Going Barefoot in Warsaw during the First World War

Introduction

In his groundbreaking study of nearly thirty years ago, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Robert Darnton examined a bizarre incident in the daily lives of a group of eighteenth-century French printing shop workers who ceremoniously executed a large number of cats. Darnton’s rich interpretation linked the workers’ action, which they celebrated in reenactments, to popular culture, social protest, meanings of sexuality, and relationships between different social groups and animals, including those kept as pets. By looking at the great cat massacre from a number of perspectives, Darnton was able to translate for the modern reader, who might otherwise be repulsed by the slaughter of animals, the meaning and intent of the printers’ humorous insult. ¹

This article will attempt to discuss how another entirely unexplored and seemingly unimportant episode, at least to grand historical narratives, can open up multiple lines of inquiry. In the course of my research on everyday life in Warsaw during the Great War, I came across an intriguing phenomenon—one might even call it a movement—of going “barefoot” (boso in Polish) during the last two years of the war. Initiated by students from Warsaw’s institutions of higher education as a means of symbolic protest against collapsed living standards, the barefoot movement would quickly spread to other groups. As it did, it generated a discourse that revealed existing cultural, political, ethnic, social, and gender-based tensions among an urban population made destitute by the exactions of the Great War.

Having mined Warsaw’s daily press for any kind of reference to the barefoot movement, I have attempted in these pages to make some sense of this phenomenon—its claimed and actual origins, its practical and ideological motivations, and its several possible meanings. Analysis linking metropolitan cultural life in Warsaw to everyday social and economic realities during the First World War has not figured in the existing historiography. ² For central Europe more generally, a recent conference devoted to “cultures at war” in the Austro-Hungarian territories also failed for the most part to connect cultural issues to the material factors that determined the substance of daily lives in wartime. ³ However, some guidance to my efforts was found in studies of the wartime cultural histories of Paris, London, and Berlin contained in the second volume of the major collaborative project Capital Cities at War edited by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert. ⁴ Particularly useful is Winter’s general observation that “the first fully industrialized war in history precipitated a deluge of traditional forms of language, perception and signifying practices.” ⁵ This “nostalgic turn” was one vector of metropolitan cultural life, according to Winter, while the other moved in the opposite direction—that is, in anticipation of the future. As we will see, both vectors characterized the barefoot movement, whose main site of cultural performance was the street.

The Economic and Political Context

The barefoot movement, which peaked in the summer months of 1917 and again in 1918, was said (with some exaggeration) to have embraced half of the city’s population. ⁶ However, even the movement’s most avid supporters in the Polish press were forced to admit that this percentage had been swelled by a population impoverished by the collapse of Warsaw’s economy in the last two years of the war. Warsaw’s poor, in other words, simply could not afford and did not wear leather shoes and boots, which were in acute shortage. As crushing wartime poverty traveled up the social ladder, many were indeed fortunate to wear wooden clogs, which like practically every good and commodity in the local economy, had become considerably if not prohibitively expensive. ⁷ These shortages in footwear and of leather shoes in particular reduced existing differences in attire between workers and intelligentsia, which before the war had been far more pronounced. ⁸

Thus, we first need to examine the barefoot movement within the larger context of Warsaw’s wartime economy. An almost complete disruption in the supply of coal already in the war’s first months dealt a crippling blow to industrial production in the city, reducing output by 70–75 percent by the end of 1914. ⁹ The impact on employment was equally devastating, and no recovery was possible so long as the war continued, thanks to the requisitioning of raw materials, machines, industrial equipment, and even entire factories first by the Russians and then more systematically by the Germans. Despite massive voluntary and coerced labor migration that substantially reduced the city’s total population by 20 percent, barely one-fourth of Warsaw’s prewar labor force was employed at the end of the war, a mere twenty to thirty thousand workers whose standard of living had been reduced by part-time employment and steep inflation. While nominal wages may have doubled during the war years, real wages experienced a dramatic decline as the overall cost of living in Warsaw increased by approximately 667 percent, with half of that coming in 1918. Costs of food and clothing most rapidly inflated, increasing by a factor of 8.65, while fuel costs increased by a factor of 4.71. German-imposed rationing in Warsaw of practically all goods and commodities—their shortages created by German requisitioning in the first place—created a thriving black market where prices were three to four times higher than official ones. ¹⁰

Such was the case with leather, which during the First World War was commonly requisitioned by belligerent states and armies. ¹¹ In Warsaw, leather was already reported to be in short supply in the winter of 1914–1915 because of requisitioning in localities to the west of the city that had come under the occupation of Central Powers. Thus, plans for relieving local unemployment by filling Russian army orders for a million boots came to naught. ¹² While inflation was relatively contained during the first year of the war when Warsaw remained under Russian rule, prices increased on practically a daily basis a few months following German takeover of the city in August 1915. As a consequence of the requisitioning of supplies outside the city that were normally transported to Warsaw, long lines began to form at grocery stores, the number of beggars multiplied and with them, as Aleksander Kraushar recalled, the visible presence of people completely without footwear regardless of weather conditions. At the same time many who had been relatively well off before the war were now reduced to wearing wooden clogs. ¹³

As leather and then wooden footwear came into ever shorter supply while the war continued, like other essential goods (especially food), they became targets of speculation which further fueled inflation. At the beginning of 1917, the average price of a pair of leather shoes was 25 rubles, before the Russian currency was replaced by the Polish mark at an admittedly artificial rate of 1:1, which lead to the new currency’s almost immediate loss of 25 percent of its value. With that in mind, the price of a normal pair of shoes in January would have been between 30–35 marks, at least double the prewar price. On 22 July 1917, the reported price of a pair of shoes was 110 Polish marks, and two weeks later it had reached 120 Polish marks, placing shoes well beyond the reach of not only workers but also the lower ranks of the intelligentsia. ¹⁴ A shoe factory operated by the city and employing 150 workers was opened at the end of 1917 with the intention of selling shoes at 80 marks, but production experienced considerable difficulties because of the existing energy and raw material shortages. ¹⁵ In any event, municipal intervention had little visible impact on the market despite the issuing of ration cards for the footwear produced by this factory. Shortly thereafter, their prices too increased by 20–30 marks. ¹⁶ By August 1918, the black market price for shoes reportedly ranged between 220 and 240 marks. ¹⁷

While the emergence of the barefoot movement can be attributed most directly to the shortages and high prices of footwear, the most fundamental daily challenge faced by Varsovians was the procurement of food. The “turnip winter” of 1916–1917 had been especially difficult throughout central Europe, but its effects were felt even more so in Warsaw. According to Belinda Davis, Berlin experienced a “virtual famine” in the winter of 1916–1917, as the caloric intake of the average German male during the second half of the war fell well under half that of 3,400 calories consumed by his British counterpart. ¹⁸ In Warsaw, which already experienced major food riots in June 1916, official rations were set at two-thirds of the norms prevailing in Germany. If a Polish Socialist Party (PPS) appeal is to be believed, however, workers who still remained employed in Warsaw in the spring of 1917 received three pounds of potatoes, a quarter pound of kasza, and 4.5 pounds of bread every two weeks, “nutrition which is insufficient for a small child.” According to the PPS, Varsovians generally received barely 37 percent of the food available to German state subjects. ¹⁹ Consequently, Warsaw experienced a second round of hunger riots on 11–12 May, which began with a demonstration of women and children in front of city hall in protest of the shortage of potatoes, whose transport to Warsaw was forbidden by the occupation regime, and ended in an assault on dozens of grocery stores and sweetshops throughout the city. ²⁰ Aside from intensifying street patrols, dispatching two new companies of infantry to the city, and banning window displays and imposing restrictions on consumption in sweetshops, the German occupation regime did nothing to alleviate the food crisis in Warsaw. ²¹ Instead, in February 1918 official rations in Warsaw were cut to a theoretical 891 calories per person. ²²

Although tensions ran particularly high in Warsaw because of the severity of the food crisis, growing hunger was not the only cause of conflicts in the city that pitted elements of the population against the German occupation authorities on the eve of and during the emergence of the barefoot movement in the spring and summer of 1917. Police beatings of demonstrating students on 1 and 3 May had led to strikes and expulsions at Warsaw University and the Polytechnic Institute, which were temporarily closed after students refused to pay tuition. ²³ Declining real wages and layoffs had resulted in strikes and mass arrests in Warsaw’s militarized metal and machine-building factories in April and again in July, the latter followed by street skirmishes and the erection of barricades. ²⁴ Finally, the arrest of Józef Piłsudski by the German authorities in July 1917 was accompanied by demonstrations on the major midtown thoroughfares of Krakowskie Przedmieście and Nowy Świat, and to the breaking of windows in the offices of Goniec, Godzina Polski, and Głos, Polish press organs perceived as outlets favored by the occupation regime. ²⁵

It was in this context dominated above all by the acute food shortages that the barefoot movement came to life. Like food, shoes and footwear had become increasingly inaccessible. Like food, shoes had become an object of thieves as children fortunate enough to have them were reportedly kidnapped and stripped of their belongings. ²⁶ However, unlike food, one could survive at least part of the year without shoes. It was this existential reality that created an opportunity to transform dire necessity into a patriotic virtue, to engage in protest without provoking yet another confrontation with the authorities, and to gain publicity for a “Polish” cause in a heavily censored daily press seeking any means to express itself freely.

Origins and Motivations

Warsaw was not the only Central European city to have experienced a barefoot movement during the war. Although Catholic sources subsequently attributed initiation of the Warsaw movement to one Father Czeczot who supposedly set the example and began to call for going barefoot already in the summer of 1916, ²⁷ the movement did not take root until a year later. By then the Polish student organization Bratnia Pomoc at Warsaw’s institutions of higher education had become the main source of the movement’s activists, citing as its inspiration “the examples of Würzburg, Vienna, and several provincial Polish cities as well as the voice of public opinion as expressed in numerous articles [about the shortage and price of shoes] in the Warsaw press.” ²⁸ In particular, the German movement called on youth in institutions of secondary and higher education to sacrifice their feet for the fatherland so that soldiers at the front had a sufficient supply of boots. The Warsaw press noted the establishment of “barefoot leagues” in cities like Cologne, Strasbourg, and Breslau already in the spring of 1917, which had helped to spread the movement’s growing popularity in Germany. ²⁹

By citing German cities as their model, the students and their supporters in an otherwise muzzled press clearly sought to divert the attention of German occupation authorities. As already mentioned, students in Warsaw’s institutions of higher education had already drawn their fair share of such attention. The initially hailed reopening of Warsaw University and the Polytechnic Institute as “Polish” institutions of higher education in November 1915 soon turned to disappointment in their lack of autonomy under German supervision. Following the dissolution of the Education Department of the self-governing Warsaw Citizens’ Committee, which resulted from the assumption by the German civil administration of control over supervisory personnel, textbooks, and curricula in the city’s schools in February 1916, a student strike was narrowly averted as faculty senates were able to convince students to remain in their classes. ³⁰ The following year, however, students could not be persuaded by faculty and rectors to relent from their demands for complete autonomy of Warsaw’s two institutions of higher education, and following their refusal to pay fees by a 21 June deadline, activities at the two schools were suspended indefinitely. ³¹ Student organizations were then dislodged from their locale at Warsaw University and students whose permanent residence was outside of Warsaw were ordered to leave the city. ³²

Thus, those students from the Bratnia Pomoc organization who remained in Warsaw safely cited German inspiration for their “barefoot action.” This strategy apparently proved successful, as the German authorities paid little heed to the barefoot movement and to its promotion in the daily press. However, in Warsaw’s case the idea of home front sacrifice for the front and for the cause of the Central Powers was an obvious nonstarter if the movement were to gain support. Instead, the real motivations for joining the movement and going barefoot were not only different but also mixed. One of the strongest was that it provided an apolitical vehicle to protest against a collapsed standard of living. An afternoon march of barefoot Varsovians down Aleje Ujazdowskie on 22 July 1917, designed to publicize the movement, was preceded by visits of its young male and female activists to the editorial offices of Kurjer Warszawski, the largest mass-circulation daily in the city, to gain support for their cause. ³³ The students’ subsequently published appeal cited “the unimaginable inflation of prices of footwear as well as woolen and cotton goods which, along with the actual absence of stockings on the market, threatens catastrophe with the approach of winter” as one of the main reasons to go barefoot in summer months and to affect both private and social savings. ³⁴ Nowa Gazeta, which was initially critical of the movement, nevertheless maintained that its main goal was to bring down the prices of footwear and hosiery. ³⁵ In restarting the movement in the spring of 1918, appeals distributed at Warsaw University emphasized its “purely economic” motive. ³⁶

However, the question of who or what was responsible for these shortages and high prices reveals another of the movement’s motivations, namely, an opportunity to express growing Polish hostility towards Jews by means of a partial and thinly disguised boycott rather than an open and full-scale one, which the German occupation authorities would not have tolerated. That hostility was voiced frequently enough during the first year of the war, when Warsaw remained under Russian rule. Following their takeover of the city in August 1915, however, the German occupation authorities made it clear that the public aggravation of ethnic tensions would not be permitted. ³⁷ In his first meeting with editors of Warsaw’s local dailies and weeklies, the new German press director Georg Cleinow called for a complete suspension of Polish–Jewish hostilities in print as well as in social and public spheres. ³⁸ One visible consequence was a change on the masthead of Gazeta Poranna 2 grosze, which still under the Russians contained the slogan “Don’t Buy from Jews.” This would disappear and be replaced by a milder message: “We accept advertisements from Christian firms only.”

The Germans would discover, however, that calming Polish–Jewish relations in the midst of wartime deprivation was easier said than done. Consequently, the careful balancing act between Poles and Jews that the occupation authorities initially sought to perform was gradually abandoned in favor of allowing the Polish side to renew the expression of its economic grievances at Jewish expense. This had the added benefit of deflecting hostility from the main culprit for the city’s economic hardships, the German occupation regime.

Throughout the war, and especially as inflationary pressures mounted, the Polish nationalist press accused Jews of price-gouging, a charge that would quickly become a constant refrain. Already in 1914 came demands for the imposition of controls to contain the “exploitation” and “profiteering” of wholesale merchants of soap, candles, soda, and other articles whose prices were deemed “excessive.” ³⁹ These barely disguised attacks on Jewish commerce became even more transparent once controls were imposed and newspapers like Kurjer Warszawski published the names and addresses of principally Jewish storeowners who had been fined or jailed for violating price regulations. ⁴⁰ Rumors of Jewish hoarding became particularly rife in February 1915, when Russian police—as a prelude to future requisitioning—inspected commercial stores and stocks in Warsaw’s 4th, 7th, 8th, and 15th precincts, where they reportedly found “an enormous amount of supplies” belonging “mainly to Jews,” “speculators” who were reportedly holding on to goods and then selling the “last batch” for markups of 300 to 400 percent. ⁴¹ This would lead to calls from the otherwise “liberal” Polish weekly Tygodnik Illustrowany for an intensification of the struggle against speculation, which in its words “should have a prophylactic character, one conducted with severity and ruthlessness by all state and social actors.” ⁴²

Inflation would rapidly accelerate during the German occupation, accompanied by renewed charges against Jewish speculators, especially following the introduction of rationing at the beginning of 1916. With rations came black markets, which became rampant in Warsaw by the second half of the following year. These “bacilli of speculation” were in almost every instance in the possession of the “skullcaps” and “sidelocks,” according to Gazeta Poranna 2 grosze. ⁴³ Jews were also blamed for the high price of meat, starting in the spring of 1915. Although Jews claimed that despite high prices, no profits were being made and that every day someone was going out of business, the Polish press remained unconvinced and called for the elimination of Jewish middlemen from the meat trade. ⁴⁴ As can be seen in the case of meat, charges of Jewish hoarding, speculation, profiteering, and exploitation during the hardship of wartime quickly became an extension of the prewar nationalist agenda of reducing the Jewish presence in commerce and trade, the unfulfilled goal of the great prewar boycott of 1912–1914. ⁴⁵ Such accusations directed at Jews were hardly confined to Warsaw as the image of the speculating and profiteering Jew became widespread throughout central Europe, especially in the second half of the war when shortages, especially of food, became the norm. ⁴⁶

And so it was with shoes and hosiery, whose production and sale in Warsaw were dominated by Jews, even if the increasingly mechanized industry itself had employed large numbers of Christians before the war. ⁴⁷ In comparison with 1899, when the city was considerably smaller, the number of shoemakers in the spring of 1917 had declined by 25 percent, the number of journeymen by 40 percent, and the number of apprentices by nearly 90 percent. ⁴⁸ With German requisitioning of leather, production and employment in the shoemaking industry had practically collapsed, to which the barefoot movement and its supporters in the press appeared to be oblivious. ⁴⁹ Godzina Polski, for instance, referred to shoemakers’ arguments that requisitioning of leather had caused the rapid inflation of shoe prices as simply “the lies of speculators.” ⁵⁰ Or to cite another example, Kurjer Warszawski, in its rejection of legitimate public health concerns related to exposing one’s bare feet to Warsaw’s less than pristine streets, attacked the “pseudo-hygienists,” whose opinion “not accidentally” served the interests of “profiteers.” ⁵¹ Such code words for Jews, whether in the medical or shoemaking professions, may still have been necessary to avoid German censorship in the summer of 1917, as calls for the city to take action against “speculators” of leather and shoes referred to “secret bands” rather than Jews. ⁵² Shortly thereafter, Polish nationalists would no longer find such circumvention necessary. In responding to its own question, “Why are shoes so expensive?” Gazeta Poranna 2 grosze left no doubts as it reported on the raid conducted by the city police, a force that was overwhelmingly Polish, against “Jewish speculators” that uncovered “vast supplies of hoarded shoes” that were being withheld “in order to drive up prices.” ⁵³

Finally, it should be noted that the Bratnia Pomoc student organization was dominated by Polish nationalist youth and that hostility against Jews ran particularly high among Polish university students. Irena Krzywicka, who began her university studies in 1919, recalled that “Bratniak” was off limits to her as a Jewish student. ⁵⁴ Indeed, anti-Semitic speeches accompanied meetings to elect representatives to Bratnia Pomoc already in May 1917, immediately before the emergence of the barefoot movement, while at the same time the Polish nationalist press complained about the percentage of Jewish medical students at Warsaw University. ⁵⁵ Jewish students found virtually no support from the university’s academic authorities, who refused to recognize a Jewish student association, referring to it as an “alien national organization of separatist tendencies” in a “Polish institution of higher education.” ⁵⁶ Compared to Łódź, which lacked institutions of higher education and where a march of the barefoot initiated by Jewish workers was joined by Polish youth, ⁵⁷ the student-led barefoot movement in Warsaw separated Poles from Jews. Indeed, tensions at Warsaw University would reach a boiling point in November 1918 when fighting broke out between Polish and Jewish students. ⁵⁸

Thus, if we think of the movement as an expression of economic and social protest, against substantially higher costs of living and substantially lower living standards, it was also part and parcel of an economic anti-Semitism aimed at Jewish commerce in the city, which had long been accompanied by notions of reducing the presence of Jews in the free professions and, by extension, in institutions of higher education. “Going barefoot,” in other words, could also mean depriving Jewish shoe and stocking-makers, cast in the role of “speculators” and “profiteers,” of their livelihoods and striking a blow against Jewish commerce in the city. Of course, the Jewish poor suffered from the same dire economic conditions, and likewise had to make do with recycled and repaired footwear or go without entirely, but this was of no relevance to those of an anti-Semitic mindset. Since the main cause for the high prices and acute shortage of footwear, German requisitioning, could not be addressed publicly, Jews remained the only available target. That the German occupation regime tolerated the barefoot movement and its public manifestations, as well as other expressions of anti-Semitism toward the end of the war, is an indication of how politically convenient, and perhaps even necessary, the Jewish target had become.

Conclusion

The barefoot movement in Warsaw was a wartime phenomenon that ended with the war and left little trace, except perhaps in the area of women’s fashion. Confined to a specific time and setting, “going barefoot” meant different things to different people. It offered a means to speak out against the war’s acute economic hardships, to strike a blow against Jewish commerce in the city, to promote a populist agenda against the “cosmopolitanism” of the big city and its elites, to express empathy with Warsaw’s increasingly desperate urban poor, and to participate in the rapidly (and, for some, alarmingly) changing world of women’s fashion.

In specifically cultural terms, by examining the barefoot movement we can find evidence of the previously mentioned two vectors of wartime metropolitan life highlighted by Jay Winter, a “nostalgic turn” of moving back in time as part of a conservative project of national reconstruction, in this case Polish, and a future-oriented cultural iconoclasm that challenged convention. In Warsaw as elsewhere, the turn toward tradition was accompanied by an emphasis on sobriety and modesty which was apparent already before the German takeover of the city from the Russians, whether in support for state-imposed prohibition of sales and consumption of alcohol or in calls for a ban on horse-racing. ⁸¹ Cinemas and cabarets also drew the attention of Warsaw’s cultural warriors, venues of relatively cheap popular urban entertainment whose legitimacy, morality, and transgressive nature came under attack both before and after the German occupation. ⁸² And, as we have seen, in a heightened atmosphere of moral austerity, targeting women and their fashion as provocative or frivolous was shared alike by both critics and supporters of the barefoot movement in the Warsaw press. This was because women’s participation in the barefoot movement did indeed challenge tradition, in a sense by wrapping itself in it. Less clothing and bare legs, even if cast in terms of a return to a simple and more natural past, were threatening to a social and cultural order that viewed these developments in women’s fashion as a loosening of constraints and to the “sobriety” and “modesty” they were designed to uphold.

In his discussion of metropolitan wartime culture, Winter makes reference to Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgics. The former consist largely of elites who invoked tradition to justify their power and policies, while the latter, with a “wistful smile,” “build imaginary cathedrals in the air, cathedrals that may never have existed in the first place.” ⁸³ According to Boym, reflective nostalgia, aware of the impossibility of a full return to the imagined past, is instead a form of “deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future.” ⁸⁴ The barefoot movement, I would argue, was “reflective” in its nostalgia. One cannot imagine that it took very seriously its own invocation of the imagined customs of the traditional Polish peasant “who goes barefoot even in winter” as something worthy of imitation, even if participants in the movement were genuinely moved by visible evidence of unprecedented misery among Warsaw’s lower-class inhabitants who faced precisely that prospect. At the same time the movement’s playfulness, beginning with Fornalski’s performances as a barefoot dandy on Aleje Ujazdowskie and culminating in the morally “outrageous” challenges to existing convention on the part of its young female activists, pointed to the future—as a new form of protest on the one hand ⁸⁵ and a real revolution in women’s attire that was hardly confined to Warsaw on the other.

There also remains a more hidden agenda, if one can even call it an agenda, because it was never explicitly stated and cannot be confirmed by any direct evidence. In the face of the existential catastrophe that in one way or another affected practically every resident of Warsaw, where incredible hunger and foul-tasting “bread” would dominate collective memory of the war, where marriage and birth rates would decline by half already by the end of 1916, where the death rate would more than double by the end of 1917 as a consequence of starvation and disease, ⁸⁶ “going barefoot” in warm weather months may just have offered a means of psychological escape from these conditions. The movement’s youthful enthusiasm and its expression in farcical street performance appeared—if not exactly to laugh in the face of death—at least to smile in the face of conditions that had brought about a rapidly increasing mortality. In other words, “going barefoot” may have offered one of the few available coping mechanisms to deal with the nightmare of everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War. If this is so, then perhaps we may have discovered a final key to the movement’s widespread support in the press and its general popularity as it quickly spread from students to other social groups.