Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State (Hardcover)

This volume is a 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 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 programmes 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 bo