Document 6bmBO96qgp5egawNL71pkoJLg

150 CHAPTER 5 close to 7 percent in Berlin, and a whopping 13 percent in Mu nich.95 A 1940 book by the nutritionist Hugo O. Kleine pointed out that Germans were spending more on alcohol than on any other "food product" (his quotation marks) with the exception of meat and bread.96 Nazi leaders also worried about the opportunity costs of using farmland crops for fermentation instead of food. In 1937, for exam ple, the manufacture of high-octane alcohol ate up more than two million tons of potatoes, sixty thousand tons of grain, and nearly sixty million liters of fruit.97 Nazi ideologues argued that agricul tural resources could be put to far better uses, judging from the benefits Americans had reaped from Prohibition. A 1941 antialco hol treatise written by two SS officers claimed that the American ban had resulted not just in declines in mental illness, mortality, and days missed at work--but also in increased purchases of shoes, clothing, and foods like milk, coffee, and cheese. The au thors quoted U.S. Steel magnate H. S. Dulaney's opinion that Pro hibition ("one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of civilization") had enormously improved the lives of his 300,000 workers; Henry Ford is cited as stating that Prohibition had made possible the eight-hour day and the five-day week. The SS tee totalers blamed the repeal of Prohibition on the "unscrupulous propaganda of alcohol-capitalists" but also pointed to the hopeful fact that even after the collapse of the federal ban in 1933, many American states continued to bar the sale of alcohol (e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, and Mississippi).98 Health, in short, was only one of several concerns behind the Nazi antialcohol campaign. Apart from cancer or the damage to labor power or even injury to the German "germ plasm," alcohol posed a symbolic threat to the Nazi state and body, as to culture and civilization generally. Racial subterfuge was sometimes in voked--as when Jewish manufacturers of alcoholic beverages were attacked as "liquor Jews"--but the more prominent theme was the equation of alcohol and degeneracy. The shiftless, out-ofwork drunkard was the imagined polar opposite of the Nazi work aholic; the indolent, sedentary boozer violated the "man in mo tion" ethic of Nazism (see fig. 5.5). The loquacious exuberance THE NAZI DIET 151 Zwei Manner -- zwei Weltanschauungen Manwo .(. ea.3Haim- w-s.jg) Fig. 5.5. "Two Men--Two World Views." Germany's foremost antitobacco journal contrasts the sedentary boozer with the energetic "can-do" Nazi man in motion. Source: Reine Luft 21 (1939): 13.