How hungry were German civilians during and after World War I? Debate about the morality, legality, and impact of the British blockade of Germany has raged for more than a century. From its inception in 1915, the blockade was denounced in Germany as Britain's starvation plan. Maintained until German representatives reluctantly signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, it also drew international condemnation. Ernest Starling, a British physiologist who visited Berlin just after the lifting of the blockade, estimated that years of malnutrition had consigned “up to two thirds of the population [to] living at a low level of vitality” (88). Other contemporaries, however, scoffed that such talk was simply German propaganda. Historians, too, have weighed in. Most famous perhaps has been Avner Offer, who in 1989 published a study of the war's agricultural aspects and concluded that “[w]hatever their complaints, Germany did not starve” (90). What effect, really, did food scarcity have on German civilians?

Aspiring to settle this question once and for all, Mary Elisabeth Cox applies novel methods to new sources. Rather than plunging into the war of words, Cox immerses herself in the world of numbers. A practitioner of anthropometrics, Cox focuses on turning up primary sources that contain quantitative data about the heights and weights of German civilians, especially women and children. If wartime food supplies were as meager as contemporaries reported, she hypothesizes, that meagerness should be reflected in the physical bodies of German civilians. Adults would show signs of reduced nutritional status in terms of height-weight ratios, and children would show lower than expected weights and heights as compared to children of the same age before and after the blockade.

Cox combines this analysis with qualitative sources about daily life during the blockade. When she finds “convergence,” she reasons that her findings are “robust” (13). When she finds dissonance, on the other hand, she finesses her analysis until convergence has been restored. Cox thus reaches several conclusions. First, the Allied Blockade inflicted terrible nutritional deprivation on German children and women. Second, hunger was distributed unequally across German society: the poorest and most vulnerable women and children showed the effects of extreme hunger first, but hunger also managed to move up the class hierarchy and was affecting even well-off children by the early 1920s. Finally, international food aid—much of it delivered by former enemies, especially the British and the Americans—helped save the lives of many German children after the war.

After a couple of introductory chapters that review the vexed history of the blockade and German government responses to it, Cox turns to the heart of her analysis. A good example of her method appears in Chapter 3. One of the short circuits in the debate over German hunger, Cox points out, is the tendency to look at average data rather than ask about what she terms intrahousehold allocation—that is, how Germans facing reduced diets allocated nutritional resources within the family. She concedes that Avner Offer may have been correct that, on the whole, Germany did not starve, but because he looked at national averages, he missed evidence of the extreme hunger of particular Germans.

To make that point, Cox uses a survey of Leipzig families launched in 1916 by the physicians Walter Kruse and Kurt Hintze. Participants submitted reports of all the food they consumed in a given week as well as every family member's height and weight for that week. Kruse and Hintze also kept track of the sex, age, occupation, and general health of each of their research subjects. To parse this data, Cox turns to metrics developed after World War II by UN agencies such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization: body mass index (BMI), basal metabolic rate (BMR), and chronic energy deficiency (CED). For the Leipzig research subjects, Cox uses the BMI (which relates weight to height to determine nutritional status) and BMR (which defines how many calories a person of a certain body size needs to support a vigorous, active, or sedentary lifestyle) to assess the (in)adequacy of Leipzig diets.

After pages bristling with acronyms, equations, numbers, and tables, Cox concludes that one-third to one-half of Leipzig women suffered from chronic energy deficiency by 1917, meaning that they were in a state of such nutritional deprivation that they could not do even minimal household activities, look for food, or work. Men, in contrast, did not suffer hunger on this scale. Moreover, qualitative sources add interesting details: that men complained more about hunger than women did and that women probably suffered more extreme hunger than men because they chose to reallocate their own food to other family members, especially children. “If a rising caloric tide tends to float all boats by masking nutritional inequalities,” Cox observes, “then in bad times, as the tide goes out, the inherent inequities of the system are starkly revealed by weight loss and the increased mortality of the most vulnerable members of society: children, women, and the elderly. Furthermore, tacitly assuming that calories were evenly divided within a household is not consistent with what is known about poor families in other times and places” (130–131).

In Chapters 4 and 5, Cox extends this analysis to the question of whether rural German children were nutritionally better off than urban ones (she concludes that they were not), and then turns to the question of which children suffered when by utilizing an anthropometric study involving 600,000 schoolchildren studied from 1914 to 1924. Here Cox finds that poor children were recovering their height and weight norms beginning in 1918, but that middle-class and upper-class children had to wait until 1920–1921 (203). Using again a mixture of qualitative and quantitative sources, Cox argues that the surprising early recovery of poorer children reflected the efficacy of international assistance delivered after the war. The final chapters of the book document the flood of food aid after 1918 and children's response to it, including crayon drawings and heartfelt letters of gratitude, many of them reproduced in the book.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, this book certainly pushes the conversation about German hunger in new directions. It unearths new sources and uses new methods to break down Offer's monolithic Germany into discrete groups of Germans with varying experiences of hunger. Cox also paints a fresh picture of postwar food aid and its impact on the bodies as well as the spirits of German children. On the other hand, some readers may find that anthropometrics, with its veneer of objectivity, cannot resolve a debate that is inherently political. Did Germans starve? What is hunger anyway? Metrics such as BMI, BMR, and CED, after all, were designed in the years after World War II in order to depoliticize hunger. Applying them here yields new insights, but is unlikely to end the debate over German hunger.