Suchergebnisse

This is the first comprehensive 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 she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary government within the welfare sector in a way

Since the nineteenth century, cleanliness and hygiene have played an integral role in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and notions of self-governance in Europe. Drawing on this reservoir of potential signification, the spread of a mass consumer society in the twentieth century has capitalized on commodified images of health, hygiene, and cleanliness, while the maintenance and representation of clean bodies for modern men and women became virtually inseparable from consumption. The Nazis both accelerated and gave a racial spin to the idea of a clean, healthy body as the symbol of racially superior, socially productive, and sexually virile Aryans. Whether commodified and sexualized under consumerism or channeled into a murderous project under the Nazis, hygienic and healthy bodies became the object of pleasure and a signifier of superior social and racial identity. When these considerations are taken into account, it is important to inquire into the problems faced by the founding fathers of the GDR with regard to questions of health and consumption. The vision of the socialist "New Man" and the ideal of pure and healthy living that were so frequently invoked in the early years of the GDR must be seen as attempts to forge a positive identity for the new socialist state while avoiding the twin ideological dangers posed by the memory of Nazi racial policies and the implicit connections made between health, consumption, and freedom in the pluralistic consumer society to the west.

In a talk delivered on 20 September 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the president of the League of German Women's Associations (BDF) likened the political status of German women to mothers who were forced to nurse their children with their hands tied behind their backs. They were thoroughly frustrated by the destructiveness of the war and were only able to fulfill their duties toward family and nation because they believed that the experience of the war would make the nation stronger.