The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic
Edward Ross Dickinson
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.
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About Edward Ross Dickinson
Reviews for The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic
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 Canning
American 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, University of Minnesota