37.2 Theme 1 - Social change in Germany and West Germany

Breadth Frame

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme. You need to explain long-term social change across 1871-1990, not write a separate mini-essay on each regime. The key is to keep asking: which social groups gained weight, which lost weight, and how far prosperity and war changed people's everyday roles?

Two large changes run through the topic.

Class structure and prosperity means the changing shape of society: landowners, peasants, artisans, industrial workers, white-collar employees, professionals, managers and the post-war middle class. It also means the uneven rise and fall of living standards. Real wages and welfare improved in some periods, but war, inflation, unemployment, bombing and displacement repeatedly destroyed security.

The changing role of women means women in family life and paid work. You need to avoid two simple traps. Do not write that German women were only housewives before 1914: many rural, working-class and lower-middle-class women worked for wages or in family businesses. But do not write that paid work automatically meant equality: women were usually paid less, concentrated in lower-status jobs, and still expected to carry domestic responsibilities.

The broad chronology is:

For exam judgement, keep change and continuity together. The urban working class was a new mass force before 1914, but workers did not simply become middle class after 1945. The land-owning elite declined, but rural interests kept political importance. Women gained votes, legal rights and work opportunities, but the family remained a central site of inequality. Social change was therefore uneven: deep in structure, slower in attitudes, and repeatedly disrupted by war.

Industrial Class Society, 1871-1914

The German Empire was founded in 1871 in a society still shaped by land, monarchy, military hierarchy and local status. Yet the new empire also became one of Europe's most rapidly industrialising states. That created a modern class society: people's life chances increasingly depended on labour markets, wages, education, skills and access to industrial or clerical employment.

Urbanisation gives the clearest starting point. In 1871, nearly two-thirds of the population lived in villages of fewer than 2,000 people. By 1910, that had fallen to about two-fifths. Large cities grew quickly, especially Berlin, Hamburg, the Ruhr towns, the Rhineland, Westphalia and Saxony. This did not mean rural Germany disappeared, but it did mean that the social centre of gravity moved towards factories, mines, workshops, offices, tenements, railway stations, trade unions, department stores and urban politics.

The urban working class grew because industry needed labour. Coal, iron, steel, engineering, chemicals, electrical goods, textiles, transport and construction drew people from villages and small towns into wage labour. By the early twentieth century, industrial workers had become a mass social group. Their experience varied sharply:

Living standards rose, but unevenly. Real wages in industry improved over the empire's lifetime, working hours gradually fell, and organised labour became stronger. The Social Democratic Party and free trade unions gave many workers a culture of collective identity. Yet workers still faced authoritarian employers, workplace discipline, industrial accidents, sickness, old-age poverty, overcrowded housing and limited political influence. Prosperity was real for some, especially skilled workers, but insecurity remained central to working-class life.

The artisan tradition complicates the picture. Germany did not simply replace old craft life with giant factories. Millions still worked in small workshops, retail trades, family firms and craft occupations. The German word Mittelstand could refer to small shopkeepers, artisans, independent producers and later white-collar employees who saw themselves as between big capital and the proletariat.

This tradition had several effects.

The land-owning elite and the peasantry declined slowly rather than suddenly. The Junkers of eastern Prussia remained powerful after 1871. They owned large estates, influenced the Prussian army, bureaucracy and Conservative politics, and benefited from the undemocratic Prussian three-class voting system. Bismarck himself came from this world. In the early empire, therefore, the political order still gave landowners more weight than their long-term economic future justified.

Yet agriculture was under pressure. Cheap imported grain, rural debt, migration to towns and the rising scale of industry weakened the relative importance of land. Bismarck's 1879 tariff helped protect grain producers, and later agrarian pressure groups defended rural interests, but tariffs could not reverse industrialisation. Peasant families and small farmers remained numerous, but the proportion of Germans living from agriculture fell. The peasantry did not vanish; it became a smaller part of a society increasingly organised around industry and services.

The rise of white-collar workers began before 1914 and accelerated after it. Banks, insurance firms, railways, shops, postal services, local government, central administration, schools and large industrial firms all needed clerks, bookkeepers, sales staff, technical employees and managers. White-collar workers often valued respectability, education, clean work and salaried status. They did not usually see themselves as manual workers, even when their incomes were modest. This created a "new middle" that was socially important because it blurred the older divide between bourgeois owners and wage labourers.

Bismarck's welfare measures were a major response to industrial class society. They should not be treated as pure generosity. Bismarck wanted to weaken socialism and bind workers to the imperial state, especially after the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878. But the laws still mattered because they made social risk a national political responsibility.

These measures did not remove class conflict. Many workers still voted socialist; employers often remained hostile to unions; rural labourers were poorly covered; and benefits were modest. But social insurance changed the relationship between workers and the state. It gave insured workers a legal claim, not just poor relief. That is why Bismarck's welfare matters for this social-change topic: it shows the state adapting to the growth of the urban working class.

Women's roles before 1914 were similarly shaped by both change and continuity. The dominant social ideal, especially among middle-class families, placed women in the home as wives, mothers and moral guardians. The Civil Code of 1900 strengthened a patriarchal legal family model in which husbands held major authority. Girls' education was more limited than boys', and most professional careers remained difficult to enter.

Yet this ideology never described all women's lives. Working-class women often had to earn money. Rural women worked in family farms. Women worked in domestic service, textiles, clothing, food production, shops, home-work and some clerical or communications roles. The women's movement, including campaigns for education and employment, also grew in the later nineteenth century. The key point is balance: paid work expanded women's practical economic role, but law, wages and respectability norms kept most women subordinate within family and workplace hierarchies.

The best judgement for 1871-1914 is therefore that Germany experienced rapid social modernisation without full social democratisation. The urban working class and white-collar groups grew, the artisan and peasant worlds came under pressure, and the land-owning elite began a long decline. But monarchy, patriarchy, rural privilege and class hierarchy remained strong.

War, Democracy and Crisis, 1914-1933

The First World War did not simply interrupt social change; it intensified it. From 1914 to 1918, millions of men were conscripted, food supplies deteriorated, real incomes fell, the state intervened more heavily in labour and welfare, and families had to survive absence, death, injury and shortage. The home front became a social battlefield.

For the working class, war meant both mobilisation and hardship. Arms production expanded, but working conditions became more controlled. The Auxiliary Service Law of 1916 tied labour more closely to the war economy. The blockade, inflation and shortages damaged living standards. Women, children and older people often had to queue, improvise and substitute for missing male earners. The urban working class became more politically significant because the state could not fight a total war without industrial labour, but workers also became angrier at inequality, hunger and military authority.

The war also changed women's work. With so many men in the army, women entered or expanded their presence in industry, transport, clerical work, welfare and public services. Female employment in insured work rose during the war while male employment fell sharply. This was not a simple liberation. Much of the work was driven by necessity, women were paid less, and many employers expected them to leave once men returned. But war made it harder to defend the idea that women belonged only in the private home.

The revolution of 1918-19 produced important social gains. The new republic recognised trade unions, introduced the eight-hour day in key settlements, expanded welfare assumptions and gave women the vote. The elections for the National Assembly on 19 January 1919 were the first national elections in which German women voted and stood as candidates. This was a major legal and political break with the imperial order.

Yet Weimar society did not become equal. The old elites were weakened but not removed. The monarchy collapsed, but many conservative landowners, army officers, judges, civil servants and university elites retained status. Junker power was reduced because the imperial monarchy and the old Prussian order had lost legitimacy, but large estates survived, especially in eastern Germany. Peasant and agrarian pressure continued through tariffs, subsidies and conservative politics.

The urban working class had more formal power than before 1914, but less security than it wanted. Trade unions and the SPD were central to the republic, yet workers suffered from inflation, unemployment, employer resistance and political violence. Hyperinflation in 1923 wiped out savings and disrupted wages. Stabilisation after 1924 brought some recovery, but not enough to create deep trust in democracy. The Depression after 1929 produced mass unemployment and despair.

The white-collar workers became more visible in the Weimar years. Clerks, shop assistants, office workers, lower civil servants and technical employees expanded as large firms, administration and consumer services grew. Many saw themselves as respectable and middle class. However, their economic reality was often precarious. Inflation damaged savings, salaries lagged, and unemployment reached salaried workers too. The insecurity of this "new Mittelstand" mattered politically because it created resentment among people who feared falling into the proletariat while not possessing the property security of the old middle class.

Artisans and shopkeepers faced similar pressures. Department stores, chain retailing, rationalised industry and the financial shocks of inflation and depression threatened small producers. Some adjusted through skill, local reputation and specialist work. Others blamed big business, socialism, Jewish businesses or Weimar democracy. This does not mean all artisans moved to the radical right, but it helps explain why the artisan tradition could produce both pride in skill and hostility to modern mass society.

For women, Weimar was a mixture of breakthrough and constraint.

The Great Depression made gender tensions sharper. When jobs were scarce, married women workers were often criticised as "double earners" taking employment from men. Such arguments assumed that men should be family breadwinners and women should be economically dependent, even though many families needed women's wages. Economic crisis therefore strengthened conservative pressure against women's independence.

The best judgement for 1914-1933 is that war and democracy opened new possibilities, but crisis prevented them from becoming secure. Workers gained formal rights but faced unemployment. Women gained suffrage but not equal family or workplace status. White-collar workers expanded but felt insecure. The land-owning elite lost some old authority but survived longer than a simple "decline" story would suggest.

Nazi People's Community and War, 1933-1945

Nazi social policy claimed to overcome class conflict through a Volksgemeinschaft, or people's community. This is one of the most important ideas to judge critically. It promised unity, national revival and protection for ordinary Germans after depression. In reality, it created a racially exclusive, politically controlled and militarised society. Class did not disappear; independent class organisation disappeared.

The urban working class experienced both employment and repression. Official unemployment fell rapidly after 1933 through recovery, public works, rearmament, conscription and labour schemes. Many workers welcomed wages after the despair of 1929-32. But independent trade unions were destroyed in May 1933 and replaced by the German Labour Front. Strikes were illegal. Collective bargaining was removed. Wages and workplace discipline were controlled. Workers gained work, but lost freedom.