The first thing you are likely seeing here is a recipe. I try to translate one recipe from a historical source every day, and here is where I post them. When I have time to experiment, I also post reports on actually trying out the dishes or short articles on other historical questions I find interesting. But mostly, it is recipes. I hope you enjoy them.
Big building projects in the countryside tend to make a lot of people unhappy, but archeologists love them. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany saw an enormous amount of infrastructure development, and in the process, excavations and unrelated discoveries completely upended the traditional view of Bronze Age Central Europe. Much of the story around these finds is speculative, but it has become much more solid lately. It is a tale of power and its abuse, pride before the fall, gold, amber, armies, and some legitimately humongous millstones.
The most famous object in this story was not discovered in excavations, but by grave robbers: the Nebra sky disc. This bronze and gold disc, about the size of a dinner plate, shows sun, moon, and stars and has been convincingly interpreted as depicting a formula for reconciling solar and lunar calendars. It was this that drew tourists, funding, and global attention, but many of the other things coming to light put together an even more intriguing picture.
We have, by definition, no written records of prehistory, so our terminology is fuzzy and unwieldy. The area of East Central Germany in the Middle Bronze Age was part of what we call the Unetice culture (in German: Aunjetitzer Kultur). Its settlements and cemeteries are tracked by a specific kind of handled cup, presumably a drinking vessel. The people farmed and raised cattle, pigs, and sheep, lived in wooden longhouses and seem to have been led by local chieftains. It was a warlike society, at least in appearances (The modern United States is an example of a relatively peaceful society that still values weapons as markers of masculinity, and so may these people have for all we know). Men were buried with bronze weapons, chieftains in richly appointed graves, and settlements were fortified with palisades.
Except that sometimes, they weren’t. About 1800 BCE, in exactly the area where the sky disc was buried, the chieftain and warrior graves stop. Instead, we find a seriesof trulygigantic individualburial mounds. The men in them – kings, in all likelihood – were given rich sets of gold jewelry and decorated bronze weapons, more than previous chiefs had, and no doubt the burial chambers had been richly furnishedl with perishable wealth as well. Settlements without fortifications show up, and so does a strange kind of longhouse without stables.
While weapons no longer show up in graves, there are several hoards of bronze axes that are absolutelyfascinating. They are largely identical, made around the same time, some show signs of wear, and they were buried together with a smaller number of daggers and dagger-axes. At least one of these hoards is associated with one of the stable-less halls, and archeologists now interpret them as military equipment. The dagger-axes indicated leaders, the axeheads regular troops, and the halls, at least part of the time, probably served as their accommodation. Without written sources, scholars are reticent to call it an army, but it really looks a lot like one.
Part of an axe hoard now on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin, courtesy of wikimedia commons
This is also where another of the strange things showing up in the archeological record becomes interesting: the grindstones. In various places, but notably as part of the enormous burial mound called the Bornhöck, grindstones for grain were found. They basically looked the same as they had since the beginning of agriculture: a large, flat stone underneath, a smaller rider moved back and forth on top, and small, round hammerstones to periodically roughen the surface. There were no rotary millstones yet, so this was how flour was produced, and similar tools, usually made of granite, were found in Unetice culture homes everywhere. People ground spelt and barley on them and baked it into bread.
But these were huge. They were far too large to serve a single household, so heavy that they were most likely worked by two persons, and they are clearly associated with the ruler. We can easily envision them used to feed an army, the workforce of the giant construction sites, retainers, and foreign guests. They may have been operated by captives or slaves – at least that was how they did things in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Along with bread, usually baked in the household, people ate meat, fish, legumes (probably not a lot), nuts, and fruit, but very prominently dairy products. Cattle was important as a source of traction and a measure of wealth, and along with the milk of sheep and goats, they provided the basis for what was probably mainly a domestic cheese production. Of course we have no recipes, just the evidence of pottery strainers, residue analysis, and an unbroken tradition of cottage cheese as far back as written records survive. Tacitus describes lac concretum as the food of the Germans in the first century CE, and throughout the middle ages, this kind of fresh cheese, often known as ziger, was a staple of everyday diet. Unfortunately, as with many basic foods, we do not have recipes surviving until very late. Everyone knew how to make the stuff, why write it down? In German, the first really good description comes from Anna Wecker in 1598:
Preparing the zueger
All zueger of plain milk, be it of sheep, goats or cows, are made as is written of the almond zueger before. And the scheidmolck (acidic whey) is best which you obtain from those who make cheese and churn butter, just as you can sometimes get the zueger from those people. But if not (if you cannot get it) and you must separate it with wine or vinegar, do not do too much so that it does not become sour. Vinegar also affects it harder than wine which is why you quickly add too much of it.
If you have made such a zueger or one as described after, pour the whey into a clean dish until it settles well. Pour off the clear (liquid) above into a pitcher or small pot that is new. Keep it in a place that is not too warm, well closed. When you wish to use it, remove the skin if it has formed one and pour of it into that (liquid) which you want to separate. It does not matter if the skin is grey or yellow, the (liquid) underneath stays good. You may salt it, that way it keeps all the better. It becomes like a vinegar. Always refill the pot again.
The process is described in more detail for almond milk which was a late medieval affectation:
… Hang it over the fire and stir it until it is just about to begin boiling. Then add a little rennet (Lab oder Renne) as though you would make another kind of cheese. Or add seydmilchen (acidic whey), or if you do not have that either, take wine or vinegar enough to make it curdle. … Let it curdle like a zueger or cheese and take it off the fire then.
Set it on a ring (a wooden coaster), sprinkle water all around it with your hand, and cover it with a white cloth as you do an egg zueger (hard custard). Take it up soon with a spoon that has many holes, into baskets or other moulds.
The variety is interesting and may go back a long way. Rennet, an enzyme from the stomachs of calves, would have been available to cattle-raising farmers, vinegar could well already have been in use, and the acidic bacterial cultures of the scheidmolck Wecker describes, like brewing yeast and sourdough, can be captured wild and continued in use. Quite possibly the people of the king under Bornhoeck already used all three, though they probably had no wine yet.
Bronze Age finds routinely include cooking pots and cheese strainers. The people knew how to make cheesecloth from nettle or linen fibre and presumably sieves from horsehair, and they had a tradition of centuries to draw on processing their milk, not least because they had to. Lactose intolerance was common in the population, so drinking fresh milk was not an option. Varying the temperature and treatment of the curds allowed for a lot of variation, from yoghurt-like spoonable dishes to firm feta- or peynir-like preparations to hard cheeses that in turn could be salted or air-dried, brined, smoked, or wrapped in leaves and aged. We cannot know (yet), but the Unetice people could easily have enjoyed a variety of fresh and mature cheeses flavoured with salt, herbs, and fruit with their bread and stew. A comparison of size and dental status shows that the people of Unetice culture on average were taller, better nourished, and had better teeth than their neolithic forebears.
Studying the skeleton found in the barrow of Helmsdorf showed that the elite enjoyed a very meat-rich diet, especially the meat of immature animals – lamb, veal, and kid. This suggests they preferred tender meat and likely roasted it. The same skeleton also revealed massive, lethal injuries from being stabbed at close range with a dagger. Traditions, it seems, run deep in both the culinary and the political sphere.
If this is indeed the first known tyrannicide in European history, the attempt was unsuccessful. The system was stable enough to continue after the death of one ruler, at least for some time. There were more rich graves with the same set of jewelry, more axehead hoards, more of the same. In detail, we know little about how this kingdom functioned. It is possible that the rulers’ power was based on spiritual or religious authority, possibly linked to the sky disc itself, but they might equally have been able to monopolise local copper mining, control the amber trade, export enslaved people, or simply led a particularly successful warband to military dominance. These things have happened in societies literate scholars labelled ‘primitive’, the most famous case being the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom which was observed by British officials and eventually turned into 1980s TV.
Gold artifacts from the Leubingen grave: garment pins, temple rings, a hair ornament, and an arm ring. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
However it came into being, this kingdom produced a notable amount of social stratification. A small number of exceptionally large and rich graves exist alongside many that are poorer in grave goods than those of other Unetice settlements. There is also an interesting pattern in the way copper and amber are distributed around it, suggesting it dominated and blocked exchange systems. To its north and west, copper and bronze did not appear in anything like similar quantity for centuries while amber becomes rare to its south and east. Perhaps controlling the supply was what made them rich, or perhaps the rulers simply claimed these goods for themselves. Either way, it would take some considerable time until new routes developed going around them to the east, bringing coveted amber south.
In the way archeology will – and in this case with some likelihood – the end of the ‘rulers of Nebra’ is linked to a natural disaster, in this case the aftermath of the eruption of Thera. At this point, the system was simply unstable enough to collapse in the way neighbouring chiefdoms did not. A study of the sky disc suggests that the astronomical knowledge encoded in it was either lost or became irrelevant. The disc was modified, first to include a stylised ship, then holes for mounting on some sort of display. It was too precious to ever have served a purely practical purpose, but towards the end, an artifact of celestial knowledge was turned into a mere symbol of power for its own sake. If it really was owned by the princes, this suggests nothing good about their rule.
The sky disc was buried with a set of objects looking remarkably like princely grave goods. It clearly was deliberate and may have been the final act of some power elite hoping to turn away divine wrath or lay to rest an era best forgotten. In the aftermath, the pattern familiar from nearby regions continues. We find weapons in graves again, chieftains buried with smaller amounts of jewelry, and metal goods in many more burials. Copper and bronze flowed northeast. No more gigantic barrows were raised.
That is all we know, and much of it could still be upended by a new excavation any day. Still, the story looks solid, and it raises the question how this felt to the people who lived through it. Did the people raising the Bornhöck hill feel proud to contribute, or were they forced into corvée labour by axe-bearing thugs? Were farmers grateful for the safety of unfortified villages, or feel defenceless in the face of royal exactions? Clearly, though this power structure outlasted its founders, it was not embraced as a cosmic necessity by its subjects. They did not choose a new king after they were rid of the old one. Perhaps this state had less to offer them than other Bronze Age polities, or just leakier borders that allowed the discontent to simply leave and set up elsewhere. Or perhaps, they actually decided to take matters into their own hands and remove their useless prince, just as it seems other subjects did around this time. We have not found the palace of the ‘Nebra rulers’ and cannot say whether it decayed back into the soil or perished in a blaze. If we ever find it, it could be fascinating indeed.
As it is, the legacy of this vanishing kingdom stands as a warning, or encouraging, example. We can easily envision how, having built up control on the strength of genuine abilities, offering their subjects identification and probably some real benefit, a dynasty of rulers increasingly embraced their power as a given. Their grave goods, though functionally the same – a set of weapons, arm rings, and elaborate pins suggesting a traditional royal garment – the amount of gold used rose from extravagant to genuinely staggering. There is, by the way, every reason to believe they knew, at least through second-hand accounts, of Mycenean Greece, Minoan Crete, the Hittites, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. When excavators their barrows ‘northern pyramids’, they may have been more accurate than they imagined. A king trying to copy the example of New Kingdom pharaohs, or even the more modest Mycenean tumuli, could well have made himself thoroughly unpopular. If you want to run a state for your personal benefit – and who wouldn’t? – it is important to give your subjects something valuable in return. Otherwise, they might just decide a king is not worth the bother and expense.
From 23 to 25 August of 1791, the city of Hamburg was filled with songs and old-world pageantry. Processions of journeymen paraded through the streets to music, waving flags and green boughs. The Honourable Council was terrified.
Just a few days before, a trivial altercation had started in a locksmith’s workshop over the way the master favoured one journeyman over the others. The man in question was betrothed to the master’s daughter, so jealousy probably played a role here. The men first called on the self-governing body of their guild to fine their colleague for shirking, but after he refused to accept the judgement, they decided that the unfair employer was at fault. He was declared geschimpft which meant no journeymen would work for him until the ban was revoked.
Things escalated rapidly from here. A few days later, the entirety of 80 journeymen locksmiths refused work until the sanction was honoured and the masters called on the council. With ill-considered heavy-handedness, the city government arrested three ringleaders and expelled the rest of the protesters from the city without their papers, tools, or even change of clothes.
These were not abject exploited wretches. Artisanal production in Hamburg, as in many other places in Europe, was controlled by the Ämter, the artisan guilds, who regulated every aspect of it. Entry was by apprenticeship and rigorous testing, and the number of workshops in a city was limited to reduce competition and ensure an adequate livelihood to all. This meant that most journeymen could never aspire to mastership unless they inherited or married into one. But they still were credentialed, skilled craftsmen with established rights and protections, earning easily twice as much as unguilded workers. These men had their pride, and they would not be pushed around. Hamburg’s journeymen took to the streets.
The atmosphere was almost festive as they brought out all the traditional flags, signs and tools of their brotherhoods. They also came with a good deal of pent-up anger. Hamburg was a rich city, by any reasonable measure an independent maritime republic, but it was also increasingly crowded with French refugees and Holstein peasants, suffering from rising food prices, sky-high rents, and depressed wages.
Journeymen had been able to support families on their pay, rent rooms, and eat well. Their estate did not usually reach to the famous Hamburg beef – a dish of cold-smoked salt meat often erroneously linked to the history of the hamburger – but they could expect a respectable diet of bread, meat, and a variety of vegetables as well as occasional treats like the famous Braune Kuchen or Hamburg Klöben.
Klöben was nothing special – a kind of enriched bread with dried fruit, sugar butter, milk, and spices in the same family as the more famous Stollen. It was not tied to Christmas, but eaten on festive occasions, often served with tea of coffee, and we can well imagine the exuberant strikers of 1791 eating it as they marched through the streets. We do not have a recipe from the 1790s, but the Hamburgisches Kochbuch of 1830 preserves one:
IX No. 88: To bake good Klöben
Take 10 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of butter, half a Loth of cinnamon, half a pound of currants, a quarter pound of sugar, 1 cup of syrup, 2 cups of large raisins, 4 beer glasses of warm milk, 2 glasses of yeast, and prepare it as Hannoverschen Kuchen. From this dough, you can prepare 5 Klöben, brush them with egg yolk, and bake them in an oven.
Helpfully, it also explains the reference:
IX No 106: Hannoverscher Butter Cake
Take two pounds of good wheat flour, a quarter pound of ground sugar, cardamom, three egg yolks, and grated lemon peel in an earthen bowl. Lay one pound of butter and a little salt in the centre of the flour and pour on a large beer glass full of warm milk and a little less warm white beer yeast. Stir it all well together and if the dough is not soft enough, add a little more warm milk. When all is stirred well and the dough detaches from the bowl, work them thoroughly with your hands on a table and roll it out as evenly as the sheet on which it is meant to be baked. …
I have made this and can attest that it is quite good as described here. Sugar syrup, something like molasses, was an inexpensive byproduct of sugar refining, a major industry in Hamburg, and cinnamon and currants would also have been on hand at reasonable prices. The recipe produces a dense, firm loaf that can be sliced more easily than broken and is excellent dipped in hot tea or spread with extra butter. It is well suited to sharing with comrades and can be carried wherever it is needed. Bakers in the city made it regularly.
We do not know for sure what the journeymen ate on their excursions, not what they thought they were doing, other than standing up for their unjustly mistreated comrades. All our records come from the side of the Honourable Council and the good citizens of Hamburg, and they were deeply concerned. These were not arch-reactionaries. Hamburg was, after all, a republic that abhorred hereditary aristocracy to the extent it forbade any nobleman from obtaining citizenship and any citizen from accepting ennoblement. Many of its leading men were liberals. Just a year previously, they had raised a liberty tree and celebrated the success of the French Revolution! But, like many of the revolutionaries of Paris, they had little time for demands for equality, especially when they came from people on whose labour their comfort depended. Their version of liberty embraced a complex accretion of privilege and an absolute protection of property rights. Beyond lay chaos and destruction.
The thought of local sans-culottes horrified them, and as protest continued, labourers, sailors, and factory workers joined, armed with fenceposts and looking scary. If we can trust our accounts, many journeymen shared these reservations and the groups occasionally came to blows. They, after all, were here to defend their traditional rights, not those of some upstart sugar-refiner or smelly longshoreman. The council, probably wary of repeating the mistakes of Louis XVI, repented of their overreaction and agreed to allow the expelled men to return. At this point, though, things had already proceeded farther than they were willing to allow. Labourers – the great unwashed – were consorting with respectable journeymen, and the orderly parades of the previous days became noisier, more riotous assemblies. Paris provided a warning, and the large exile community could tell the tale. They called out the army.
Unlike France, Hamburg did not actually have a large army, but its soldiers, supplemented by the militia of wealthy citizens, made up in assertive brutality what they lacked in numbers. Numerous protesters were shot, three journeymen tailors killed, and a curfew imposed at gunpoint. The general strike ended with no further resistance.
Tellingly, the government did not feel like they had won. This was new territory for everyone, the thought that the working class could make common cause against the wealthy terrifying beyond what the fairly banal events warranted. They actually informed the expelled journeymen locksmiths that they were welcome to return to work and after they, understandably, refused, sent them their papers, personal effects, and additional travel money. The treatment of the injured and the funerals of the dead were paid for by the city fisc. It was the strangest “no hard feelings” gesture imaginable.
Of course nothing had really been resolved. The journeymen knew that the council was willing to meet protest with violence. The council felt sure they could not stand up to any repetition of this groundswell of anger. Prussia and Austria were convinced that French secret agents had orchestrated the whole thing and put pressure on the republic to crack down on its refugee population. Meanwhile, well-meaning reformers suggested that the traditional institutions of the guilds were to blame for leading good men astray and educating the artisans would heal the rifts in society.
Over the coming years, the government of Hamburg attempted valiantly, if vainly, to address the problems the protest had laid bare. An expanded effort to support paupers and educate their children for vocational careers, a school for apprentices, and an effort to uplift the lower classes from their deplorable habit of being poor all had some effect, but their most significant impact was providing us with a wealth of statistics on rents, food prices, wages, and the baffled question how anyone could possibly survive being working class. In the face of rising industrialisation, population pressure, and competition from unguilded labour, the journeymen of Hamburg were rapidly becoming proletarians.
We can only imagine what solution might have been attempted by the genuinely creative and well-meaning liberals on the council if the city had not been conquered by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. Over the coming decade, it saw a brief period as capital of the Département Bouches d’Elbe, wrenching liberalisation of its economy, a trade embargo, a brutal winter siege, and a long, slow recovery in the hungry years after 1816.
But it is equally intriguing to imagine what might have happened had the protesting journeymen decided to embrace the labourers who came to join them. In the end, they were ready to jealously defend their higher pay and job security, but twice starvation wage is still uncomfortably close to starvation. Joining hands, they might have been able to get more. Unity in strikes can open purses in the way appeals to customary right seldom does.
A friend of mine whose skill as a herbalist and craftsperson are deserving of their own channel, sent me a gem they discovered online. It is the 1910 manual on bowls and punches for field and exercise use in the German army (Bowlen und Pünsche für den Manöver- und Feldgebrauch der Deutschen Armee). Reading it is absolutely fascinating, and I will share a few choice bits with you to get away from the sombre tone of recent weeks.
It probably needs saying that this is not an official field manual. Most technical literature for the German military were produced by private publishers, and they took the opportunity that association afforded them to also produce books like this. Priced at three marks and sold strictly to officers only, it was intended to raise money for German troops in China and their dependents. Much of it is filled with repurposed filler text and doggerel, but about half the pages contain actual, useful recipes and instructions.
The recipes claim to be designed to combat two common health problems, namely chilblains and cirrhosis of the liver. Against the first, the authors recommend hot punch drinks in winter, against the second, chilled Bowle in summer. These thirst-quenching, refreshing mixed drinks were intended as an option to moderate alcohol intake which, reading what goes into them, is mind-boggling. It is not hard to believe that cirrhosis of the liver was a common health problem in the officer corps.
An example of a Bowle involves strawberries which makes it a seasonal drink:
Strawberry Bowle, second type:
One heaping plate of fresh strawberries (forest strawberries are preferred) are layered in a serving bowl with the requisite amount of pounded sugar and just barely covered with water. After the berries have been left to steep for a few hours, you add five or six bottles of light Rhenish or Moselle wine. Just before serving, one or two bottles of champagne (Sekt) may also be added. Care must be taken that the strawberries are placed in the drinking glasses undamaged so the drink keeps its appetising appearance.
Some of the recipes seem designed more for show than use, though some German troops saw service in the tropics and may actually have done this:
Pineapple Bowle, fifth type, for howitzer batteries
In the colonies or other places where pineapples can be had in sufficient quantity, you take off the top quarter of the fruit with one straight cut, carefully hollow out the fruit with a spoon, and smooth the top edge by removing the spines etc. Then you place a piece of ice inside the hollow, fill it up with cold champagne, and use the previously removed quarter with its green leaves as a lid to cover it. In order for this delicious cup not to fall over, use the empty casing of a field howitzer as a support.
For winter, we get hot, higher-proof mixtures like this:
Favourite Punch of King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg
(The recipe was obtained from the old king’s table setter)
One orange is peeled and squeezed out, two lemons have their zest rubbed off on sugar, a third is peeled very finely. the sugar, orange juice, and lemon zest are placed in a vessel and the juice of the three lemons squeezed into it. Also add one bottle of good white wine, three Schoppen (about 2.1 litres) of water and further sugar to taste. It is left for several hours in a well-covered bowl, then allowed to boil, but not strongly. Add a little more than one Schoppen (0.7 litres) of rum or arrack, but this must not be allowed to boil.
Along with those, there are a number of traditional mixed drinks, mostly based on wine. The recipes are a melange of the familiar, the weird, and the fashionably exotic, with pineapples being a special favourite. Many are sourced from named military units, some from foreign forces, and in a few cases, specific toasts or customs for drinking them are also recorded. One feels notably modern, an ancestor of the margarita:
Frozen Punch
Cut a pineapple in slices, add a kilogram of sugar moistened with water, pour on two bottles of Rhenish wine cover the terrine and leave it to stand for five to six hours. Then squeeze in the juice of two lemons, strain the liquid, mix it with one bottle of champagne (Champagner), fill the punch into an ice cream maker (Gefrierbüchse) and let it freeze while constantly turning and stirring. Meanwhile, add half a bottle of fine arrack or rum gradually, glass by glass, until the beverage is thick, but liquid.
As an aside, the word used for champagne here – Champagner – means the real thing from the Champagne region of France. In other recipes, the word Sekt can mean any kind of sparkling wine made by the champagne process.
Others are less immediately intuitive to modern drinkers. There is, for example, something for an artilleryman’s stomach:
Howitzer (Haubitze)
(Communicated by Field Artillery Regiment No. 58)
Stir four fresh egg yolks in a large Bowle glass with one (unit of) cognac and one curacao. Continue stirring and add half a bottle of champagne (Sekt) that is not too cold or too dry. Drink, and you will say “C’est une chose!”
And some things were just plain silly:
Pot às feu of the East African colonial troops (Schutztruppe)
(Communicated by the officers’ mess at Dar es Salaam)
In a large glass mug (Becherglas), add one shot glass of yellow chartreuse, a splash of angostura bitter, and one spoonful of crushed ice. After shaking it well, fill it to half full with any champagne (Sekt) you have. The moment you raise the glass to your lips, you add one teaspoon of fine powdered sugar, quickly stir it, and drink up before everything comes foaming out of the glass.
The final chapters are even more interesting. They record a number of recently imported “American Drinks”, namely cobblers, sours, and cocktails. If you are used to thinking of ‘Old Europe’ as a separate world, the opposite of America in every regard, this seems strange, but it really is not. America had a strong hold on the imagination of the German public in the early 1900s, and though it was in many ways considered strange and confusing, people were fascinated by its habits. At the same time, a Prussian officer, far from being seen as a relic of bygone glory, was seen as inhabiting the same pinnacle of modernity as a New York broker. It was perfectly natural to take an interest.
This is their version of Martini:
Martini-Cocktail
(use a large bar glass)
Fill the glass with finely crushed ice, add two or three splashes of sugar syrup, two or three splashes of angostura bitter, one splash of curacao, half a wine glass of Old Tom gin, and half a wine glass of vermouth. Stir it well with a mixing spoon and strain it into a cocktail glass. Press a piece of lemon peel into it and serve.
The main thing that strikes me personally is the extremely liberal use of ice in most summertime recipes – a habit that has sadly fallen out of favour in Germany today. The absence of soft drinks is no surprise, given the focus of the book. It is hard to imagine a teetotal Prussian officer. It means, though, that I am not going to try out any of the recipes. Perhaps someone else would like to.
If you believed the official line, East Berlin in 1953 was a relatively happy place. Governed by a benevolent party under a people’s democracy, its inhabitants were building a happier future for everyone from the ruins of war. The city was used to proletarians in the street marching under red banners, shouting in chorus, and displaying pride in their achievements. Still, the crowd of construction workers that assembled on the grand, newly built Stalinallee to march to their union headquarters and the seat of government were not what the Politbüro had in mind. They were angry, and for good reasons.
New buildings on Stalinallee in Berlin, May 1953, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Some revolts are large. but get little mention history books except maybe as a comedic anecdote. Others are small, but take on legendary status. What happened in East Germany in June of 1953 was big, and it was immediately seized on by both sides of the Cold War to make it fit their respective narratives. Much of this was created in West Germany, where a propaganda of official commemoration arose that quickly obscured what actually happened.
The story is by now well researched and too complex to recount in detail. What makes it interesting is that a chain of events that nearly toppled one of post-WWII Europe’s Communist dictatorships began in small, private frustrations building up to uncontainable anger. It was indeed a spontaneous uprising of, in the broadest sense, the working class.
Life in the newly founded German Democratic Republic was not easy for anyone. The destruction of World War II still crippled many areas of public life: food and clothing were rationed, electricity intermittent, and housing scarce. The government had just embarked on a drive to impose Soviet-style economic reforms on its citizenry which angered both the middle class who lost their farms or workshops to collectivisation and the workers who saw no improvement in their standard of living as a result. Hundreds of thousands left for West Germany, where living standards were higher and democracy more tangible. The government was worried by these developments and decided to address the loss of skilled labour by raising the required work quotas by 10%.
Surely, the workers would understand that the good of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat required them to work 10% more for the same pay? Not really. Through much of 1953, the government received worrying reports of resistance and protest. At least one party official explaining the benefits of collective farming ended up dumped in a cesspit. On 16 June, building workers on two of the most prestigious projects in the capital downed tools and marched to the Gewerkschaftshaus to call on the labour unions supposedly representing them to do a better job. Their protest was joined by thousands and ended in front of the government headquarters.
Later, the East German state claimed all of this was a coup orchestrated by nefarious Western agents, but in reality, nobody had seen it coming. The people simply had had enough. They lived in cramped quarters, often lacking basic amenities, and found that their wages could not buy them the things they needed because they simply weren’t there. True, things had improved since the catastrophic Hungerwinter of 1947, but nowhere near as much as the state’s propaganda claimed.
Cookbook writing was a very particular genre of fiction in the Soviet bloc. Publishers walked a fine line between providing a useful product and preparing the people for a future free from material needs, a world of collective hedonism that was just around the corner. The East German Verlag für die Frau (gender roles were considered immutable even in Communist Germany) published a number of works that managed to stay relevant for decades despite changing circumstances. One of them, Unser Backbuch published in 1953, includes a recipe that would, by the standards of the mid-1950s, be a modest luxury, maybe a Sunday meal.
Sift the four into a bowl, shape a well in the centre, distribute the margarine along the edge and sprinkle 1 teaspoon of salt over it. Beat together the milk, egg, and crumbled yeast. Stir in the liquid starting from the centre and work the dough very thoroughly, then let rise in a warm place for about 1 hour. Then punch down the dough, work it again, and roll it out on a greased baking sheet. Wedge a piece of wood into the open side and press the dough upwards (to raise an edge) on all sides of the sheet. Leave in a warm place to rise for about 20 minutes. In the meantime, fry the finely cubed bacon in the butter until transparent (glasig), distribute them on the dough, and sprinkle lightly with salt and caraway. Mix the sour milk, eggs, flour, and 1 teaspoon salt in a tall pot and beat in a water bath until the mass begins to thicken. Pour over the bacon, spread out, and bake for 45 minutes at a medium heat. You prepare onion cake (Zwiebelkuchen) like bacon cake, but cover it in 500g of sliced onions fried in bacon fat.
If you are familiar with the bourgeois cookbooks of pre-war Germany, this recipe provides a striking contrast. No fresh herbs, no exotic spices, no ample portions of meat and enticing decoration. A meagre half pound of fat bacon and five eggs must make to for a family, and the only butter, a single tablespoon, goes towards frying the bacon cubes. The equipment is similarly basic: A baking sheet, open at one end but closed with a handy length of wood, and a bain marie improvised with two cooking pots are all that is required. These are instructions for what shocked middle class families after 1918 called the ‘servantless household’, life in an urban apartment small kitchen, but in 1953, even that was a fond dream for many Germans living in cellars, sharing communal apartments, or still housed in displaced person camps. Finding five eggs, half a pound of fat bacon, and a whole cup of milk could also pose a challenge in the state-controlled retail environment of East Germany.
Under such circumstances, and especially in contrast with the faster growing economy of West Germany, it becomes understandable that people throughout the country readily took to the streets. As early as 12 June, village communities kicked out their party organisers. By 16 June, East Berlin’s streets were dominated by a crowd of angry building workers. The next day, demonstrations took off in almost every city and town. People demanded better working conditions, lower prices, and free travel to the West. In some places, they stormed police stations and jails to liberate prisoners and destroyed party offices. The police initially did not intervene much as the government expected to bring the situation back under control with a few concessions. They revoked the increase in work quotas and some ministers actually went to meet the protesters with that announcement, probably expecting them to cheer and walk away. That did not happen – by midday, the East German government was losing control of its population. Protesters came close to storming its administrative headquarters the Haus der Ministerien (everyone knew the parliament had no significance). They fled to the protection of the Soviet occupation forces.
Soviet tank in the streets of Berlin, 17 June 1953, courtesy of wikimedia commons
That was how it should have ended; A people had lost patience with its authoritarian government and ousted them from power to take control of its destiny. But this was the Cold War, and though Stalin was dead, Moscow was not going to accept such a blatant display of democracy. Martial law was declared, Red Army troops took to the streets, and the protests in Berlin were brutally repressed. That night, East German police arrested more than 10,000 people. The next morning, armed police and Soviet tanks ensured quiet on the streets. Freedom was over.
The aftermath was surprisingly restrained by Soviet standards, though that is not saying much. About 1800 people were sentenced to prison terms and seven to death. The government, deeply shocked, responded by building a system of mass surveillance and tightening border controls to staunch the flow of unhappy people leaving for West Germany. The famous Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht bitterly remarked that it might be best if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another.
More broadly speaking, though, East Germany preferred not to speak of these events ever again. The government put out the official line that the uprising had been provoked by foreign agents collaborating with domestic fascists and ended through the heroic actions of the party apparatus. West Germany meanwhile spun its own heroic legend about 17 June. Here, the narrative focused on the desire by Germans on both sides of the border to be united, casting the protesters as patriots opposing the unnatural divide between east and west – and the territorial losses following the Second World war which the Federal Republic only formally accepted in 1990. The anniversary of the uprising was made a national holiday, the Day of German Unity, which continued to be observed until reunification. Western politicians and retailers used it to call on their citizens not to forget the unfortunate brothers and sisters in the East and send them gifts of all the good things they missed. The Westpaket full of coffee, chocolate, cosmetics, clothing, and other luxuries, became a feature of intra-German relations and part of East German folklore. East Germans would grumble at the state of their shops, but no further large-scale revolt took place until 1989.
The Communist state had won. Yet in a pattern we see a lot in history, the demands of the defeated were accounted for by the winners. Work quotas were not raised again. Wages rose while prices remained fixed. Industrial policy shifted towards an increased focus on consumer goods. By 1959, Secretary General Walter Ulbricht announced a new five-year-plan with high hopes:
Our table will be set with the best nature has to offer: High-quality meat and dairy products, fine vegetables and the best fruit, the earliest strawberries and tomatoes at a time when they do not yet ripen in our fields, grapes in winter, not just in times of their glut. As Socialists, we are aware that by 1965, a superfluity of food is expected in the Socialist camp. What the retailers are facing is an ever growing wave of foods and delicacies from all over the world!
Not least because resources had to be invested in building walls, this did not exactly come to pass, but the German Democratic Republic was remarkably successful at feeding its people. Per-capita consumption of meat, milk, eggs, butter and sugar reached unprecedented heights, though things like coffee, cocoa, bananas and oranges remained rare till the end. The government had learned a key lesson: Democracy, national unity and freedom of speech were inspiring ideals, but in the end, it was the ability to live with dignity and sufficiency that decided the future of nations; All they needed to do was pay people enough to live.
There are no Easter recipes to share this time. Instead of cooking a feast, I had the chance to meet up with friends to go to some of the amazing museums Munich offers. I still haven’t had the time for a proper recipe post, but while the battery lasts, I will try to share some food-related highlights from the Easter weekend museum tour with you.
I will begin with a piece of high culture from the Alte Pinakothek, an altarpiece painted in 1518 by Quinten Massys. The entire thing is fairly dull, but in this section we have a Good Boi bringing St Rochus a small round bread loaf that I am fairly sure qualifies as a semmel. This is a decent guide to the size, colour, and style we are looking for when we reconstruct them.
Another instance of good bread is provided by Albrecht Altdorfer, carried by the sexiest Saint Joachim at the Nativity of the Virgin I have ever seen. At least that is who I think he is. The whole painting is interesting, but this part is relevant to my specific interest: A rather long loaf with lobed ends, very light and well-risen, probably expensive, and likely soft and delicious.
Further in art from the Alte Pinakothek, here is an interesting seventeenth century genre study of two rather ragged boys eating a pastry. It is by Murillo and has all kinds of artistic merits I am not well placed to judge – I learned during my visit I have no appreciation of art for its own sake. What struck me was the way those two were eating their meal (called a Pastete in the German label and a pie in the English): they are detaching pieces of the filling from the crust. By the late 1600s, we assume pastry crusts would be universally edible, especially on open-faced pastries, but that clearly doesn’t mean they are eaten with the filling. At least not in this instance.
Incidentally, I do not know what kind of pastry this is meant to represent, but the way it can be scooped up with the fingers and dangled suggests it holds together rather well. Maybe an egg-based, quiche-like tart is meant. We have a number of recipes like that from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Another example of seventeenth-century deliciousness if Pieter Lastman’s ultrabaroque Odysseus before Nausicaa. The princess addresses the unexpected guest while her servant, suitably bare and shocked, recoils from the naked, shipwrecked mariner. Between them stands the picknick Nausicaa intended to enjoy alone and will now share.
Does it show I am no fan of Baroque painting? At least we are getting some useful detail from among the billowing fabric and rippling flesh. Along with fresh fruit, the meal includes white bread loaves, one of which looks like it was hollowed out from the side to eat the crumb. That is something I remember doing as a child and getting scolded for. Someone here got away with it, and I am not sure whether to read it as symbolic (the soft, pampered princess used to only the finest bits) or just as something people did. To the left, there is a closed pastry and some sugared nibbles to enjoy with the wine later. The beverages very likely are in the voluminous copper vessel the artist used to put his signature on.
A piece of woodcarving caught my eye at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. It is a small part of a larger altarpiece, a Nativity scene showing Mary in bed, Joseph cooking, and two angels serving the meal. The work dates to between 1513 and 1519 and this is how a wealthy woman was served at the time: wine poured from a decorative pitcher, warm food in covered dishes brought by a servant on a napkin. On the side table, we can see two small bread loaves, perhaps one wheat and one rye, as is described in a poem on table manners, or differing in some other way, and a plate that may be holding fruit or some other dish I am not sure about. Soups, cheese and hard custards were recommended for women in childbed, but this does not look particularly like any of these things.
The new Archäologische Staatssammlung also holds some beautiful pieces, and I was particularly struck by a set of grave goods from a Roman cemetery near Augsburg.
The point here is not the beauty or particular ingrnuity of any of these pieces. It is the sheer mass of the ensemble illustrating the possibilities a developed urban civilisation offered to some. This lady went to the afterlife fully equipped to throw some awesome parties. The Romans would not have understood the idea of “Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen” (Your final shirt has no pockets i.e. ‘You can’t take it with you.’).
Speaking of which, the Nationalmuseum also has a collection of silver originally owned by the bishop of Hildesheim. This is one of the most complete eighteenth century ensembles, displayed as a first-course table setting, and again illustrates what wealth and power could buy you even if you were really just a minor ecclesiastical prince in a dinky corner of the Empire with more history than it knew what to do with.
For the final image today – the battery is drawing down and the train is past Hannover – I picked another piece from the Archäologische Staatssammlung, a cup from Uffing that dates to the years around 600 BCE and a modern replica. This is an unprepossessing time, about when the Archaic period begins in Greece and a few centuries before La Tène culture gives us what we now think of as “Celtic” art. This particular item survives only by chance and would likely have been dismissed by excavators of earlier generations. After all, it is not made of precious metal, of no innovative design or artistic merit, ‘just’ wood. It shows beautifully what we often miss when we focus on traditions of written sources alone, on ‘great’ art and big names. True, this probably belonged to a wealthy person. We have no idea who its owner was. But objects like it, lathe-turned wood shaped expertly by local craftspeople, were much more common than golden cups and bronze krateroi, and represented a practical kind of luxury that is hard to reconstruct: the domestic comfort of our forebears.
In honour of the day, I am once more departing from the Feeding the Revolution series to bring you a fragment from the rich non-recipe manuscript tradition of medieval Europe. I referred before to the Scottish (or Saxon?) dish and the April fish from the Liber de ferculis malis. This story needed piecing together from two distinct sources.
In a manuscript of the Ulenspiegel tales dating to the early sixteenth century, a marginal gloss preserves a cryptic instruction:
Du schal nene flasken eden in dinem brode as ein Dene
You shall not eat bottles in your bread like a Dane.
The diction is very similar to the Wahre Hovescheit, a fifteenth-century manual of good manners which includes a number of such admonitions citing various professions and nationalities: Do not spread butter with your thumb like a Frisian, drink from bowls like a Wend, or warm your fingers in your armpits like a fisherman. This one is not included in the surviving manuscript, and neither does it make any sense. Who would eat bottles in bread? What does ‘in bread’ mean anyway?
A possible answer is offered by the Möllner Panglossicum Strigospecularium, a late sixteenth-century collection of quotes from earlier literature much of which is lost today. It includes the following lines which I would suggest must have been familiar to the anonymous glossator:
Pleno foro edunt butelli rubri inpositi in panes quasi dicitur vulgo semil id est similia, longiori sunt quam nostri. Sinapi salatibus cucumeribusqve condiant et ceppi in larido sartagine assati superponunt. Et porcellum baubantum vulgo varkelen ille odiosum valde laudant. E carro venditi calidi vidi.
In the marketplace, they eat red sausages (butelli) placed inside breads like those commonly called semil that is similia which are longer than those common with us. They season them with mustard and salted cucumbers and place onions fried with lard in a pan on top. And they greatly praise this disgusting barking piglet (porcellum, commonly varkelen). I have seen them being sold hot out of carts.
Clearly, whoever read this when they glossed the Ulenspiegel was unfamiliar with the Latin expression butellum for a sausage. It is etymologically related to the word bottle (budel in Middle Low German), so the mistake is easy to make. That said, there are problems with the Latin quote that go beyond this faulty translation.
The quote is incomplete, and the short introduction in the Panglossicum is little help. According to the marginal notes, it was taken from:
Itinerarium regni Dannorum ab Caroli Balnearioli vulgo Badeker scriptum a.u.c. mdcccxxxiii
An account of a journey to the kingdom of the Danes written by Carolus Balneariolus, commonly Badeker, in the year 1833 after the founding of Rome
This is pretty atrocious Latin and not very good Low German, either. The name is derived from balnearius, the bathhouse attendant (Bader), with an added diminutive, and the proper Low German form should be Baderken. If we take the date seriously – which was clearly deduced and added by the compiler in the sixteenth century – it is unlikely we are looking at a family name this early. Even allowing for a broad estimate, this places the author in the second half of the eleventh century, a remarkably early time for travelogue writing. Beyond this, we are dependent on speculation. Might the text have been produced for Adam of Bremen as part of producing his Gesta Hammaburgensis? He includes a large amount of information about Denmark and Sweden in his work, not all of which he likely collected himself. A balnearius, a bath attendant, had a place in both monastic communities and ecclesiastical courts.
The use of the word semil to describe the bread may be a problem with this interpretation., It is a South German word derived from the Latin similum, with the northern equivalent being wegg(h)e. Both describe particularly fine, white breadrolls in individual portion sizes. However, since we know little about the origin of most of the senior clergy of northern Germany, it is entirely plausible the author could have been educated at one of the major centres of learning in the south.
The presence of cucumbers equally presents a problem since these are not generally thought to have been present in Germany until the 15th century. Might the text be misattributed, of a much later date? It is possible, though by the fifteenth century, Denmark was a familiar neighbour, no longer the subject of ethnographic writing in Germany. Equally, this may be an early reference to their appearance, associated with West Slavic cultures from where they were adopted into German and Danish cuisine. Another plausible explanation is that the word refers to a different plant, as it most likely did in classical Latin. Some variety of gourd may be meant.
Finally, it is very hard to see what the author may have meant by a ‘barking piglet’. The expression seems intended as a euphemism, but it is hard to imagine anyone eating dog sausages sold hot from carts. One might speculate that this is a dig at residual pagan practices, but 1080 would be very late for this and the stereotypical sign of pagan barbarism to medieval Western Christians was eating horse, not dog. The combination with elongated fine breadrolls and condiments suggests that this was a luxurious dish. Pork seems an appropriate choice of meat. Neither need we assume the ‘red’ to be a reference to a blood sausage. It is not clear how it was achieved, but the colouration clearly was important to the observer and must have been different to the sausages he knew, and perhaps ate, in Germany. Red sausages eaten in long breadrolls with mustard, cucumbers (if that is what they are) and fried onions – one can see the appeal.
The city of Braunschweig was an important place in late medieval Germany: A trading hub, a member of the Hansa, independent of its dukes from 1430 onwards, and supporting a web of local alliances. In the early 1440s, it was also an unruly and very noisy place. The chronicler Hermann Botelooking back on those events much later writes in his Schichtbuch (book of rebellions):
… They fished in the council’s waters, held many feasts (bylage), and ran schodüvel (a kind of riotous procession), danced between the racks where the linen was dried and thrummed their fulling strings. And the coppersmiths banged and rattled their bowls so that all through the town, nobody could hear a thing. (…)
And many of the conspirators, above all the coppersmiths, took hoes and rakes and walked through the streets shouting they would root out the hop plants. They said the gardeners should plant cabbage instead so they could buy much cabbage for a verling (a small coin). Others yelled that the beer from Einbeck was too expensive and the price should be set lower so that poor people could also drink it. Poor men should be served as good a beer as rich ones, otherwise they would smash up the casks in the beer cellar.
Bote writes as a committed authoritarian, so he is happy to put the worst possible spin on these activities. In his story, the wise city council agreed to all reasonable demands and greedy, irresponsible commoners (led, of course, by shady conspirators) used the period of uncertainty to prepare a usurpation of power. I strongly suspect that in reality, the concessions came after the protest had begun, but either way, what he describes is interesting: Disaffected citizens band together over shared celebrations, specifically kumpenige, sharing food and drink, shinkelage, a celebratory feast centered on a ham, and running shodüvel, a kind of procession customary around Christmas for which people disguised as devils. They made their disaffection public by deliberately breaking rules against public feasting, dancing and music, noise, demonstrations, and symbolic demands.
The city of Braunschweig, print of the Sachsenchronik by Hermann Bote, 1492. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
Commensality – sharing food and drink – was central to the way urban society was set up. There were rules about specific occasions when you ate together, who was obligated to host, what was provided, and who was entitled to join. For example shinkelage, a feast of a ham, shows up in a variety of sources: Apprentices made journeymen, master artisans celebrating a wedding or baptism, members and religious fraternities were obligated to invite their guild brothers to one. Guilds and associations ate and drank together on set days, and even contracts were sealed by publicly sharing a drink of wine. The protesters broke this pattern. They ate and drank across guild lines, celebrated in public, and, it seems, engaged in public displays of undisciplined fun and nonsense. Bote, ever the prim official, is rather upset at the idea patricians would join these things.
They would have been able to provide, if nothing else, the food and drink people craved: Ham, fresh meat, the coveted Einbeck beer, fine bread, and other festive delicacies. We do not know exactly what was shared at those gatherings, but aside from boiled hams and beer, one dish that shows up very frequently in our sources is a good candidate. Feeding large groups was an exercise in logistics, and the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch, written slightly west of Braunschweig around 1500, describes the process:
27 If you are called on to take the field (in de hervart) and asked to cook many things and do not have many cooking vessels, take sheep stomachs (bruchen) and beef stomachs (bruchen) and pig’s stomachs (maghen). Clean them. Put into each one what you will, black, yellow, green, with root vegetables, with onions, many a thing, whatever you wish. Put each one separately into the stomach, each with its particular cooking liquid. And close it up well in them, each with its particular ingredients. And lay that in a pan or a cauldron. Let it boil until it is done. Then serve it as skilfully as you may.
The same collection describes stomachs filled with pieces of chicken and pig and with chopped spiced meat to make something like a giant sausage. A similar recipe is also found in South German recipe collections:
128 To fill sows’ stomachs
How to fill a pig’s stomach. Take pork, chopped eggs, white bread, sliced fat meat, pepper, caraway, saffron and salt. Then temper (tempier) it all together and fill a pig’s stomach with it, but not too full, and boil it when it is raw (seud in grün). When it is cooked, loosen the filling from the stomach entirely, cut it in slices, and chop it well with eggs.
Now he takes the innards of it and washes it nicely and makes it nice and takes bacon and fine white bread that he cuts into cubes. Take as many eggs as you wish and mix the eggs and bacon into it and fill the neck and the wämlein (one of the stomachs) and let it boil nicely and cook it separately, that way it stays white.
It need not have been something this complicated. Just some bread, butter, and beer would have served for a public feast. But for the bigger celebrations, especially ones that took preparation like the shodüvel runs with their elaborate costumes, this would be welcome and possible to make for larger numbers of people than a kitchen would usually support.
What was the whole thing about, though? Bote sees it as an attempt to overthrow and usurp legitimate authority, but there were solid reasons behind the discontent. The city council of merchants and guild masters had not been having a good time lately. An attempt to besiege Erxleben, a castle held by robber barons, had failed, and for all their rationalisations about unreliable allies and poor performance by traitorous nobles, losing wars cost a lot of money. Thus, the city government announced an increase in tariffs and a doubling of the shoten, an annual tax based on wealth, until the deficit was paid off.
You can see how that would make people unhappy, but clearly it was not the only issue. Bote explains, a propos of nothing much, that when the council retracted the doubling of taxes, they were also forced to regulate the practice of relatives and close friends holding political office at the same time. Apparently, that was how influential families had managed to monopolise influence, putting brothers, sons, and cousins into key positions to further their own interests. An elaborate system of grandfather clauses was put in place to phase out these old-boy networks without too much disruption. Finally, again without much of an explanation, we learn that representatives of the outlying village communities and city quarters would be allowed to nominate candidates for the council along with the artisan and merchant guilds. Representation must have been a pressing issue.
A nepotistic, unresponsive council, having led the town into an expensive military disaster, blithely assuming they could hand the bill to the citizenry and continue their venal business as usual looks much more convincing as an explanation than Bote’s tale of malign subversion. People resisted, protested, and threatened violence in order to force concessions, gained a degree of relief and a measure of representation, and changed the way the city was run for good. What happened next is open to interpretation, but I suspect it was a dispute about how far the revolution should go. Perhaps, as so often, the question was whether political rights should extend to economic equity and the answer given by the powerful, as so often, was ‘not really’.
This also explains why beer and hops became the focus of protest. Hops were needed to brew beer which was the right of established householders. They would sell it, profiting from their privilege, so the crop was of use only to the already wealthy while cheap cabbage, proverbially a poor man’s food, would benefit the lower classes. Similarly, Einbeck beer was not just any old beverage. It was a luxury monopolised by the city council and only available from the government at a regulated and profitable retail price. Wealthy merchants, of course, could always buy a cask wholesale and put it into their cellars. Both would have been understandable to contemporaries as class issues in much the same way we ‘get’ references to organic food or unpaid entry-level internships.
Bote’s story makes sense if we read it in that light: Families and guilds positioned themselves on either side of the issue, gathered followers, contested public spaces, threatened violence, but eventually shied away from open civil war. The account includes some fascinating anecdotes. Defiant rebels apparently wore pieces of paper with slogans on their hats and hoods, snippets reading “This is now happening”, “We are united”, and “What we want will come to be”. Later, they added pictures of halberds and the text “I strike”. Their opponents copied the practice, displaying mocking lines such as “Now you are wearing rhymes, soon you will herd pigs”. People engaged in noisy public displays, shouting slogans and wearing outlandish costumes that must have meant something to contemporaries, but Bote cannot really explain. An elaborate prank that involved dressing up a street cat as a hare – the symbol of the rebel faction – and the surprise of onlookers as the ‘hare’ climbed the city gate to escape pursuit is described in great detail, suggesting it took on much more significance than we would give it. On several occasions, violent confrontations were narrowly averted. In the end, the forces of conservatism prevailed. The ‘disobedient’ – Bote literally uses that term – were fined for displays of defiance and several of their leaders exiled from the city. The gains they had made, the ban on nepotistic office-hogging, the inclusion of the rural vote on the council, and greater influence for less wealthy citizens, remained in force, though. This happens a lot in pre-modern rebellions: Chroniclers will condemn the rebels as the old guard takes its revenge, but even as everyone condemns the impropriety of the whole thing, everyone also acknowledges that there is no way the concessions made can be walked back.
In February 1893, a private staging of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Die Weber (The Weavers) was held at the Neues Theater in Berlin. The performance was limited to members because the police had banned its public performance, and it would not be until 1894 that a paying audience would see the piece. It proved an instant sensation, and a law was entered into the Reichstag to permit permanent bans on seditious plays in future. A history piece about events 50 years in the past had the power to terrify the rulers of Wilhelmine Germany. What was going on here?
Cartoon from 1848: Suffering in Silesia. The top caption reads “Hunger and Despair”, the bottom one “Government Aid” From the Fliegende Blätter, courtesy of wikimedia commons
The story of The Weavers is set in Silesia in 1844, where a relatively small, but ultimately very influential revolt took place. Silesia, once ruled by Bohemia, then conquered by Prussia, now part of Poland, was the kind of Central European landscape where languages and cultures mixed, German and Polish speakers lived side by side. This story, though, had nothing to do with ethnic rivalry. It was all about economic exploitation.
Silesia was a rich country with a large population, productive soils, and a thriving textile industry, but many of its people were desperately poor. Tens of thousands made their living producing the country’s famous fine linen and cotton cloth, working at home for contractors who bought the fabric to ship it west. This way of life had supported generations, but in rapidly industrialising Europe, competing against powered looms and steam-driven factories was a recipe for disaster. The contractors sought to stay competitive by lowering prices, some started investing in weaving mills of their own, and more and more weavers sank into deep poverty. Horrified contemporary observers describe their living conditions, their tiny plots of land, dark hovels, ragged clothes, and a diet that mainly consisted of potatoes. Rudolf Virchow wrote in his report on the typhoid epidemic of 1848:
…It is generally said of the people of Upper Silesia … that they subsist entirely and solely of potatoes. According to enquiries I made partly among the people themselves, partly among officials … that is not entirely true. However, within living memory potatoes have formed the greater part of the diet and descriptions of the quantities of them that single individuals are said to consumed verge on the incredible. However, two other things require mention: milk and sauerkraut. Though with many, the milk or the articles derived from it (butter and cheese) are destined for sale, yet many have enjoyed milk. All make use of the buttermilk and the whey left over from making cheese. Sauerkraut is another commonly consumed food, and I have found large tuns filled with it even in the rooms of the wealthy. Cereals, on the other hand, were always grown in small quantity, and bread is not a common food. … (p. 25 f.)
Another visitor wrote of a Sunday dinner where a family gathered around a single salt herring against which each diner in turn was allowed to rub their boiled potato to impart flavour.
Herring, while not poverty food, was the cheapest fish there was, far cheaper than bacon or sausages. Potatoes infamously would grow almost anywhere, producing enough on a small garden plot to support a family. They had spread throughout Germany in the years around 1800 and become a mainstay of the working-class diet. When the potato blight struck Silesia in 1845, the result was widespread famine.
Of course there is no such thing as a recipe for boiled potato rubbed on salt herring, but the voluminous 1844 recipe book Der Dresdner Koch by Johann Friedrich Baumann tells us how wealthy families prepared such plain dishes when they ate simply:
Potatoes the natural way
Good, medium-sized potatoes of equal size are washed clean and placed in a pot or casserole. Warm or cold water is poured on them so they are bathed in it (i.e covered) and they are covered and quickly brought to a boil. Cooked until done, they are drained in a colander, arranged in a bowl on top of a napkin, and served immediately. Fresh butter is set alongside. Or potatoes are set over boiling water in a colander so only the steam touches them, covered, and steamed until done.
(I, p. 395)
Salt herrings roasted
The herrings are washed, desalinated, dried, and drizzled with fine oil. Before serving, they are roasted on a griddle and arranged with a butter sauce, bean or pea puree or other things placed on top of them.
(I, p. 354)
This, minus any of the butter, oil, peas, colanders, or napkins, was the reality of the angry men who gave such a shock to the Prussian crown it would still alarm the authorities five decades later.
The weavers of Peterswaldau (today Pieszyce) were specialised in working imported cotton for higher wages than domestic linen. In fact, earlier in 1844 the parson of nearby Langenbielau united respectable locals in complaining about the thieving ways, excessive consumer habits and dissolute, drunken partying of what they considered an overpaid and uppity servant class. We need not credit these reports with much veracity. There are few things the middle class finds more disconcerting than poor people having fun of any kind.
The Silesian Weavers. 1844 painting by Karl Wilhelm Hübner showing a dramatised view of negotiations between weavers and a Verleger, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Even being among the more fortunate was very much a relative position. In most families, children were put to work early to make ends meet and the margins were razor thin. Weavers did piecework for their Verleger, contractors who supplied raw materials and purchased the finished cloth. Negotiations at this point could be harrowing as the buyers used the tiniest, even imaginary flaws to bring down the price. Technically equal parties, the arrangement actually gave the buyer disproportionate leverage The humiliation of these encounters must have been difficult to bear.
On 3 June 1844, simmering anger turned to protest. The events of the following days have been researched so thoroughly it is almost superfluous to recount them. It is surprising to learn how trivial in scope and numbers the event that would become a founding legend of the German left was compared to, say, the almost forgotten, at best folksified riots in Munich the same year. A group of weavers came to protest the firm of Zwanziger, a particularly hated Verleger who had them violently dispersed by his armed servants. One of their leaders was arrested.
The next day, more protesters assembled to demand his freedom. They broke into the houses and factories of unpopular contractors and ransacked them while others bribed them with payments of money or distributions of food to spare their property. Those Verleger known to pay fair wages were not attacked. Neither was anyone killed or even injured in the course of two days of rioting. The degree of restraint is actually remarkable given how the weavers had been treated by some of these people.
Bloodshed began immediately the Prussian military arrived on the scene. This was, after all, no medieval shire where the lord of the manor relied on the force of his personality and the walls of his castle. Prussia was a modern European power equipped with telegraphs, railways, and a large conscript army. On 5 June, the first troops to arrive confronted protesters who were armed with sticks and tried to overawe them with a volley of blanks. After this failed to disperse them, the commanding officer, as so often in fear for his life (one wonders how career military and law enforcement scare so easily) ordered the men to fire into the crowd, killing eleven and injuring 24. The soldiers then retreated in the face of the angry and undeterred rioters.
Engraving from Käthe Kollwitz’ Weberauftstand cycle, 1897, courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Reinforcements arrived the following day, and with numbers on their side, the authorities stifled protest and arrested suspected leaders. It was the particularly 19th-century German combination of having a relatively free and active press, but almost no way for public opinion to impact government that made this a cause celebre. Later commentators drew a direct line from the Silesian uprising to the failed revolution of 1848 and the rise of Socialism in Wilhelmine Germany, and artists engaged with the subject almost immediately. Heinrich Heine wrote one of his darkest, most haunting poems in response the same year. Fifty years later, playwright Hauptmann came to produce a dramatisation of the events and Käthe Kollwitz was inspired to create a series of etchings that made her famous. Protest songs of the Silesian weavers were kept alive, rewritten, adapted to the German workers’ movement, and are still performed by German folk and punk bands.
Ironically, for all the efforts of conservative authorities to stifle the memory of the revolt, it was the Communist governments of post-WWII Eastern Europe that almost succeeded. Their embrace of a whitewashed, ideologically corrected narrative made the subject attractive to revisionist historians, but terminally boring to activists. Today, this aspect of the story stands as a warning against how easily a complicated event can be simplified into a convenient morality tale, and even more so how the actual moral charge of the situation is drained by it. The weavers of Silesia rose up to confront unbearable exploitation and in doing so inspired generations to fight against what often seemed like impossible odds. Turning them into sanitised ideological mouthpieces did them a grave disservice.
Being Prussian consul in the port city of Göteborg in 1843 was not an exciting job. At least, not until 15 August when the captain of the schooner Maria von Ueckermünde presented himself to demand the arrest of his entire crew for mutiny. We can only speculate how long it took the flummoxed official to do as he was bid, but his report, preserved in the archives of the court that tried the case, shows a degree of composure we expect of a Prussian civil servant.
“Returned!” – a highly romanticised image of a boy come home from his first voyage at sea. Engraving, 1892, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Romantic notions about ‘ships of wood and men of iron’ probably need some dispelling to make us understand how extremely unusual this was. Like the similarly mythologised cowboys, seamen of the age of sail were a tough and self-reliant lot used to hard labour, danger, and poor food. They were not particularly lawless, violent, drunk, or dangerous, though. Quite the contrary, within their very limited means, they valued a kind of domesticity that would surprise many landsmen. Most of their food might consist of hardtack, salt meat, and beans, but the crews of German ships famously enjoyed their pancakes and pudding, two dishes any ship’s cook worth his salt had to master under the most adverse conditions.
Pudding especially could be used to track the deteriorating state of a ship’s supplies as a voyage progressed. Initially, there would be fresh butter, milk, and plenty of eggs, maybe even fresh fruit for a sauce. Later on, milk would be replaced by (increasingly foul) water, eggs dwindle and disappear, and butter often take on a distinctly oily quality. The sauce could still be made with dried fruit or, if the shipper was generous, jam, but often enough the cook was reduced to serving plain molasses. There are no surviving recipes for these versions, only descriptions in the memories of sailors, but we have instructions for making a proper, gentrified ‘ashore’ version in the Rendsburger Kochbuch published around 1900:
6. Common Yeast Pudding
40g good compressed yeast is set to rise with a few tablespoons of the lukewarm milk intended for the pudding as well as 1 teaspoon of sugar. – 500g of flour is poured into a bowl and a well made in the centre. – The remaining milk – reckoned at 4 1/2 decilitres altogether – is stirred well with 2 whole eggs and 70g melted, lukewarm butter. First, the risen yeast is added to the flour, then the egg-milk, 60g of sugar, the grated peel of one lemon, and 1/2 pound of small raisins or chopped currants. If you wish, also add 70g blanched and finely chopped almonds that give a very pleasing flavour. You fill this mass into a basin prepared with butter and white bread which must only be filled to half, leave it to stand in a warm place, then set it in boiling water and have it cook for about an hour. Preparing this pudding is not easy. Before serving it, it is sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, or a simple compote with much liquid, or a common mayonnaise (Oelguss).
At sea, as it was in many modest homes ashore, puddings were cooked tied in a cloth, and we have accounts of sailors describing how the men sewed these pudding bags to fit the size of their pot to maximise yield and reduce the risk of burning. A plain Mehlpudding, especially absent eggs and milk, is a challenging dish to get right. It can easily end up burned when it touches the side of the pot, raw in the middle, soggy, runny, or gummy and hard. A cook who could prepare it well even in a tiny kitchen on a ship pitching in the swells of an Atlantic gale was rightly treasured, and sailors looking to muster on a ship would often ask specifically what the food on board was like.
On the Maria von Ueckermünde’s fateful voyage, rations did not cause much friction. Just a few days out of her home port, vegetables, eggs, and even milk were still plentiful as she left the Baltic Sea bound for London. Her captain, though, was a different matter. His account of what happened on the night of 11 August differs from that of the other witnesses, but both agree that it began with an altercation between the captain and Able Seaman Hoffmann. The captain was unhappy with Hoffmann’s performance at the helm, berated him for it, and in the end hit him to emphasise his displeasure.
Again, the stereotype of life on tall ships makes it hard to appreciate how shocking this was. On German ships, sailor was a respected profession. The men had gone through a long apprenticeship to qualify. Officers addressed them with the honorific Sie (roughly equivalent to being called ‘Mister’ on a British ship); Only boys and landsmen workers rated the colloquial Du. Many seamen saved for nautical school to obtain a helmsman’s patent that would open the possibility of a career to middle-class status and even command of a ship. The nearest analogy was probably artisan journeymen, skilled workers who were due respect and could be trusted to feel pride in their occupation. Discipline was enforced by the threat of docking pay or writing poor references. In the rough and tumble of shipboard labour, a Bootsmann might still reinforce his orders with a swift kick, but for an officer to raise his hand against one of the men diminished the dignity of both.
Hoffmann’s response becomes understandable in this context: he hit back. The captain later claimed that he was acting in fear for his life, but the crew describe a much more vicious and deliberate assault on his part. He stabbed Hoffmann repeatedly with a clasp knife, beat him with a handspike, and left him on the deck to be carried back to quarters by his comrades. His survival was in doubt, doubly so since the captain refused to allow the men access to the ship’s medicine chest, and the crew spent an uneasy night moving from shock and despair to deep, righteous indignation.
On the afternoon of 12 August, after their remonstrations fell on deaf ears, the helmsman, cook, and one sailor seized the captain, tied him up, and locked him in his cabin. Worried about the state of their comrade Hoffmann who was still fighting for his life, they decided to abandon plans to sail to London and instead made for the nearest port. Three days later, they reached Göteborg, Hoffmann was taken to hospital and the rest of the crew placed under arrest.
The men knew that the law of the sea was unequal. The word of an officer weighed heavily against theirs and the authority of a captain was not questioned without consequence. Still, they neither denied what they had done nor made excuses. As far as they were concerned, they had been right. Their captain had overstepped the limits of his authority. He had harmed one of their number, further endangered him by his stubborn anger, but above all, he had broken the rules by which a ship operated. His position might entitle him to many privileges, but it did not mean he could do whatever he wanted. The sailors had rights, and if they were expected to respect their commander, they were due respect in return.
The Prussian court in Stettin (today Szczecin in Poland) agreed. All charges against the mutineers were dismissed, and the magistrate encouraged them to seek damages for wrongful arrest against their captain. Seaman Hoffmann, who survived, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for his initial attack on the captain, though. The law still was unfair, and while the court took the provocation into account, they upheld the authority of a bad officer against a good subordinate as a matter of principle. The captain in turn was referred to a higher court to be tried for assault causing grievous bodily harm. His career was over.
It is the kind of satisfying ending that we have come to expect from any “based on true events” movie, the coda listing who ended up in prison for how long. That it would end this way had been far from certain, though. The men who locked up their captain to save their dying comrade had taken a crazy risk. In their world, authority backed up authority, employers were often wilfully cruel, and the law was fundamentally unequal. But even in an unequal system, there was an expectation of basic dignity, a respect due to everyone in their place, and when this was violated, they took action to redress the injury. This is important, because in a situation where they fear no repercussions, powerful people can quickly become capricious despots whose whims often enough endanger the wellbeing and safety of those they consider less than them. Even an unfair law or custom can be a protection worth taking risks over, because the alternative is allowing tyrants free rein and hoping they hurt someone else first.
In Late Medieval Germany, most cities had no more than a few thousand inhabitants. Only the largest came to much more than 10,000. But in June of 1476, the tiny village of Niklashausen in the Tauber valley hosted a crowd that size every Sunday as people from far away came to hear a young cowherd preach. Hans Behem, a descendant of refugees from the Hussite Wars, spoke of divine wrath and heavenly forgiveness and invoked images of a future utopia, a world where nobles and prelates would “…have no more than the common man, and thereby have enough” and hunting and fishing would be free for everyone.
Title page of a poem published in 1490 depicting Hans Behem as a musician. The association was meant to disparage his character, and it stuck. Courtesy of wikimedia commons.
We depend on sources hostile to him, often reports from spies collected for an inquisition trial, so it is hard to prise part truth from fiction here, but the tenor of our information is so consistent on this point that there must be some truth to it. Hans Behem told his rapt audience that emperor and pope were grave sinners who held no legitimate authority. In the world to come, priests would hide their tonsure to escape recognition while princes and lords were be put to day labour. Whether he really claimed he could personally free souls from hell is doubtful, but his views on earthly authority are absolutely clear. A contemporary report preserves a snippet of song from among his followers: “We would lament to God in Heaven, kyrie eleison, that we are forbidden from slaying priests, kyrie eleison“.
Why was everyone so angry? Where to begin… the people who went to Niklashausen lived in an extremely unequal society, one where the powerful owned almost all the land and the great majority worked to pay rent to them. It had been this way for a very long time, of course, but that does not mean everyone had been happy. By 1476, people were suffering new burdens imposed by an increasingly sophisticated, monetised economy. The church and secular landlords tapped ever new sources of revenue, most of them based on getting the commoners to pay for things that had been free or inventing new charges. Among the most resented were the purchase of indulgences and the loss of the commons.
Access to resources of nature, governed by customary law, were a central part of how farming communities survived. People had defined rights to cut or gather wood, forage for food, catch fish, trap birds, and pasture their livestock. All of this was increasingly under pressure as landowners discovered they could monetise these things. The peasantry functioned in a largely barter economy and often found it difficult enough to gather enough cash for their tithe and rent, so paying extra hurt, especially for things that had been theirs by right. The kind of dishes they missed were likely not the elaborate presentation pieces of medieval cookbooks, but simple fare like that described in the Kuchenmaistrey of 1485:
1.xxviii Item reinuisch (lit. Rhine fish) and bolcken (Ehlert reads this as dried fish)boiled in water together with greens (kraut dar bey) or with sauces, that is good. The same fish and all smoked or dried fish may be served in a pepper sauce or with soup and greens on all fast days.
A plain soup of beet greens or spinach, or maybe even cabbage, served with some smoked fish, bread, and butter, is a joy. I made it several times and it was always much appreciated. With fishing rights restricted, but the fast day rules in force, even those who had cash would likely be reduced to buying stockfish, dried flatfish, or salt herring. In the big scheme of things, this was a fairly trivial matter, but trivial, everyday humiliations are much more apt to make people angry than major crises.
The people who went to Niklashausen were angry, but they were also thrilled by the vision of hope and change the young preacher offered them. It was, after all, laid out under the authority of God and the Virgin Mary who, he claimed, had appeared to him in a vision. They observed strict nonviolence, coming to the church in Niklashausen as pilgrims doing penance, not as rebels in arms.
Woodcut from the Schedelsche Weltchronik illustrating the Niklashausen pilgrimage. The text gives a condensed version of events, stating the city of Nuremberg banned participation and received papal praise for it. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
The Church, of course, had a long tradition of dealing with theological dissent and did not much care whether it was violent or not. Rudolf II von Scherenberg, prince-bishop of Würzburg, took some time to decide how to address the problem. He sent out spies to report whether Hans Behem was preaching heresy and, having satisfied himself on that point, dispatched a commando force of armed horsemen to arrest him with minimal disturbance. On 12 July 1476, Behem was abducted from his home at night and taken to the fortress at Würzburg to be tried as a heretic.
His disappearance could hardly go unnoticed when crowds of thousands gathered daily to hear him speak. The pilgrims, sources claim over ten thousand strong, marched to Würzburg and demanded he be returned to them. They did not make threats, simply stating they would stay and pray until their ‘holy youth’ (Behem was not yet 30 years old) was free. The bishop, well versed in the ways of government, sent out a negotiator who explained to the protesters that all would be well and asked them to disperse for now. Having agreed to do so, the departing crowd was fired on with artillery and attacked by armoured horsemen.
Behem himself, of course, never stood a chance. After ecclesiastical authority in the person of Prince-Bishop Rudolf had found him guilty, he was handed over to the secular arm in the shape of the same man uniting both offices and burned at the stake on 19 July. The pilgrimages continued for a while, but the loss of their charismatic leader removed the main draw and governments everywhere worked hard to suppress them. In 1477, the archbishop of Mainz, under whose authority it stood, decreed that the church in Niklashausen should be demolished and the statue of the Virgin moved to his cathedral. The wealth of offerings left by pilgrims may have had something to do with this.
Niklashausen was never forgotten. A concerted effort to ridicule Hans Behem and associate him with the devil gave him the byname piper or drummer of Niklashausen, and the story was still important enough to be included in a printed history of the world produced in Nuremberg. The city fathers there were proud of the fact they had forbidden pilgrimages to Niklashausen and even received a papal letter praising them for it. Later historians rediscovered the event, giving it various interpretations in a Protestant, nationalist, or Marxist light, and in 1970, Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced a movie about it, Die Niklashauser Fart.
Contemporaries also remembered how their lords had unarmed, unresisting pilgrims fired at and ridden down, and how their beloved preacher was burned alive, singing hymns even on the pyre. In 1525, when the Peasant War broke out, monasteries burned and Würzburg was put under siege by the rebels. Nonviolent protest is easy to defeat by force, but governments that chose to do so often enough found themselves faced with more embittered, angrier resistance at the end.
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