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6 - Hunger Envisioned

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2025

Mary Elisabeth Cox
Affiliation:
Central European University, Vienna
Claire Morelon
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Summary

Representations of food in the public sphere in Europe evolved over the course of the First World War. Advertisements served as proxies for the economic situation in a given region, a rough gauge of what was available to consumers, and what at least a portion of them could hope to afford. In certain ways, what was left unsaid or unwritten spoke louder than any representations of the desperate food situation could have. In Austria-Hungary, for example, press censorship included removing entire articles relating to the food situation, shortly before a newspaper was published. The infamous “white spaces” remaining were left to be filled by the reader’s imagination and speculation, which may have had an even more damaging effect than had the situation been discussed openly. Despite the privations of war, however, humor was expressed in various ways as both a direct confrontation with reality and an escape from it. Using examples of posters, cartoons, advertisements, films, and other media, this chapter surveys how hunger – and its most extreme form, starvation – were envisioned and utilized by humanitarian groups, governments, and ordinary people struggling to survive during the First World War era.

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Chapter
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Hunger Redraws the Map
Food, State, and Society in the Era of the First World War
, pp. 169 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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