Rationed Life

Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres―food, labor, gender, and protest―that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

Rudolf Kučera is a permanent researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he is also a deputy research director. He has held fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Imre Kertész Kolleg at the University of Jena, and in 2015 he received the Otto Wichterle Prize for outstanding researchers under 35.