This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship
among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German
welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong examines the
competing conceptions of poverty, citizenship, family, and authority
held by the state bureaucracy, socialists, bourgeois feminists, and the
major religious and humanitarian welfare organizations. She shows how
these conceptions reflected and generated bitter conflict in German
society. And she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary
government within the welfare sector in a way that paralleled the crisis
of the entire Weimar political system and created a situation in which
the Nazi critique of republican "welfare" could acquire broad political
resonance.
The book begins by tracing the transformation of Germany's traditional,
disciplinary poor-relief programs into a modern, bureaucratized and
professionalized social welfare system. It then shows how, in the second
half of the republic, attempts by both public and voluntary welfare
organizations to reduce social insecurity by rationalizing working-class
family life and reproduction alienated welfare reformers and recipients
alike from both the welfare system and the Republic itself. Hong
concludes that, in the welfare sector, the most direct continuity
between the republican welfare system and the social policies of Nazi
Germany is to be found not in the pathologies of progressive social
engineering, but rather in the rejection of the moral and political
foundations of the republican welfare system by eugenic welfare
reformers and their Nazi supporters.
Originally published in 1998.
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