‘Light the Candles and Lay the Table’: A Study of Middle-class German Jewish Women’s Relationship with Food during the Prewar, Wartime and Postwar Eras

This thesis considers the place of food in middle-class German Jewish women’s lives during the prewar, wartime and postwar periods, analysing prewar lives; emigration; ghettosiation; concentration camps; hiding spaces and liberation all through the prism of food. Food, or lack of, is a recurring motif in Holocaust testimonies but the specific encounter and meaning of hunger and starvation – experiences impacted by categories such as class, gender and nationality – has rarely entered into dialogue with either food history or Holocaust studies. As such, the thesis tackles an aspect of the Holocaust that is widely identified but inadequately researched. Furthermore, while the Holocaust was a period of intense food paucity, it also generated mass migrations to lands of unfamiliar foodways and other survival responses, like hiding. Subsequently, each period under investigation presented different challenges and interactions with food, demanding that women find new ways to acquire food, conceptualise edibility and abate hunger. The demographic of focus – middle-class German Jewish women – are understood to have led social, economic and cultural lives aligned with the wider German bourgeoisie, in addition to conferring on men the public world and women the domain of the home. While the thesis follows such assessments, it also addresses the nuances to women’s consumption experiences by using food as a lens to spotlight their class-centred and gendered realities. Using a source base comprised predominantly of memoirs and oral testimonies, in addition to contemporary documents like diaries and, when necessary, material from public discourse, the thesis makes sense of food’s place in women’s accounts and lives. It does so by drawing on socio-cultural anthropological concepts proposed by theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas and David Sutton. The thesis explicates the analytical value of using food to map German Jewish women’s multifaceted identities; encounters with class and losing status; memory processes and their gendered experiences of this epoch.