German Social Policy 2 Origins of the German Welfare State Social Policy in Germany to 1945 Bearbeitet von Prof. Dr. Dr. Michael Stolleis 1st Edition 2012 2012. Buch. xii, 188 S. Hardcover ISBN 978 3 642 22521 5 Format (B x L): 15,5 x 23,5 cm Gewicht: 467 g Weitere Fachgebiete > Geschichte > Kultur- und Ideengeschichte > Sozialgeschichte, Gender Studies Zu Inhaltsverzeichnis schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, eBooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte. Origins of the German Welfare State: Social Policy in Germany to 1945 Michael Stolleis 1 Introduction 1.1 The Cultural Conditioning and Changeability of Social Protection This book provides a historical survey of the development of social protection in Germany up to 1945.1 It is based on the realization that the modern, complex “system” of social protection is an “evolved” one and can be best understood by knowing how it came into being. It has layers of historical growth and is a far cry from the kind of rigor one expects of “systems” in the scientific or philosophical sense. But in the professional discourse of social theory and social law it may well be referred to as a “system,” and this can be useful to the historian if he is asked to specify the past phenomena he is searching for and in which he expects to find a bridge to the present. Of course, a look back at history can be useful also in that can provide today’s actors clues to how much of the past is preserved in the various structures that exist today. If something should or must be changed, it pays to examine the long-term developmental trends. Many declarations of political intent and reform projects have failed simply because they underestimated the inertia of historically evolved material. Long-term trends can be reversed only if one has detailed knowledge about the forces driving them. In this limited sense, historical information – in conjunction with sociological, economic, and legal frameworks – can also serve to lay the groundwork for innovations. Especially in the transition to one of the most difficult periods of social policy in the first decades of the new millennium, it could prove an urgent necessity to regard also the older legacies and institutions as “historically evolved.” This entails two things: one, like everything that has 1 The best overview is by Scherner (1996). M. Stolleis, Origins of the German Welfare State, German Social Policy 2, 23 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-22522-2_2, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 24 Origins of the German Welfare State: Social Policy in Germany to 1945 grown slowly, they are fairly stable; second, as history demonstrates, they are never immovable, but can be changed and adjusted to changing needs. 1.2 Chronological Parameters This historical survey does not begin with a striking turning point, but it concludes with one: 8 May 1945 was a “new beginning” (what the Germans refer to as “Stunde Null” – “zero hour”) at least in terms of politics, military affairs, and state law. A morally discredited regime had collapsed and its army had surrendered (Stolleis 1987, }5). Even critics of this metaphor concede that it was a “zero hour” in this regard. But they point out that there were strong continuities in many other spheres of life. Against the backdrop of the well-known external conditions of 1945, work was simply resumed or continued as best as possible. This was especially evident where tasks of a largely material nature had to be performed and the ideological overlay from National Socialism could be easily cast aside or at least suppressed. Social law was one such area. The material misery of the years after 1945 virtually cried out for a restoration of the social safety net. And the way that rebuilding unfolded, first in the occupation zones and then in the two German states, would have been unthinkable without individuals with the necessary exper- tise, the structures that still existed, and the assets that were left. Every step into the future was a step out of the past, but it was possible only because of the existence of accumulated knowledge and practical experience from “care” (Fursorge€ ), “youth welfare” (Jugendwohlfahrt), “social insurance” (Sozialversicherung), and the “pro- visioning system” (Versorgungswesen). Beyond this somewhat trite justification of the need for a prehistory, there are, however, connections between the past and the present that go back much further and make it advisable to probe the past as deeply as possible. Our modern sense of time is an accelerated one. We experience the world as dynamic and in movement. Changes follow in rapid succession and also seem to overtax us. The social protection of the next generation, especially the future of traditional social insur- ance, is threatened. While a look at the past cannot allay these anxieties, it does show, first of all, that our current system constitutes a mixture of historically evolved forms of security. All forms of provisioning against risk and its consequences that we know and practice simultaneously can be assigned to specific chronological stages: from family and neighborly help to co-operative self-help, the formation of foundations as the bearers of charitable institutions, the emergence of funds that are meant to ensure against conventional risks – all the way to the modern protection systems that encompass nearly the entire population.2 Some of these 2 According to Axel von Campenhausen (1997, p. 12) “the oldest member of the Association of German Foundations (Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen) is the hospital foundation in Wemding in the Ries, which has been operating an a old-age and nursing home for indigent residents with funds donated back in 917.” 1 Introduction 25 institutions go back to the early Middle Ages (Schilling 1997). Others can be assigned to the period of the emerging cities, to the beginnings of trade, and the formation of the first large fortunes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as urban hospitals, charitable foundations, or social housing projects like the Fuggerei in Augsburg. Others are the products of the society-shaping powers of the churches in the early modern period and especially of the early-modern territorial state, which implemented a new notion of “work,” combated “idleness”, and created penitentiaries and workhouses. This development has been much discussed in recent years under the heading of “social disciplining” (Schilling 1997). Scholars now realize that this was a highly complex phenomenon, involving the participation in equal measure of the slowly emerging state, the churches that depended on the disciplining of their members, but also the faithful and subjects themselves in rural and urban communities, in guild or church, who acquiesced or resisted. In modern historical scholarship, the hard-working and adjusted individual who eventually emerged from this process is seen as the necessary precondition for the launch of the industrial age. The modern-day institutions of social protection arose only in the Industrial Revolution, after the high point of Liberalism had already passed (Stolleis 1989). The main pillars of our system of insurance are no more than a 130 years old, counting from Bismarck’s new departures in domestic politics between 1878 and 1881. But older forms of safety merged into this new system, and not only as relics, but possibly also as the potential for future social policy. Of course, what functioned before the Industrial Revolution under very different conditions cannot and should not be revived. But it is at least conceivable that the post-modern world will draw upon the pre-modern world. In recent years, a good deal has been said and written about shifting responsibility back to the individual, the family, and the neighborhood. Even the legislature has made a small attempt in that direction (}3a BSHG), and it will have to make further attempts. The more difficult is becomes to finance the large-scale safety systems, the stronger the trend toward a reprivatization of risks could become, and there is no way one can predict how such a process will affect a society that has not been geared toward “self- provisioning” for generations. To be sure, the revitalization of idealistic, voluntary commitments is conceivable, as is the revitalization of ascetic, meditative, and charitable ways of life. Even today, not all forms of social security are monetarized and open to economic analysis. But it is revealing that all previous attempts at an “exit” from the evolved ensemble of social security more or less explicitly expected that the state and society would provide a guarantee against failure. A return to past forms of security would be conceivable only if the social context also changes accordingly, a literal “Renaissance,” in other words, which is not very likely. The future is open, however, and it holds no guarantees about the survival of “tried-and-true systems,” as for example the concurrence of social security, provi- sion, and social welfare in the modern form. The framework conditions are con- stantly changing, as are the safety systems themselves. If industrial society, which once began with the life-long factory work of the male employee, is rebuilt some day into a globally interconnected, mobile information and service society, the 26 Origins of the German Welfare State: Social Policy in Germany to 1945 preconditions especially of social insurance are no longer in place (Stolleis 1998a). In that sense there exists, alongside the purely historical motivation, also a vital interest in those phenomena that lie outside the narrow purview of our current times.