Gluttony and the Good Life during the Time of the Apocalypse

You’re asking, what is this guy talking about - the apocalypse? I’m referring to the five years between 1943 and 1948, a time of total war and total defeat, when the four horsemen – conquest, war, famine and death – reigned supreme where I lived. And yes there was gluttony, even then. Excess is not a phenomenon of good times and abundance only, as you might think when you watch North-American TV these days. It’s not dependent on the circumstances of the day. Gluttons exist even in Spartan times, amid chaos, death and famine.

Voracity doesn’t require fancy gourmet foods, fine china or expensive wines. In fact, the first thing many Germans did after 1948, once they could get their hands on some real money again, was to gorge on food, because they’d gone without for such a long time. Stoutness and consumption of large quantities of food became a sign of status, of middle class well being. I know I mentioned this before, but the world record in dumpling eating my brother holds (42), stems from this period in German history. This was the age before diets, fitness and the whole health craze. I have been known to revel in the odd bit of overindulgence at times, but I wouldn’t consider myself a gourmand. Of course, some people, who had the means to stuff themselves when everyone else was starving, took the ideal of plumpness to the extreme. Let me introduce you to my late godfather, my uncle, Franz.

My uncle, Franz, was married to my mother’s sister, Anna. I take my middle name from him. He worked at SKF (Schwedische Kugellager Fabrik), one of Schweinfurt’s three ball-bearing plants, during the war. These factories ensured that the city was flattened by allied bombs. The heavy air raids between August 1943 and March 1945 – there were a total of seven major ones, with a combined total of 1,113 B-17 bombers -, remarkably, never caused a fatal disruption of the ball-bearing war production. It was simply moved underground. The factories were hit numerous times, but the damage was soon repaired and production continued until the end of the war. Ditto for the railroad switching yards. The city’s two stations were wrecked, but the tracks were quickly restored and service resumed.

SKF was a Swedish company, owned by the Wallenberg family. You may have heard of Raoul Wallenberg. He was a Swedish diplomat who in the last year of the war saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from being shipped to the gas chambers. He was arrested by the Soviets after the fall of Budapest and disappeared into the Gulag, never to be heard from again.

My uncle thought that he was safe from the bombing raids. The Swedes, after all, were neutral. He was a bookkeeper. But during the first major daylight raid on Schweinfurt on August 17, 1943, when 230 American B-17s dumped their bomb-load on the city, including 80 high-explosive direct hits on the city’s ball-bearing plants, he’d been buried in the rubble for two days before he’d been dug out. He’d spent over a month in the hospital. His left hip had been smashed by a chunk of concrete. He now walked with the help of a cane and with a pronounced limp. Hip replacement surgery was not on the agenda in those days of total war and the immediate years after it.

He hated Americans with a passion for the rest of his life. He blamed them for ending his soccer career. It was an imaginary career. He was too fat to play anymore, but he did enjoy going to soccer games and cheering on the local side, so much so that he usually wore out the toes of his shoes from relentlessly kicking the seats in front of him with every attack of his team. His cane and his lame leg now made that difficult. He was a fierce fan and went to every home game of the local team, FC 05 Schweinfurt. He needed a scapegoat for his shortcomings. The Americans were it.

To compensate for his inability to move around unimpeded, he became a great gourmand. He would eat at all hours of the day and night. His favorite respite was rye bread slathered thick with goose fat, seasoned with pepper and hot Hungarian paprika. And he swore by the curative values of green beans and gherkins. He devoured them in large quantities. Maybe his corpulence was predestined, what with a last name of Rahm, which means cream in German. It was a good thing that he and his wife owned a corner grocery store; otherwise his gluttony wouldn’t have been possible.

Food, of course, was strictly rationed during and after the war. My uncle, though, had access to extra coupons, acquired during his daily trips to various suppliers and farmers around the city and the surrounding countryside. I can still see him get into his grey three-wheeler truck. I believe it was called a Tempo, but I’m not sure anymore. What I remember is that I always thought that the truck would tip over onto its side when he heaved his bulk behind the wheel. This truck had one wheel in the front and two in the back. You’d see them everywhere in the years after the war, when gasoline was scarce.

I remember sitting in his living room behind the store and watching him gorge himself, while everybody was pasting ration coupons into coupon books, a nightly chore in those days. He’d jam a bib into the neck of his shirt. It acted like a table supported by his huge gut and held his rations. He had this special little saying he cited in his low-Frankish dialect, while he was stuffing his face. It went “Kloess un Faserli mache de besten Toenli.” A rough translation – “dumplings and beans generate the best tunes.” The beans, gherkins and rye bread, washed down by copious amounts of beer, were a lethal combination which triggered a volatile mixture of foul-smelling gas. He broke wind in tumultuous explosions that rolled like thunder and rocked you back into your chair, but nobody was allowed to comment or applaud, for that matter. His putrid eruptions were ignored. We couldn’t even laugh. My aunt never paused in whatever she was doing, just kept on licking and pasting as if nothing had happened.

My uncle had a very low opinion of me and told me on numerous occasions that I would end up a criminal and would end my days in prison. The reason he felt that way was that I regularly raided the cigarette supply in his store, when I stayed with them for a year after the war to attend high school in the city. He never caught me in the act, but I used to smoke in the upstairs washroom, standing on the commode with the window open and left the butts on the outside sill of the window high up on the wall, never thinking that my aunt would clean outside the window, – she’d have to stand on the toilet to reach it - but she did and, of course, found the evidence. Why I didn’t simply flush them, I don’t remember, but I must have had a good reason to come up with such a stupid solution.

My uncle took care of himself. He lived to the age of 67, when he finally took his clogged arteries to that All-U-Can-Eat buffet in the sky. My aunt, who was equally huge, outlived him by 30 years. She died at age 98.