31 July 1919 — the allotment ordinance that hunger wrote

In German history 31 July 1919 is remembered as the day of the Weimar Constitution. The National Assembly adopted it that day; President Ebert signed it on 11 August and it took effect on 14 August. On the same 31 July, the same assembly passed the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung. The state federations of both Berlin and Bavaria record the two as events of a single day. That is no coincidence: the memory of four years in which the cities nearly ran out of food pushed out both the new state's basic law and a tenancy law for garden plots in the same summer. The Bavarian federation's account notes that the parliamentary handling took 'only a month and a half' — the speed is a measure of the political pressure of the moment.

Yesterday's first instalment surveyed two hundred years of German history, from poor-relief gardens to community plots. Today we descend into a single day of it. The subject is the 1919 ordinance itself: what §§1 to 5 actually said, what offices the ordinance brought into being, and what kind of national body the gardeners themselves set up two years later. The content of the 1983 Federal Allotment Gardens Act belongs to day five, so here only the line running from 1919 to it is drawn.

The Allied blockade is said to have cut the Central Powers' food supply by 33 per cent. The potato harvest failed in the autumn of 1916, and the winter in which the swede — until then livestock fodder — became the centrepiece of the table is remembered as the Steckrübenwinter, the turnip winter of 1916–17. Calorie intake fell to roughly 1,000 a day that winter and stood at about 1,560 even in the summer of 1917, against the 3,000 the Imperial Health Office set as the requirement for a healthy adult male. Female mortality is recorded as rising 11.5 per cent above pre-war rates in 1916 and 30 per cent in 1917. These were the figures in the memory of the legislators of 1919.

Cities turned vacant lots into gardens, and the state moved too. In 1916 the Reich government set up a Central Office for Vegetable Growing in Allotments in Berlin, at the urging of the Central Federation of German Workers' and Schreber Gardens, founded in 1909. Several emergency decrees were issued during the war: one to hold down lease prices, another obliging municipal land to be made available for growing produce. The 1919 ordinance gathered this scattered wartime legislation into a single frame — 'non-commercial horticultural use'. Its significance lies exactly there: it turned temporary measures into permanent law.