Nachhaltigkeit in Kriegskochbüchern: Bedeutungswandel, sprachliche Strategien und kulinarische Anpassung

This article examines German-language wartime cookbooks from the First World War regarding linguistic strategies of coping with scarcity and conserving resources. It shows how linguistic means and recipe structures frame economic behaviour normatively and imbue it with moral value. The focus lies on the historical transformation of the concept of sustainability, which in the wartime context referred not to future-oriented responsibility but to the frugal use of limited resources and the acceptance of constraints. Lexical patterns (economical, cheap, substitute) and appellative structures reveal how language reinterprets shortage positively and valorises substitute products. The analysis demonstrates that wartime cookbooks functioned not merely as culinary guides but as linguistic and ideological instruments of social discipline, documenting a form of „crisis-induced sustainability“ in which linguistic creativity, adaptability, and moral responsibility intertwine.