History 281--Handout for Second Essay Assignment Answer one of the questions below in a typed, double-spaced, 3-4 page essay. Be sure to build your answer using evidence (material from the lectures an

This is an excerpt from the diary of Anna Eisenmenger, an Austrian doctor’s wife who lived in Vienna during WWI. This excerpt is reprinted in Bonnie Smith, Changing Lives. Women in European History Since 1700 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1989), p. 376-377.

Vienna in Wartime

Anna Eisenmenger, a wealthy doctor's wife, spent a good deal of the war trying to find food for her family. Before the war, feeding a family of four children, a son-in-law, grandson, and aunt posed little chal­lenge for someone in her circumstances. By the end, after her husband and one son had died, it was Frau Eisenmenger's main undertaking. Alarmed by having the three remaining men in her family sent home from war as invalids and by her daughter's and aunt's illness from malnutrition, she illegally hoarded food, bartered away her dead hus­band's tobacco, and overcame any number of middle-class scruples to get that most precious commodity-food.

Ten dekagrammes [31/2 ounces] of horse-flesh per head are to be given out to-day for the week. The cavalry horses held in reserve by the military authorities are being slaugh­tered for lack of fodder, and the people of Vienna are for a change to get a few mouthfuls of meat of which they have so long been deprived. Horse-flesh! I should like to know whether my instinctive repugnance to horse-flesh as food is personal, or whether my dislike is shared by many other housewives. My loathing of it is based, I believe, not on a physical but on a psychological prejudice.

I overcame my repugnance, rebuked myself for being sen­timental, and left the house. A soft, steady rain was falling, from which I tried to protect myself with galoshes, water­proof, and umbrella. As I left the house before seven o'clock and the meat distribution did not begin until nine o'clock, I hoped to get well to the front of the queue.

No sooner had I reached the neighborhood of the big market hall than I was instructed by the police to take a cer­tain direction. I estimated the crowd waiting here for a meager midday meal at two thousand at least. Hundreds of women had spent the night here in order to be among the first and make sure of getting their bit of meat. Many had brought with them improvised seats-a little box or a bucket turned upside down. No one seemed to mind the rain, although many were already wet through. They passed the time chattering, and the theme was the familiar one: What have you had to eat? What are you going to eat? One could scent an atmosphere of mis­trust in these conversations: they were all careful not to say too much or to betray anything that might get them into trou­ble.

At length the sale began. Slowly, infinitely slowly, we moved forward. The most determined, who had spent the night outside the gates of the hall, displayed their booty to the waiting crowd: a ragged, quite freshly slaughtered piece of meat with the characteristic yellow fat. [Others] alarmed those standing at the back by telling them that there was only a very small supply of meat and that not half the people wait­ing would get a share of it. The crowd became very uneasy and impatient, and before the police on guard could prevent it, those standing in front organized an attack on the hall which the salesmen inside were powerless to repel. Everyone seized whatever he could lay his hands on, and in a few mo­ments all the eatables had vanished. In the confusion stands were overturned, and the police forced back the aggressors and closed the gates. The crowds waiting outside, many of whom had been there all night and were' soaked through, an­grily demanded their due, whereupon the mounted police made a little charge, provoking a wild panic and much screaming and cursing. At length I reached home, depressed and disgusted, with a broken umbrella and only one galosh.

We housewives have during the last four years grown ac­customed to standing in queues; we have also grown accus­tomed to being obliged to go home with empty hands and still emptier stomachs. Only very rarely do those who are sent away disappointed give cause for police intervention. On the other hand, it happens more and more frequently that one of the pale, tired women who have been waiting for hours col­lapses from exhaustion. The turbulent scenes which occurred today inside and outside the large market hall seemed to me perfectly natural. In my dejected mood the patient apathy with which we housewives endure seemed to me blameworthy and incomprehensible.

Source: Excerpted from Anna Eisenmenger, Blockade. The Diary of Austrian Middle-Class Woman 1914-1924, tro Winifred Ray (New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1932), 63-68.