Food Profiteering, Paper Laws, and Criminal Justice in the Bohemian Lands after 1918

Abstract The article deals with food profiteering in the Bohemian Lands after the declaration of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The new state faced a disintegrated society in which various units continued to fight each other for an advantage in the food market. While food shortages persisted, the Czechoslovak authorities had to deal with a situation in which food rationing laws had lost some of their power to distinguish between the legal and the criminal. Moreover, collective ideas about what was right and wrong, about the victims and perpetrators of food profiteering, and of whom to punish and how, varied according to the different social and ethnic affiliations of the population. Political instrumentalization of such ideas jeopardized the postwar consolidation based on the promise of a better future. Thus, the introduction of food profiteering courts with lay judges was an attempt to institutionalize conflicts over food profiteering and to reduce the impacts of the atomization of society until the economic situation improved.