The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic

by Edward Dickinson

Overview

The model of the development of child welfare policy presented here illuminates the complexity of the struggles from which modern social policy emerged, and accounts for the ways in which similar policies could be adapted to changing political systems—monarchical, republican, or fascist. Following a period of policy innovation, rapid institutional expansion, and intensifying ideological conflict before the First World War, Dickinson shows, the period from 1918 to 1961 saw a succession of efforts to reconcile competing policy agendas within different political contexts: the corporatist-democratic compromise worked out in the early years of the Weimar Republic, which broke down in the economic and political crisis at the end of the 1920s; the disastrous Nazi synthesis of authoritarianism and racism; and a revitalized corporatist-democratic framework, stabilized on the basis of the antitotalitarian consensus and of psychotherapeutic theory and practice, after 1949.

Historians of modern Germany and of the welfare state will find this a challenging and illuminating approach to important theoretical and historical questions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674688629
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1996
Series:	Harvard Historical Studies , #121
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Edward Ross Dickinson is Lecturer in History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Society, Politics, and Modern Social Policy

1. The Inception of Modern Child Welfare Policy, 1840-1895

2. Competing Reform Conceptions in the 1890s

3. Expansion and Consolidation, 1900-1914

4. The Struggle over Child Welfare Policy, 1910-1914

5. Child Welfare Policy in the Great War, 1914-1918

6. Revolution and the National Child Welfare Act, 1918-1924

7. Child Welfare, Bureaucracy, and "Cultural War," 1924-1929

8. The Great Depression and National Socialism, 1930-1945

9. Child Welfare Policy in the Federal Republic, 1945-1961

Conclusion: Democracy, Fascism, and Social Policy

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

Its contributions to the fields of welfare state history and modern German history are clear and compelling.

Editorial Reviews

At the center of Edward Ross Dickinson's excellent study are the contests and conflicts that shaped the field of child welfare in Germany across four changes of regime between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1960s. This long time span—and Dickinson's adept charting of continuities and ruptures in the visions and practices of child welfare across it—bespeaks only one of the book's many ambitions. Impressively cognizant of the pertinent historiography of state, welfare, and civil society in Germany and other European countries, Dickinson's book resituates social reform and social policy at the heart of the state-civil society nexus in modern Germany...Grounded in an obviously rich collection of archival sources, Dickinson analyzes a myriad of organizations and institutions...A nuanced analysis.

Kathleen Canningn Historical Review

By focusing on the politics of the German child welfare system from the mid-19th to the late 20th century, Dickinson's excellent study raises provocative questions concerning the connections among the process of modernization, the development of the welfare state, and the rise of fascism.

Choice

Through an examination of child welfare policy in Germany between 1871 and 1961, this study addresses continuity and discontinuity in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history and the relationship between the modern welfare state and modern regimes forms (e.g. democracy and fascism). Dr. Dickinson concludes, among others, that the politics of child welfare policy in Germany reflected democratic continuities between the Empire and the Federal Republic that were as important as the antidemocratic continuities between the Empire and the Third Reich.

International Review of Social History

Its contributions to the fields of welfare state history and modern German history are clear and compelling.

Mary Jo Maynes

At the center of Edward Ross Dickinson's excellent study are the contests and conflicts that shaped the field of child welfare in Germany across four changes of regime between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1960s. This long time span—and Dickinson's adept charting of continuities and ruptures in the visions and practices of child welfare across it—bespeaks only one of the book's many ambitions. Impressively cognizant of the pertinent historiography of state, welfare, and civil society in Germany and other European countries, Dickinson's book resituates social reform and social policy at the heart of the state-civil society nexus in modern Germany...Grounded in an obviously rich collection of archival sources, Dickinson analyzes a myriad of organizations and institutions...A nuanced analysis.

American Historical Review - Kathleen Canning