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The United States

Decent Essays

Chapter 6 narrates the popular demand for a militarized “food dictatorship,” and the state leaders’ response to it. The poor Berliners challenged the market economy and believed that only a total militarized control of food distribution could serve their needs. Seeing the slow response of the authorities, the starving population found that the government failed to make their promise to reward their patriotism in the war. A byproduct at this time was anti-Semitism, separating “true Germans” from “the Jew” that were associated with profiteering (132-135). This chapter contends that the women of lesser means perceived the state’s capacity for controlling food distribution as a criterion to “adjudicate the government’s success or failure” (115). Consequently, the WWI Germany was not fully oriented to the military need and political loyalty, but full of dynamic altercation (115).
Chapter 7 describes two approaches that the Berlin authority adopted to impose its total control over food ------public kitchens and factory canteens. Unfortunately, they were not uniformly welcomed by its potential clients. The working class demanded more public kitchens, but the lower middle class and some of the working class rejected it for fear that eating in mass dining halls contradicted their bourgeois ideology and family value (140-142). The factory kitchen provided an alternative to feeding the ammunition plant workers, but it alienated them from workers from other jobs and lower middle class

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