Germans on Welfare

"[T]he latest and [one] of the most impressive contributions to the burgeoning field of the history of German social welfare."--Central European History "This is a first-rate manuscript, based on extensive and extraordinarily dense archival research, with a strong and appropriate sense of the prevailing historiographical and conceptual/theoretical questions for this period of German history, by one of the leading German historians in the United States...This book has been well worth waiting for, and will certainly have a major impact on the field."--Geoff Eley, Department of History, University of Michigan "A major study on the Weimar Republic and on how millions of destitute Germans fared on welfare prior to the rise of Hitler. The author richly details the experiences of men and women at the grass-roots level of society, but also looks at their interaction with the policy-making authorities at the top. Methodologically innovative, this book will serve as a model for a new integrated socio-political history of modern industrial societies."--Volker Berghahn, Columbia University "David Crew has produced an original and important contribution to the growing literature on welfare policy and politics in interwar Germany...[His] rich reconstruction of individual experience shows the independence and agency of those dependent on the state, and it illustrates the complex relationship of political affiliation and welfare politics."--Journal of Modern History "Crew pays special attention to various groups...women, the elderly, schoolchildren - and through an examination of the welfare state's policy towards them sheds light on a hitherto unexplored facet of German inter-war history."--Bulletin of the Institute of Holocaust Research