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

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In 1946/1947, Germany — and much of Europe — experienced one of the hardest winters in memory. It came to be called the Hungerwinter in German.

Life in the ruins became nearly unbearable for many. Especially in the Ruhr area where I’ve done most of my research, the food situation was catastrophic. Record low temperatures froze the waterways so that ships with perishable foods imported from abroad were trapped in the harbors. A bad harvest meant less fresh food sent from the agricultural parts of Germany to the cities. In Essen, it’s said the actual ration people received amounted to just over 700 calories a day per person.

A coal shortage, due only in part to the coal exported by the Allies from the Ruhr region, meant people had trouble heating their homes. The “White Death,” as the Germans called it, took its victims. How many people died as a result of hunger, cold and illness in this period isn’t clear. Some historians estimate hundreds of thousands.

German public television produced an interesting docu-drama on this, so interesting to me that I bought the book based on the show. Hungerwinter: Überleben nach dem Krieg links the fate of several different families over that winter.