Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949

Abstract

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”