Rescuing the Vulnerable

Beate Althammer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trier and a visiting lecturer at the University of Lüneburg. She is author of Das Bismarckreich 1871-1890 (2009) and co-editor of the volumes Bettler und Vaganten in der Neuzeit (1500-1933) (2013) and The Welfare State and the “Deviant Poor” in Europe, 1870-1933 (2014).

“…a readable collection of interesting case studies on a topic likely to interest many political sociologists, historians, area specialists, and scholars of poverty and welfare in both the social sciences and the humanities… The breadth and innovative use of archival and literary sources make the work overall a trove of interesting ideas for comparative and historical researchers.” • Contemporary Sociology“This volume’s focus on the young, the homeless, and the unemployed is particularly welcome given the limited amount of scholarship within histories of poverty and welfare on these groups. The book’s underlying principles are of universal significance and will be of interest to the general reader of welfare history.” • Olwen Purdue, Queen’s University Belfast

• IllustrationsFigures and TablesIntroduction: Poverty and Endangered Social Ties: An IntroductionBeate Althammer and Tamara Stazic-WendtChapter 1. Poverty and Social Bonds: Towards a Theory of Attachment RegimesSerge PaugamPART I: ENDANGERED CHILDHOODSChapter 2. Living at the Edge of Society: Wallchian Orphans in Nineteenth-Century BucharestNicoleta RomanChapter 3. Orphans, Pauper Children or Wayward Children? The Lives of Children Cared for by Public Institutons in Hamburg, 1892-1914Katharina BrandesChapter 4. The Reduction of Poverty Starts with Children: Swiss Societies for Educating the Poor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesErnst GuggisbergChapter 5. Compassion for the Distant Other: Children's Hunger and Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great WarFrederike Kind-KovácsPART II: VAGRANCY AND HOMELESSNESSChapter 6. Traditional Mobility and Solidarity in Crisis: Jeremias Gotthelf's Response to Pauperism in the VormärzAndrew CusackChapter 7. Controlling Vagrancy: Germany, England and France, 1880-1914Beate AlthammerChapter 8. The Prolbem of Homelessness in Postwar BritainTehila SassonPART III: UNEMPLOYMENTChapter 9. 'United Idle Men with Idle Land': The Evolution of the Hollesley Bay Training Farm Experiment for the London Unemployed, 1905-1908Elizabeth A. ScottChapter 10. An Unbearable Social Existence: The Unemployed in Rural Poor Relief (Germany, 1918-1933)Tamara Stazic-WendtChapter 11. How Unemployment was Normalized by the Establishment of Public Labour Exchanges in Austria, 1918-1938Irina VanaChapter 12. The Poor Unemployed: Diagnoses of Unemployment in Britain and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980sWiebke WiedePART IV: RE-ESTABLISHING SOCIAL TIES: NARRATIVES AND APPEALS FROM THE POORChapter 13. Voices from the Lower Depths: Russian Poor in Their Own WordsHubertus JahnChapter 14. 'They Sit for Days and Have Only Their Sorrow to Eat': Old Age Poverty in German and British Pauper NarrativesAndreas Gestrich and Daniela HeinischChapter 15. Seen With Their Own Eyes: Self-Presentation of the Poor in Freiburg and Schwerin, 1950-1975Dorothee LürbkeConclusion: The Twisted Paths of Recognition and Protection: Vulnerability and Welfare in European SocietiesLutz RaphaelBibliographyIndex