Germans on Welfare

The welfare state was one of the pillars of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar experiment in democracy depended to no small degree upon the welfare system's ability to give German citizens at least a fundamental level of material and mental security in the face of the new risks to which they had been exposed by the effects of the lost war, revolution, and inflation. But the problems of the postwar period meant that, even in its best years, the Weimar welfare state was dangerously overburdened. The onset of the Depression and the growth of mass unemployment after 1929 destroyed republican democracy and the welfare state upon which it was based. On the ruins of Weimar's social republic, the Nazis built a murderous racial state. Adopting a "history of everyday life" perspective, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler, shows how welfare discourse and policy were translated into welfare practices by local officials and appropriated, contested, and re-negotiated by millions of welfare clients.

First sentence: Detlev Peukert has argued that in the 1920s, Germany broke with its nineteenth-century past more abruptly, more distinctly than any other western industrial nation.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Editions

1

Pages

304

ISBN

9780195118780

Data source: Wikidata