The shifting politics of public health in Germany between the 1890s and 1920s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, social historians have published on the history of public health and the welfare state in Germany. Many scholars have focused on the social security measures installed during the German Empire, while others concentrated on welfare in Germany in the 1920s and the expansion of the welfare state. These studies were often part and parcel of long-running debates discussing the rise of Nazism and the extent to which it was rooted in Wilhelmine and Weimar (mis)developments. Building on these studies of welfare relief, social security and public health, this article focuses on welfare and public health in Imperial Germany. It evaluates the extant German-language literature and proposes that we understand welfare in imperial Germany as a mixture of transfer payments and services developed to improve the living conditions of the working poor, as well as a set of biopolitical public health measures used to influence the behaviour of the poor. After framing the social context of public health in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the article focuses at first on the medical police and public health measures initiated by the Imperial Health Office, the highest medical authority in Germany. Second, it describes the role of Statutory Health Insurance and its effects on public health; and, third, it summarizes local welfare and public health institutions that had to execute public health measures. Finally, it analyses the ways in which the politics of public health changed between 1870 and the early 1920s.