With his latest work, Rudolf Kučera undertakes an ambitious and welcome attempt to close a considerable gap in the research landscape: His study on rationing and rationalization in the Bohemian lands during World War I represents an extended English version of his 2013 book Život na příděl. Válečná každodennost a politiky dělnické třídy v českých zemích 1914–1918 (Rationed Life: Wartime Daily Life and the Politics of the Working Class in the Czech Lands, 1914–1918). The author aims to analyze the changes the Czech working-class underwent because of the war effort. To show the fluid character of any definition of the working class and to point at the constitutive aspects of group identity, he scrutinizes the fields where intersecting interests met and were negotiated.

Kučera unfolds four different perspectives on his subject, titled “The Politics of Food,” “The Politics of Work,” “The Politics of Gender,” and “The Politics of Protest”; each chapter develops its own analytical approach, which makes the book quite a pleasure to read. Starting with the question of how to feed a population in wartime, the author uses the first chapter to bring together three different aspects: the production of scientific knowledge about the minimum requirements of human nutrition; bureaucratic measures meant to ensure that the distribution of food especially to those most involved in the war effort works, by means of rationalization on all levels; and finally the meager reality of wartime nutrition, mostly in Prague. The second chapter sees a change of perspective, as Kučera shows how the human body became increasingly seen and understood as a machine and how the question of nutrition was also perceived as a question of fueling. He points out how physical labor became regulated and controlled by political power, in a framework that built strongly on scientific knowledge and based on research over the course of the prewar decades. Kučera demonstrates how the war allowed for an expansion of political power into a new sphere. Scientific knowledge on how human resources could be exploited was put to the test under wartime conditions. The third chapter scrutinizes the massive and rapid changes gender roles underwent during the war in the Bohemian Lands. The thorough analysis provides a detailed and fascinating insight into the degree to which scientific knowledge on nutrition had already spread into a broader public (99) and the effects this had. It further illuminates the massive and irreversible transformation of gender roles during the war, when women not only were provided with a new quality of knowledge on the preparation of food but also had to take over many of the formerly male tasks in wartime economy. The final chapter opens the subject of working-class wartime protest and unrest, and it also provides a sort of conclusion, as all the issues addressed earlier in the study come together here. With his description of street riots in Plsen/Pilsen (131–32), the author convincingly completes a masterful and subtle treatment of class boundaries in this study.

Rudolf Kučera's work is a remarkable step toward a more complete assessment of the war effort in Central Europe, and he presents a well-written and multifaceted social history of the Bohemian Lands during World War I. His approach of four interweaving perspectives has its merits, and it is certainly the method of choice when it comes to dealing with a complex matter from analytically different sides, yet it has its limitations. Kučera masterfully avoids repeating himself, and even though there is a great potential for overlap in the sections on “The Politics of Food” and “The Politics of Work,” this does not happen. Nonetheless, one might regret a lack of deeper analysis in some cases. For instance, the author deals in a playful and skilled way with “rationing” and “rationality,” yet he omits any further clarification of these two terms. Moreover, while the book does address the topics of “everyday life” and “working-class politics” as promised in the subtitle, science—the first word in the subtitle—is not overtly stressed in the study. This is a bit disappointing, especially given the other merits of the book.

Yet these are minor issues. The reader might feel compensated by the fact that Kučera by no means limits the scope of his study to the “working class.” On the contrary, he scrutinizes class limitations and its transgressions on many occasions and consequently produces a vivid portrait not only of the working classes but also of the middling classes. This compelling social history (in the best sense of the term) of the Bohemian Lands during World War I is a must-read on the subject and opens the field for a broader reassessment of life in the late Habsburg Empire.