Waterloo Centre for German Studies announces inaugural book prize winner

Professor Weinreb examines how hunger has been a central motivating force in German politics throughout the 20th century. By focusing on the role of hunger in German society, Prof. Weinreb demonstrates “the fluid relationship between state power and food provisioning.” If governments control the food supply, they can also control the populaces they govern, and Prof. Weinreb uses Germany as a case study to illustrate this important point.

Jury members singled out Prof. Weinreb’s book for its crisp writing, its wealth of detail, and the wide variety of sources consulted. The book is “a page-turner, with fascinating facts running counter to modern stories about the past on every page.” Exploring the topic from World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “this book uncovers the intricacies of the relationship between food and power, showing food and hunger as instruments of power.” The jury concluded that this book will likely become one of the standard works on postwar German history.

The jury was chaired by James M. Skidmore, Director of the Waterloo Centre of German Studies, who notes that the prize was established “to raise awareness, within academia and the broader public, of the engaging and dynamic knowledge being produced by newer German Studies scholars.” He was joined by jurors Karin Bauer (McGill University), Ann Marie Rasmussen (University of Waterloo), Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford), and Karina Urbach (Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton).