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Spanning World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Modern Hungers shows how food and hunger have been central to economic policy, political identity, and everyday life in modern Germany. It historicizes contemporary issues ranging from the obesity epidemic to the gender-wage gap to famine relief.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Modern Hungers in Modern Germany
- 1. The Geopolitics of Total War: Food in the First World War
- 2. Blood and Soil: The Food Economy and the Nazi Racial State
- 3. Hunger and the Remaking of History: Rationing, Suffering, and Human
- Rights in Occupied Germany
- 4. Fueling Reconstruction: Production and Consumption in Divided Germany
- 5. Kitchen Debates: The Family Meal and Female Labor in East and West
- Germany
- 6. Fighting Fat: Obesity and the Healthy Body in the Late Cold War
- Epilogue Yes, We Have No Bananas: Negotiating Past and Future in Reunified Germany
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Alice Weinreb is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.
Summary
Spanning World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Modern Hungers shows how food and hunger have been central to economic policy, political identity, and everyday life in modern Germany. It historicizes contemporary issues ranging from the obesity epidemic to the gender-wage gap to famine relief.
Additional text
Modern Hungers contributes to a growing trend in German historiography of bridging rather than assuming (or even highlighting) ruptures of state and society in the twentieth century. Indeed, central to Weinreb's argument is that the particular pressures of the two world wars, the depression, dictatorship, and the cold war critically informed the trajectory of the modern politics of food...Modern Hungers offers a readable, teachable, and accessible master class in biopolitical analysis of modern statecraft. The politics of starving bodies, raced bodies, gendered bodies, and fat bodies in the twentieth century is not a story unique to Germany; it is rather an ongoing story to this day...Interdisciplinary scholars of food, hunger, and satiety in almost every context would do well to take note of this important book and consider its applications for their own fields of study.
