Social Science Research Council

"Nourishing Socialism: Food, Bodies, and the Building of a National Identity in Early Cold War East Germany"

My research explores the ways in which food was woven into the construction of national identity in Cold War Germany, with a focus on the GDR. I am interested in the ways in which these governments used discourses of food preparation and consumption to redefine notions of private and public spheres, and of individual and collective health.

During the first decades of the Cold War, both East and West Germany were engaged in complicated process of identity construction. In the wake of the Holocaust, the devastating military defeat and the division of the nation into two self-contained and ideologically opposed lands, the two Germanys redefined themselves both in reference to the (Nazi) past and to their ‘other half.’ In the GDR, this process was implicated in the explicit attempt to formulate a new model of appropriate consumption and production, something, I argue, bound to the issue of food management. West Germany as well developed a new model of a sexualized consuming, rather than producing, housewife, who prepares food for her family more by shopping than by cooking. A major archive for this project will be the German Institute for Nourishment Research (DIFE), which organized all policy related to food in the GDR, including work-place meals, the production (margarine versus butter) and distribution of specific food items, prices and display of consumer goods in stores and debates over the relationship between diet and health. State-published cookbooks redefined a national cuisine within the framework of a community of “socialist friendship lands,” while museums developed exhibits teaching about “good” and “bad” obesity.

Although the ideological centrality of food to socialism, unlike in capitalism, makes such sources far easier to find in the East, I hope to be able to balance a comparative framework in answering these questions. By exploring the ways in which the two Germanys self-consciously connected the eating habits of their populations with the nation’s development, my work hopes to better understand how individual bodies are tied to the process of nation-making, and the particular significance of food to socialism, to capitalism and to modern Germany.