Read an Excerpt
Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919â?"1933
By Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, Young-Sun Hong PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05793-4
CHAPTER 1
The Politics of Welfare Reform, 1919–1923
Social democracy, progressivism, Christian conservatism, and the Shaping of the Weimar State
The revolution fundamentally altered the position of Social Democracy within the German political system, and the effects of the revolution were no less profound in the welfare sector, where it created a complex antagonistic relationship between socialist welfare reformers and organized church charities, than in other spheres of German society. Although the SPD founded its own national welfare organization Workers' Welfare (Arbeiterwohlfahrt) in December 1919, the Protestant Inner Mission and the Catholic Caritasverband had a head start of three-quarters of a century, and Workers' Welfare never became as large as its confessional counterparts, which still had broad support both within the government and in the public at large. Nevertheless, Workers' Welfare was extremely influential in the subsequent development of the Weimar welfare system because of both the reforms it advocated and the tremendous catalytic effect which its mere existence had on the Inner Mission and the Caritasverband.
In the immediate postwar period, the Inner Mission was extremely vocal in its opposition to Social Democracy, revolution, and the Republic, and it maintained close relations to the DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei). On the other hand, thanks to the support of the Center Party, which played a pivotal role in the Weimar coalition, the Caritasverband was quite successful working within the system, and the efforts of the Catholic organization to preserve the rights of voluntary welfare redounded to the benefit of the Inner Mission as well as bourgeois charity organizations. In the long run, this mutual provocation forced both Workers' Welfare and the organized church charities to articulate more fully their own visions of the role of welfare in the new Republic and become more strident and comprehensive in their criticisms of their opponents. While the Inner Mission and the Caritasverband maintained that Social Democratic demands for far-reaching social reforms were, in fact, symptoms of that moral decline which—as had been the case in 1848—had culminated in revolution, the Social Democrats argued that social reform was the precondition for moral renewal because a social order based on private property was the ultimate cause of mass poverty. The Social Democrats dismissed the attacks by the confessional charities upon their materialism and political sinfulness, as well as the insistence by the church charities upon the primacy of moral renewal, as thinly veiled attempts to retain class privileges so that they could continue to propagate notions of deference and subordination which had no place in a social, democratic republic. In turn, these Social Democratic attacks on the pernicious political effects of bourgeois and church charity and the implication of these groups in the authoritarian system of the Kaiserreich forced voluntary organizations to claim with increasing fervor that they had rights which preceded those of the state and that they could never be subordinated to the authority of democratic, parliamentary government or supplanted by the socialized welfare system envisioned by Workers' Welfare.
Although Progressive reformers were assured of a pivotal role in the shaping of the Weimar welfare system by virtue of their longtime engagement in the cause of welfare reform, they occupied an ambiguous position. Like the Social Democrats, the Progressives regarded labor as the essential characteristic of citizenship, and they sought to construct a new social contract by arguing that the state was obligated to guarantee—through preventive, therapeutic social services—those social rights to work, health, and education which would enable the individual to fulfill the more extensive social obligations imposed upon the citizen by the welfare state. Their goal was to create a social, democratic Volksstaat which would transcend both bourgeois individualism and the excessive collectivism of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. However, in contrast to the Social Democratic argument that the poor should have a legal entitlement to assistance under specified conditions, the Progressives insisted that the moral right to public assistance could never be legally codified. They argued instead that the democratic goal of equal opportunity could best be achieved through the individualized determination of need by trained social workers and by the continued provision of these social services on a subsidiary basis. The Progressives also maintained that state social policy programs could never completely obviate the need for voluntary welfare and that individualized personal help would always be necessary to supplement state social policy programs. While this emphasis on the necessity of voluntary welfare created substantial common ground between the Progressives and the confessional welfare groups, the focus of the Progressives on work and social rights and their understanding of need as primarily a social phenomenon, rather than the result of individual moral failings, had much more in common with the Social Democrats than with either the confessional organizations or the organizations representing the various groups of the new poor created by the war and the inflation.
Like the DDP itself, however, Progressive reformers were increasingly faced with the problem of bridging the gap between their claim to transcend differences of class and confession and the realities of Weimar politics. Although Progressive welfare reformers castigated what they perceived as the particularism of the organizations representing the new poor and argued with increasing vehemence that only the further professionalization of social work could provide an effective antidote to the undue politicization of personal help, they were themselves constantly tossed back and forth between Workers' Welfare, the major confessional welfare organizations, the interest groups representing the new poor, and the Labor Ministry. Although the Progressives ultimately played a major role in shaping the Weimar welfare system, they were only able to do so in alliance with the other major reform groups and, all too frequently, on the terms established by these groups.
"We Are the Subject, Not the Object, of Social Welfare": Social Democracy and Workers' Welfare
Despite their growing influence in municipal politics, the Social Democrats had had little opportunity before World War I to participate in municipal poor relief and little inclination to theorize about poor law reform. Instead, they directed their reformist energies toward labor law and the social insurance system. During the war, the participation of some Social Democratic women in the National Women's Service had not fundamentally changed this situation, and only when they entered the government en masse after the revolution did the Social Democrats begin to reflect systematically on the problem of poor law and welfare reform.
The novelty of the Social Democratic strategy for welfare reform—and its permanent challenge to both confessional and bourgeois organizations—lay in its insistence that the social question could only be solved through political struggle and radical social change to eliminate poverty as a class phenomenon, rather than through personal help provided to indigent individuals. The overriding aim of Social Democratic welfare reformers was the democratization of both charity and poor relief because they viewed this as the precondition for transforming public and private benevolence into a generalized system of social self-help. The Social Democrats detested the very idea of charity because the display of gratitude expected from the recipients of such largesse reinforced traditional patterns of political subordination and social deference which were incompatible with the idea of democratic equality. This antipathy extended to poor relief as well, and the Social Democrats made the democratization of charity and poor relief their top priority in order to demonstrate—to use one of their most popular slogans—that the working classes were "not only the object, but also the subject, of social work."
However, private charitable activity had historically lain beyond the legislative competence of both Reich and local government, and the charities tenaciously resisted all attempts by the Social Democrats to "politicize" their work, especially the Caritasverband, which saw this challenge as yet another stage in its own Kulturkampf against the sovereign, secular state. Nevertheless, the Social Democrats insisted that charity organizations had to be subjected to the sovereign authority of a democratically elected government because providing for the poor was one of the essential tasks of the state and could not, therefore, be left to the discretion of private individuals or associations. As Hedwig Wachenheim, the daughter of a wealthy banker who joined the SPD in early 1914 and became one of its leading welfare theorists, argued, democracy could only be perfected by subordinating the charities to democratic institutions and the authority of organized public opinion. Through the 1920s Wachenheim was the most vocal Social Democratic advocate of the "primacy of public welfare" and the most trenchant defender of the sovereignty of democratic self-government against the traditional privileges of church charities. Ultimately, this democratization of voluntary welfare would have entailed its "communalization" and the transformation of welfare offices into the "executive organ of the public welfare will [Fürsorgewillen]."
The goal of democratizing the welfare system and imbuing it with a socialist spirit was closely connected to the problem of social work training for working-class women because the Social Democrats insisted that only the participation of the working classes themselves could transform social work from a charitable undertaking into an expression of democratic solidarity. However, the major obstacle to social work training for these women was the fact that they could not afford the tuition demanded by the existing social work schools. Since the fall of 1919, Social Democratic women had been calling for the establishment of special courses to give working-class women a knowledge of the fundamentals of social work. In response to both this pressure and a request by the Interior Ministry, the Conference of German Social Women's Schools (Konferenz Sozialer Frauenschulen)—which had been founded in January 1917 by representatives of the existing social work schools (or social women's schools, as they had been known since the turn of the century) to represent the collective interests of these schools and the nascent profession—decided in early 1920 to sponsor six-month training courses at the social work schools in Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg. Approximately 150 women took part in these courses, which were funded by the socialist trade unions, the Interior Ministry, and the Labor Ministry. Even though these courses were generally regarded as successful, the Konferenz feared that they would lower the level of social work training, and thus the status of the profession, and they were not repeated after their initial offering. Instead, the Konferenz proposed that those municipal governments which needed more social workers provide stipendia to permit workingclass women to attend existing social work schools. Workers' Welfare itself also offered a number of short-term courses to provide social workers with an overview of existing legislation. However, the hurdles faced by workingclass women were raised even higher by the training regulations issued in October 1920 by the Prussian Interior Ministry.
Beyond these programmatic statements and immediate goals, however, Social Democratic welfare experts did not initially have a concrete vision of what a modern democratic welfare system would look like. The decision to establish Workers' Welfare was taken primarily on pragmatic grounds which reveal more about the dynamic which propelled the organizational consolidation of voluntary charity in the early years of the Republic than about the Social Democratic vision of welfare reform. Social Democrats were often excluded from the official welfare policy committees because there was no organization to officially represent the interests of the working classes in these matters. These problems were further complicated by the fact that both the Reich Labor Ministry and the Prussian Ministry of Public Welfare, which were the most important sources of funding for charitable work, preferred to negotiate exclusively with the centralized welfare organizations. Both the Caritasverband and the Inner Mission already had nationwide networks and were consequently in a much more favorable position to obtain government subsidies and secure foreign relief than were socialist welfare activists. As Heinrich Schulz, State Secretary in the Interior Ministry, told the SPD central committee, although a great deal of money lay at the disposal of the Prussian Ministry of Public Welfare, he found himself in a difficult position when fifty church-affiliated organizations applied for funding, while there was no separate organization to represent the interests of the working classes. For this reason, he urged the SPD to create an organization "which corresponded to what the bourgeois parties called 'voluntary charity.'"
Workers' Welfare was officially founded in December 1919 by the SPD as an affiliated organization. The head of the national organization was Marie Juchacz, a member of the Reichstag and chair of the SPD Women's Bureau, and its central committee was made up of representatives of the party and the socialist unions as well as experienced social workers. The women's movement had generally been marginalized within the SPD itself, and the women who played a leading role in Workers' Welfare—including Juchacz, Wachenheim, Dorothea Hirschfeld, Adele Schreiber-Krieger, Elisabeth Kirschmann-Röhl (Juchacz's sister), and Louise Schroeder—hoped that the organization would become a vehicle for advancing the goals of the women's movement within the party. As Juchacz later wrote, Workers' Welfare was "the ground on which the women's movement grows and thrives." These women believed that it was necessary to establish an autonomous women's sphere within the socialist movement because, no matter how unresponsive or antagonistic their male comrades might be to their interests, the class differences between working-class and bourgeois women were still too great to allow them to join with bourgeois feminists to form an independent women's party.
The preliminary guidelines which were published in June 1920 stated that the primary goals of Workers' Welfare were to promote the interests of the working classes by placing party comrades in key administrative positions in the growing network of municipal welfare offices; mobilize the working classes and provide them with the training necessary to enable them to occupy the many voluntary and honorary positions in these offices; and represent the working classes at all levels of government and in umbrella organizations of private charity organizations. Although the leaders of the organization were either unaware of or not especially concerned by the ambiguous status of the organization as a voluntary, societal association devoted to the communalization of all such organizations, they nevertheless insisted that the activity of Workers' Welfare was qualitatively different from that of bourgeois and church charity organizations because it was not charity, but rather the organized self-help of free and equal citizens, who recognized their solidaristic obligations to one another. As Johann Caspari, the director of the Berlin-Neukolln youth welfare office and later mayor of Brandenburg, argued, "Democracy does not exhaust itself at the ballot box, but rather means the intensive collaboration of the individual in the common welfare and interest." This maxim was applied in a very concrete manner in the fund-raising activity of the organization. Unlike the older and better-established organizations, Workers' Welfare could not depend on either government subsidies or the contributions of affluent benefactors, and its important source of funding came from union members who worked overtime and donated their wages from these Wohlfahrtsstunden to the organization (and from employers who were also expected to contribute part of the profits from these extra hours). As Minna Todenhagen, the director of the Berlin branch of Workers' Welfare, explained, the democratization of the welfare system depended as much on the activity of the local Workers' Welfare associations as it did on the democratization of the welfare bureaucracy. These local organizations, she argued, "must understand and undertake their work as social service in the service of the state." No matter whether they worked in an official or a voluntary capacity, she argued, the members of Workers' Welfare represented an auxiliary service for public welfare, not a private, societal organization, and they should "provide the points of contact from which a coordinated stream flows through the entire welfare system."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919â?"1933 by Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, Young-Sun Hong. Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
