Robert Monk

A Genealogy of the Nuclear Family
Germany, 1917-1933

The final stages of Germany's industrialization (1870 -1933) involved a rapid evolution of family, kinship, and neighborhood structures. In roughly half a century, the poor majority, who increasingly lived in cities, went from life in intimately coordinated networks of service- and property-exchange among family, kin, and neighbors (these terms are somewhat interchangeable for the period 1900-1920), through a period in which families became atomized and informal support systems eroded (the '20s), and into the totalitarianism of the Nazi regime, involving state-defined and state-regulated family and neighborhoods, whose members were united, but only vertically via the Fuhrer and not horizontally with one another. The transformation of German family and community involved a complex interplay between labor and economics, culture and politics, and the informal family- and social-norms of communities in all classes of society. It is impossible to do as many Marxist analysts do in singling out global capitalism as the overarching structure governing this historical transformation of urban communities. Generated as they were by the interaction of industrial rationalization, the structures of German labor organization, societal attitudes about gender roles and family functions, and the cultural and political history of the 'German' people, the transformation of poor communities has a unique history in Germany, one that cannot be subsumed under any single-factor analysis of the structures of capitalism, or of family, politics, or culture.
At the same time, however, the evolution of family and community patterns in Germany involved elements that were common to and latent in most Western nations, and that still exist in virtually every capitalist nation today. These elements are class struggle and patriarchy. Their function in capitalist societies is generalized in Wally Seccombe's "The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism" and in the second part of Rayna Reiter's "Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains". The key point in both these analyses is that the productive labor of women is concealed under capitalism much in the same way as the usually involuntary nature of wage-labor is concealed by the nominal freedom of exchanging services for money. Just as men are kept enslaved under wage-labor by their immediate need for survival and the absence of alternative means, so women are yoked to the cult of domesticity in a world that, even in 1996, operates on the assumption that men ‹ especially high-status men ‹ have a wife at home to manage food, laundry, and other house-hold affairs.
Reiter and Seccombe's analyses show how women are ideologically naturalized in their situation by two interacting factors. First, they operate in isolation from the wage-based government of labor choices and processes. Their alienation from the product of their labor is much more thoroughly concealed than men's. It is tied up in a discourse of domesticity that claims to have tradition stretching back to the beginning of time. Women work in a world where their apparent relation to the products of their labor is totally different from that of men. For Seccombe, "These differences are reflected in the differing consciousnesses of workers in the two realms. Because gender difference correlates with work locale and consciousness, character differences appear as biological destiny to male and female workers alike"(Seccombe, p. 6). Second, and more specifically, the wage of a husband appears both to him and his wife to be a compensation for his labor, and not, as is really the case, a compensation for all the labor involved in the maintenance and reproduction of his labor power. "It appears that [the husband] is paid for his labour (hence its importance) while [the wife] is not for hers (hence its triviality)." The wage is, in reality, paying for both the work of the husband and that of his wife (Seccombe, p. 12). Thus, domestic labor is isolated and under-valued even though it is equally important both to other members of family and to the capitalist looking to profit from surplus labor wherever he can find it.
This kind of isolation and low status is unfortunate in itself, but it has had other effects, as well. Being shut out of the broader economy and socially atomized for much of this century, domestic labor stagnated technically while the rest of capatalist society rationalized and became more efficient.
Precisely because there exists no continual impetus to reorganize domestic labour to improve efficiency, it is the one labour process which has not been socialized, though there is nothing inherent in the work itself that would prevent it from being so. [Seccombe, p. 17]

Reiter and Seccombe both note the consequence of stagnated domestic technology: increasing involvement of the state in previously family-centered social functions, such as managing community relationships of reciprocity and socializing the young. This century has seen much of family and neighborhood-community ‹ both women's spheres ‹ absorbed into the state, along with a degradation in the status of both of these traditional social forms. Women's social role has been separated from that of men for centuries, but neither to the degree, nor with the same low, isolated status that characterized it during most of this one. The isolation of women's work from the wage economy has had tremendous effects, direct and indirect, on its status and function.
But what did its isolation do for industrial capitalists in Weimar Germany? How did capital, labor economics, political and social attitudes combine to affect women's work and family life between the world wars? These questions put Seccombe's analysis in an interesting light, for they make it clear that capitalism does not work alone in the determination of social reality, and specifically, it did not work alone to isolate women and extract surplus labor from them. One gets the sense from Seccombe's article that ideological structures and political and cultural formations all arrange themselves in the exclusive service of Capital. A close look at Weimar Germany tells us that matters are not always so simple.
Seccombe talks about the "stagnation" of domestic technology and its failure to become "socialized" like other forms of labor under industrial capital. The fact is that, in this conception of it, domestic labor actually regressed between the start of WWI and the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933. Until the Great War, poor communities were left largely to their own devices. What little relief aid they did receive took the form of arbitrary and often degrading private charity efforts. Until state agencies began intervening during and after WWI, poor neighborhoods had a highly developed, socialized, and often monetary system of exchange for managing domestic life. Child-rearing was often farmed out to the elderly and other unemployed women for a money compensation. Even immediate family relations, such as a teenaged child lodging with her mother, were often arranged in financial terms, with employed young women paying the going rent for the privilege of staying with their family. Communities of neighborhood women, as much as individual mothers, served the function of supervising children and ensuring their safety, as well as that of other adult community-members. Fluctuations in individual families' capacity to support themselves in an unstable wage-labor market were evened out through the support-networks of neighbors and neighboring kin, so that few families were without help in a time of financial crisis. (Ross, passim)
The world's first total war brought women into the wage-labor market in unprecedented numbers. State bureaucracy was simultaneously developing to a stage at which, for the first time, the concept of unemployment began to take on its modern meaning and social programs began to replace the function of neighborhood survival networks (Evans, p. 2). Prior to twentieth-century state interventions, women had been the primary orchestrators of community-based social welfare. Women's survival networks among the poor had worked to dampen the violent oscillations men faced in the industrial wage labor markets. In the years during and after WWI, the state absorbed this function, becoming the new stabilizer of a volatile economy and allowing women to continue their movement into the wage-labor market, or in rare cases where husbands were consistently employed at sufficient wage-levels, to move into isolated families whose structure was based on upper-class, nuclear models.
Here, conflicting interests reveal themselves among working women, men, industrial capital, political factions and social classes. Rather than allying themselves neatly with a totalizing social order, these interests were continually realigned with respect to one another. The problem of chronic, massive unemployment, as well as the new mobility and increasingly public life of women were at the center of these conflicts. The job market in Germany was permanently altered by the Great War, and ultimately accomodated its demobilized men only by putting them back to war, not work. Women had already been making their way into public (non-domestic) occupations before the war, but with war-driven shortages of men, they took positions in heavy industry that would otherwise have been considered exclusively male. Men faced new competition from these women on returning home, but the several sharp dips in the economy during the twenties were actually more salient in prompting various kinds of discourse around the regulation of women's role in the workplace and in radicalizing political factions. Toward the end of the twenties, (middle/upper-class) housewives' associations were clamoring for restriction of (lower-class) women's employment in garment and heavy industries and in state offices. Entire neighbourhoods which had previously depended on cooperation between the working-class and the petty bourgois were divided into intensifying clashes between elements of the NSDAP (German National Socialist Workers' Party) and the KPD (German Communist Party).
The reintegration of German society under the Weimar Republic was a struggle that occurred at multiple levels, and which ultimately failed. The problem of insuring and supporting the unemployed was at its center because it was a way to determine the structure of family and community, the role of women in the economy, and the nature of state responses to it. Capital, too, had its interests in the resolution of this flux, for it would affect the job market faced by worker and employer alike.
The sense of urgency with which the role of family in society was surrounded had many dimensions, but all of them were eventually tied back to women via the notion of her proper situation in the domestic sphere. By the mid-twenties, street life in German cities was very different from what it had been at the start of the War. Streets in poor neighborhoods were less thoroughly regulated and their new inhabitants were threatening to the middle and upper classes, whose ideas about family and community differed from the networked approach of the lower classes. The apparent disintegration of order in the streets was a symptom of transformations in the labor market for women and in women's life-strategies. It also reflected the presence of unemployed men at home, with nowhere else to go than the streets, where 'hanging out' was not necessarily the disorder upper classes perceived it to be. It was a strategic use of formerly public space for traditionally private activities. At the same time, the new uses of public space were a consequence of the process I introduced already, in which the state and industrial capital both worked to erode the organization of neighborhood communities, their survival networks and norms of regulation.
Berlin was the most developed in this respect, and, as the capital city, also the most politically articulate amidst a national debate about the problems associated with unemployment. Families were stuffed into tenements that were inadequate even when the husband was employed outside the home; his unemployment, which became very likely several times during the twenties, and almost probable during the world economic crisis, sharpened the problem. Men and children spilled out of over-crowded homes into idle groupings on the streets or in the public-houses. There were about 100 youth gangs in Berlin, composed mostly of unemployed and taking up a prominent position in public discussions of social problems (Stachura, p. 139). Mature men tended to hang about the streets or in public houses, but even these benign activities were a destruction of the order that had prevailed even over streets in poor neighborhoods. Since there was no room in the home, those women who still retained their role of orchestrating community networks and regulating their neighborhood in defense of its reputation could offer these loiterers little alternative. Many women were no longer in the neighborhood, working as they did in the growing number of clerical positions and in industrial occupations that had been opened up to them through capital-initiated rationalization of production processes and de-skilling of traditionally male jobs. (Toward the end of the twenties, neighborhoods became the site of territorial battles between the lower and lower-middle classes for control of social regulation of neighborhoods. See 'Appendix A' for a more detailed account.)
Berlin is also the city in which German women were most 'modern', and contemporaries responded to this realization in a variety of ways. Berliner women were more likely to have jobs outside the home or domestic industry, and these jobs were often in the clerical field, which was growing due to both governement and business bureaucratization. Such jobs conferred a measure of status, a higher wage, better insurance, and more stability than domestic out-work or other, less public occupations. Women in Berlin (and in other cities) also married less frequently and had fewer children than country women or women of a decade before. The change in women's situation was very much in the public eye. They demonstrated for the legalization of abortion. The transformation of neighborhoods and street-life, the reduction in birth-rate, and women's unwonted and increasing employment in the wage economy, despite persisting massive male unemployment, were all widely discussed. Tim Mason describes the viscerality of the public's response in some quarters: "[I]n the eyes of right-thinking citizens in the provinces, Berlin had become a threateningly large wilderness of sterile promiscuity, hedonism, degeneracy and unnatural progress"(Mason, p. 142). And women seemed to be at the center of the problems.
Employment was to give structure to the lives of male, street-dwelling German masses at the expense of women and through their reconstitution in a domestic world that had never really existed. Men were having trouble finding a job, women were occupying 'men's jobs', and neighborhood communities ‹ women's traditional sphere of influence ‹ were disintegrating. The solution seemed to be to send women back home and reinstate men in wage-compensated occupations. None of this happened immediately, but the decade of the twenties saw vigorous debate about how the state should regulate women's social role ‹ debate in which 'the domestic' was reconstituted in the 'classic' nuclear, atomized form we think of today as having had a long history. The social and economic relations among women in their neighborhoods that had in fact characterized 'the domestic' before the War were largely erased.
In fact, the creation of the modern nuclear family was hotly contested during this period. It required a whole new species of state apparatus ‹ the social welfare system ‹ and it occurred in opposition to the ebbs and flows of the industrial labor market. The emergence of a strong movement for guaranteed employment of demobilized men, and ultimately all men, reflected the nostalgia for extinguished family and neighborhood life. Like all nostalgia, this was a reformulation of past structures to suit present sentiment; or, alternatively, this was a revision of history to suit longstanding but latent male fantasies.
>>Theweleit?
It was also a highly problematic approach to post-war reintegration, for it meant the displacement of millions of women from their jobs. It was of course argued at the time that, with the return of men to productive labor, women could rely on male support and could themselves return to 'traditional' domestic duties within the family. But many of the men necessary for this vision to be viable were now dead. Tim Mason gives a sense of the problem: "Throughout the interwar years there were roughly 2 million more women than men; in 1925 there were 2.5 million more women than men aged over twenty, 1.25 million more women in the age-group twenty-five to forty"(Mason, "Women in Germany, 1925-1940", p. 135). Many households were female-headed; German society needed either substantial and continuing direct support of women, or full employment of women. The ideal of guaranteed employment for all men, even if reached, would not have satisfied the needs of a great many families. Neither was it in the interests of rationalizing heavy industry, which was trying to take advantage of the wage-differential between men and women. This is one example of a whole constellation of public policy discourses which advocated not only patriarchal retrenchments that were feasible, if illogical, but ignorantly yearned for patriarchal orders that had become impossible or absurd within the new socio-economic framework of the interwar period.
Nonetheless, the ideal that stubbornly predominated in the male-dominated, rational-bureaucratic state was that of full and guaranteed employment for men and domestic duty for women. Despite numerous practical obstacles and contradictory pressures from factions of both government and business, the policies of the Weimar Republic as well as state and local agencies consistently strived to install this impossible social 'ideal'.
As we have seen, the domestic ideal was, for demographic reasons, literally impossible for a substancial number of women. Even when women did live by the support of father or husband, family economy often demanded they work partly outside the home to supplement the family income. Large businesses were obliging in this respect. The textile industry, which had always employed many women, continued to grow and to employ them (men did not deem this work worthy of their participation), and even heavy industries, through their rationalization efforts, tended to eliminate male-dominated skilled positions in favor of unskilled jobs that could be filled at low wages by women. Women also had what might be called an employment advantage over men in that they were willing to do low-status, low-wage work such as that of the textile industry and domestic service to the wealthier classes.
By the end of the twenties, women white-collar workers had attained a solid position in government administration and trade industries, largely through the official policy of gender equality before the state. In the world economic crisis, however, many were forced, through the restructuring of government assistance programs, to abandon their clerical positions for less desireable ones in textiles or domestic service. Rather than giving up and considering themselves unemployed because of losing their chosen career, women settled for whatever employment they could get (Kramer, "Frankfurt's Working Women" in The German Unemployed, p. 136). Having been trained in the apprentice-system from youth to know and rely on a single trade, and identifying with their own trade as well through their male-dominated trade unions, men were far less willing to negotiate different careers or to shift entirely from one to another, especially when that meant degradation in working conditions and/or status and pay. The state formalized this difference between men's and women's employment experience by calling women unemployed only when they literally could not be employed, or by refusing to consider any woman unemployed (the woman's employment is her home-making), while men were considered unemployed if they could not obtain work at their specific trade (Evans, "The Experience of Unemployment in the Weimar Republic" in The German Unemployed, p. 11).
Thus, when it came time to dole out unemployment relief, women were often denied aid where men in identical or even better circumstances got it. At the same time, though, women's rate of employment really suffered far less than men's as the pressures of economic depression eliminated more and more jobs. Women adjusted to the shifting labor market while men refused to do so.

The public response to the persistance of women in the labor market and the decline of traditional male occupations was varied, but the subtext of discourse on employment measures and unemployment insurance policy seems to have been along the lines of 'If it weren't for women, we might ...'. Public policy in Germany ignored women's widespread employment, the economic conditions (capital's increasing unwillingness to commit to projects guaranteeing anything more than seasonal employment) that continued to demand and even increasingly demanded it, and the fact that in the man-shortage of the inter-war years, women needed either work or substantial public aid in order to support themselves, as well as any dependents they might have had. Helgard Kramer gives a good over-view of what these policies aimed at.

Whatever form these policies took, whether they made marriage or the allegedly 'masculine' nature of an occupation the criterion for driving women from the capitalist labor market, in all cases they shared the intention of reducing the real or potential supply of labour. They thus sought the apparent creation of jobs for men, whose higher social priority enabled them to claim the 'right to work' for themselves, and so constituted the initial beginnings of a policy of full employment. [Kramer, "Frankfurt's Working Women" in The German Unemployed, p. 108]

The Weimar Republic was trying to integrate its demobilized, sexually unbalanced, and economically aflicted society throughout the inter-war period. It was Germany's first rationalized bureaucratic state, and it developed social policy with a relatively clear social vision in mind, but it was a vision that did not account for women. It may have been sometimes rational, but it was always fantasy. Karin Hausen:

...if the comprehensive policies attached to the labour market would have to deal only with people of the male sex ‹ with women existing only as unpaid home and family workers ‹ the administrative machinery could have been cast in one uniform mould. In practice, however, these policies were forced to deal with women situated in the labour market. With their low wages, 'pin money' and - in the post-war period - their by no means unusual family 'breadwinner' function, these women cropped up, then, as irritations to the administrative machinery which was being established. [Hausen, "Unemployment also Hits Women" in Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany, p. 86]

At the same time, popular opinion moved toward the enforcement of the new nuclear family, in which woman's place was in the home and the place of the home was not community. Not much attention is given to the community's role in child-care in Ruth Weiland's Children of the Unemployed (Kinder der Arbeitslosen), published in 1933. That book reflects contemporary concerns about the effects, nutritional and environmental, of long-term poverty on the physical and mental health of the next generation. An important component (which I cannot address here) in the mobilization of nuclear domesticity during this period was the fear that not enough children were being produced, and that those currently in production were put at risk by malnutrition and the disruption of family occasioned by fathers' unemployment. While Weiland shows admirable concern for the position of women in the families she observed, she presents the problem as one of acute social crisis rather than as a chronic dysfunctionality in the family structures trying desperately to maintain themselves.

It is increasingly observed that the mother is the primary authority in the family. The father, who suffers under his unemployment, is often a burden to his children, more often feared than loved. When I asked the children once last year what they would buy if they had money, one nine-year-old answered: "A knife, to kill my father, because he always beats mother and us." [Weiland, Kinder der Arbeitslosen, p. 45 ibid Red Cross paper]

It is unclear whether the neighborhoods of the families Weiland describes consisted of families as atomized as her observations imply. Whether the family atomization her descriptions imply was reality or the product of biased accounts, the result is a characteristic endorsement of the nuclear family.

The instructive function of the family is made doubly difficult in the unemployed family, for despite his good intentions, the husband is rendered helpless by his destitution and can no longer supply the wife with the means necessary even for [her] creating the most modest ease. He can no longer be an example to his children of diligence and work. In many unemployed families the father's authority is reduced, all the more if the wife reproaches him for his unemployment before the children. The children witness daily how the mother must worry to get the barest relief-aid. The mother gets all the money on hand, the father at most some pocket-money. The child is dependent for every want on the mother, not the father. Attentiveness changes to inattentiveness and disobedience when/if (wenn) the father tries, in an mis-educative (unpaedigodische) manner, to reestablish his authority-position in the family through brutality. [Weiland,Kinder, pp. 44-5]

Weiland makes a hero of the housewife at the same time she relegates her to the circumscribed domestic sphere. Furthermore, it is clear that the degraded state of patriarchal authority is to be considered a temporary and lamentable social ailment. No doubt related to the growing presence and violence of youth gangs in Berlin and other urban centers, there is a pronounced anxiety over the consequences of disrupted family (unconventional mother-function) for the upcoming generation and its likely behavior.

The ability of families to withstand the spiritual consequences (seelischen Folgen) of unemployment is dependent not only on external life-factors, material reserves, political and religious conviction, but above all on the spiritual (seelische) strength of the wife of the unemployed. In essence, it is up to her whether the husband meets the growing crisis with despair, resignation, dullness and apathy, or seizes upon self-determination, whether he comes into conflict with the criminal courts or maintains his activity and fortitude and raises his children to a positive attitude. [Weiland, Kinder, p. 37]

These descriptions participate in the traditional gender split between public, practical husband and private, moral-spiritual wife that students of social history know so well. It is particularly important to take note of it here, though, because this is a case where it is being applied directly to the lower class, whereas in most cases, it is invoked in midde/upper-class contexts or unconsciously mis-applied to society without regard to class variations in the ideology of the sexual division of labor.
Weiland goes beyond a simple regurgitation of the ideology of housewife-morality and adapts this middle/upper class social form to the particular problems presented by massive unemployment. For her, the housewife's function in the unemployment crisis is to absorb all the tension created by it and to maintain and revitalize her husband. She is the source of mental vigor. Predictably, that cultivation of vigor is rigidly contained within the domestic sphere. The wife is not even permitted vicarious access to the public through care of the children: the vigor she (re)awakens in the husband is important largely because it ensures his ability to assert authority over the children and to fill an implied vacuum in their up-bringing, as if it is really he who normally accomplishes it.
The movement to enforce middle/upper-class forms of domesticity in lower-class communities took the form of social and political activism, as well as sociological observation. The Housewives' Association in Frankfurt is an example of the way in which the creation of 'traditional' domesticity and the nuclear family was the product of forces opposed, rather than in league with, capital. The Association campaigned for domestic training in the schools, and, after 1929, expansion of the educational system to train young unemployed women with no one to support them. They also latched onto the public outcry against 'double-earners' (anyone with an income beyond a primary job or the income of a supporting family member), calling for broad termination of women's jobs in both the private and public sector. The state responded in words, if not in law:

There is a crass imbalance in the female labour market between the vast number of industrial and white-collar unemployed and the high demand for domestic servants. If a balance is to be achieved, prejudices on both sides have to be removed. House-wives have evinced a distinct disinclination to engage as their servants women who have worked in industry, while the latter have objected to the wages and working conditions customary in domestic service." [quoted in Kramer, "Frankfurt's Working Women" in The German Unemployed p.117]

Kramer shows that this was not really the case. Wages in domestic work were chronically marginal or insufficient for the support of the independent women who took to it. Until the flow was stopped by the radical policies of the Great Depression, domestic labor was "a sluice through which women streamed from the countryside into the town, eventually to find work in factories, offices,and services of other kinds. The favourable position of women workers in this sector was a result of the high demand for female labour in other sectors, which allowed young women to move on to them with relative ease, and thus improved the position of those women who remained in service by reducing the competition for jobs"(Kramer in Evans, p. 119). Housewives wanted to pay lower wages to career servants; country girls wanted a place to shack up in the city for a few weeks while they found a real job. By 1932, state unemployment insurance and other policy embodied a powerful push to put women in homes where they would make babies.
Thus, the interests of middle/upper class women, lower class women and industrial capitalists, and general popular opinion as expressed in government policy were at odds with one another. Seccombe is highly convincing in her analysis of the function of the ideology of nuclear domesticity in service of capitalism. A look backward at its origins shows us that this cozy relationship was really established against the tides of industrial capital during the inter-war years. A better way to understand how capitalism seems to capitalize on every aspect of the societies that support it would be to recognize its flexibility, its ability, always in the long run, to rearrange itself and convert new social developments to its own purposes. It is important to realize that this conversion process is as much a matter of capital reorienting itself as it is of social patterns changing in its favour.

Epilogue: Speculation

There can be no mistake that capitalism has benefitted from the extention of nuclear family patterns into the lower class during this century. Though the particular pattern of political and public debate is unique to Germany, the general one of family atomization applies more or less to all the Western industrialized nations, and may be applicable in developing nations even now. The erasure of what was essentially functioning socialism circumscribed by a capitalist wage-market is a cultural loss. It is a loss of the practice of sharing and the predilection for thinking in terms of collectivity. It is a loss of a major reservoir of political power. This erasure took place precisely at the time when the former practitioners of socialism (neighborhood women) were moving into the public world, that is, when the predilection for collectivity might have had an impact on political culture.
One of the obstacles to socialist activism in the US has been its inability to generate a solid base through community. With its own erasure of neighborhood survival networks, and being largely atheist, socialists and the left in general has not benefitted from the natural community of the old neighborhood or of religious practices. Since the Red Scare, which erased what secular community had existed among left-leaning people, community activism has been concentrated in African American communities that included religion as a major component of their communal base. The political consequences of the erasure of socialist community in Western countries should serve as a warning against international development strategies that seek to (re)create the world in our own image.
Is there a way to industrialize without destroying valuable practices and attitudes of collectivist community that develop under early capitalism?

Appendix A: The Intersection of Public and Private Space

The domestic sphere was a primary topic in unemployment discourse not only because of such direct attempts at stuffing women back into it, but also because families could no longer fit within it. The results were dynamic transformations of established practices of the domestic and their forced migration into spaces hitherto coded in a rigid notion of 'public'. As massive unemployment continued to resurface and the Republic's resources for coping with it continued to weaken, the dynamic interaction of domesticity and urban, 'public' neighborhood spaces became more and more politicized, turning the relationship between the proletarian population and the petty bourgeoise from one of supportiveness into one of intense conflict. While the effects of unemployment remained uncatastrophic, landlords were supportive of their unfortunate tenants, loaning them money and letting their rents run very late; public-house patrons turned their establishments into a second home for men displaced from work and home. But by 1932, the land-lords and small shop-owners who had been the last thread in the increasingly localized support network for growing masses of unemployed were themselves increasingly threatened by economic depression. Those who did not sell out to less forgiving, absentee investors were themselves forced into meanness in their dealings with the community. Some public-house owners guaranteed themselves clientelle by opening their businesses up as outposts to the Nazi SA, which was then infiltrating the restive urban neighborhoods (Rosenhaft, pp. 216-17). Meanwhile, the KPD were organizing in the tenement courtyards, to which men had reatreated from their former public-houses, and where, too, women and youths became an important constituency of the Communist movement. By 1933, the urban neighborhood support networks, which had tended to partially integrate the proletarian and the petty-bourgeoise, had devolved into conflict between NSAPD and KPD, landlord and tenant, public-house proprietor and workmen. Certainly, the proletariat did not side anywhere near exclusively with the KPD (Rosenhaft, pp. 220-23). What must be stressed is that all notion of community support networks had been converted either into militant political activism or into commercial selfish-interest.

In this scramble for cash the means of entertainment and recreation were turned into a source of income. Social life thereby took on a new edge, as informal institutions ranging from the family to the drinking club either dissolved or acquired new functions. [Rosenhaft, p. 210]

These fundamental alterations in the arrangement of social relations were brought on largely by developments in the international economy. Unemployment and its attendant problems were caused by a global economic depression, but it is also important to understand the function of basic, everyday interactions in the demise of German urban communities. The urban centers of Germany were extremely over-crowded. Tenement projects already designed to pack people into scarce space were themselves used beyond 'capacity', with multiple families living in spaces that were really too small for single families. The result was unavoidable transgression of traditional divisions in German social space. Unemployment ‹ resulting in men hanging about the tiny apartment because they had no work ‹ turned this stress on boundaries of the domestic sphere into their explosion.
The over-flow of domestic practices into public places like streets, courtyards, pubs and parks ‹ spaces that had always been highly regulated through rigid social and legal code ‹ was central to the process of politicization and political polarization already described. Whatever little diversity might have been acceptable within the limited privacy of apartments, these formerly public spaces demanded a conformity that became impossible as they were appropriated by people who were displaced from either or both family-circle and work. Streets had been for cars and purposive foot-traffic. Sundays, families took a ten o'clock stroll about in them; only Sundays, only in the morning. With unemployment and over-crowding, this sort of tradition broke down and youth and adults alike turned street into sitting-room: they hung out there (Rosenhaft, "The Unemployed in the Neighnorhood" in Evans, passim). Rosenhaft describes the situation:

Respectable behaviour involves not only maintaining a clear distinction between public, private and work, but also avoiding appearances in public except in circumstances where one is unequivocally going about one's business or in highly structured situations like the Sunday promenade or organised processions. The breaching of these distinctions may be perceived as threatening in itself; those who habitually spend their time in public places open themselves to the suspicion of unreliability and even criminality. [ed. Evans, p. 205]

The domestic invaded the public, but the public invaded the domestic at the same time. The owners of the tenements were usually part of the communities that lived in them. They often had been successful small merchants in the area who retired on rents from their investment in the tenement. This class and community of petty bourgeoise was the primary enforcer of social codes regarding the use of space. They developed systematic rules of neighborliness for their tenants in response to conflicts that were the inevitable result of too-close living, but also to try to mediate in ethnic conflicts both by enforcing politeness and standardizing acceptible behaviors. They also felt justified in calling on police regulation of the streets. Congregations there were subject at least to unwanted interrogation on an informal basis, if not forced to disperse. Socialization that was once possible within the privacy of a room now was subject to police intervention.
Even the 'private' room became subject to public scrutiny. A condition for many forms of public aid was subjection to regular and surprise inspections. Since unemployment benefits and other welfare programs were tied to unemployment and domestic conditions, accepting assistance meant accepting the occasional presence of government social workers. This put added pressure on the small spaces in which families lived. Though it was in violation of the conditions on which assistance was granted, children of all ages often found mini-entrepreneurial schemes by which they could supplement the family's inadequate income from relief agencies (newspaper circulation, shoe-shining, 'protecting' people's cars while they shopped). Their absence from home often implied they were working, so hanging out on the street was not only frowned on by elements within the community, but also by the laws of the Weimar Republic (Rosenhaft, p. 210).

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Reiter, "Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains"
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975

ed. Richard J. Evans and Dick Geary, The German Unemployed: experiences and consequences of mass unemployment from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich /
Chapter 1: Evans, "Introduction: The experience of unemployment in the Weimar Republic"
Chapter 5: Kramer, "Frankfurt's Working Women: Scapegoats or Winners of the Great Depression?"
Chapter 8: Rosenhaft, "The Unemployed in the Neighborhood: Social Dislocation and Political Mobilisation in Germany 1929-33"
New York : St. Martin's Press, c1987.

ed. Stachura, Peter D., Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany
Chapter 4: Hausen, "Unemployment also Hits Women: the New and the Old Woman on the Dark Side of the Golden Twenties in Germany"
New York, St. Martin's Press, 1986

Mason, Tim, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class
Chapter 5: "Women in Germany 1925-1940. Family, welfare and work"
Glasgow, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Weiland, Ruth, Kinder der Arbeitslosen
bibliographic info not ready-to-hand

Related Texts
Author: Great Britain. Ministry of Labour.
Title: Unemployment problem in Germany / Translation of an Advisory
commission appointed by the federal government.
Published: Lond., H. M. Stationery off., 1931.
Description: 101 p.

Subjects (use s=):
Insurance, Unemployment--Germany.
Unemployment--Germany.
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Lippincott B-10 331.1379 G3G7 Circ. info not available
------------------------------------------------------------

Author: Hafeneger, Benno, 1948-

Title: "Alle Arbeit fur Deutschland" : Arbeit, Jugendarbeit und
Erziehung in der Weimarer Republik, unter dem
Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit / Benno
Hafeneger.
Published: Koln :bBund, c1988.
Description: 280 p. ; 21 cm.

Subjects (use s=):
Working class--Germany--History--20th century.
Youth--Germany--History--20th century.
Unemployment--Germany--History--20th century.
Germany--Economic conditions--1918-1945
Germany--Economic conditions--1945-1990.
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HD8450 .H23 Check Shelf
--------------------------

Title: The German unemployed : experiences and consequences of mass
unemployment from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich /
edited by Richard J. Evans and Dick Geary.
Published: New York : St. Martin's Press, c1987.
Description: xviii, 314 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Subjects (use s=):
Unemployed--Germany--History--20th century.
Unemployment--Germany--History--20th century.
Germany--Economic conditions--1918-1945
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HD5779 .G355 1987 Not checked out
----------------------

Author: Stachura, Peter D.

Title: The Weimar Republic and the younger proletariat : an economic
and social analysis / Peter D. Stachura.
Published: New York : St. Martin's Press, 1989.
Description: xii, 236 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Subjects (use s=):
Youth--Employment--Germany--History--20th century.
Unemployment--Germany--History--20th century.
Public welfare--Germany--History--20th century.
Juvenile delinquency--Germany--History--20th century.
Germany--Economic conditions--1918-1945
Germany--Social conditions--1918-1933
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HD6276.G4 S725 1989 Not checked out
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Author: Lewek, Peter.
Title: Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer
Republik 1918-1927 / Peter Lewek.
Published: Stuttgart : F. Steiner, 1992.
Description: 483 p. ; 23 cm.
Series: Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Beihefte ; Nr.104
Series searchable as:
Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Beihefte ; Nr. 104
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Van Pelt H5 .V6 Suppl. Nr.104 Not checked out
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Author: Jahoda, Marie.
Title: Marienthal; the sociography of an unemployed community
Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Hans Zeisel.
Reginall and Thomas Elsaesser>
Published: Chicago, Aldine, Atherton <1971>
Description: xvi, 128 p. 23 cm.
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LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HD5772.M33 J313 ihaveit
---------------------------

Author: Stiefel, Dieter.
Title: Arbeitslosigkeit : soziale, politische und wirtschaftliche
Auswirkungen am Beispiel Osterreichs, 1918-1938 / von Dieter
Stiefel.
Published: Berlin : Duncker & Humblot, c1979.
Description: 219 p. : graphs ; 24 cm.
Series: Schriften zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte ; Bd. 31
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HD5708 .S73 Not checked out

--------------------
Author: Weiland, Daniela, 1954-
Title: Geschichte der Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland und
Osterreich : Biographien, Programme, Organisationen / von
Daniela Weiland.
Edition: 1. Aufl.
Published: Dusseldorf : ECON Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983.
Description: 320 p. : ill., ports. ; 19 cm.
Series searchable as:
Hermes Handlexikon. 2480
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION: CALL NUMBER: CIRC.STATUS:
Van Pelt HQ1625 .W44 1983 Not checked out

----------------
AUTHOR Weiland, Ruth.
TITLE Kinderfursorge jenseits unserer grenzen ..
PUBLISHER Weimar : Bohlaus, 1937.
DESCRIPT 116 p. ; 24 cm.
SUBJECT Child welfare.
LOCATION CALL NO. STATUS x
B Canaday 362.7 W42 AVAILABLE

----------------
AUTHOR Stargardt, Nicholas.
TITLE Male bonding and the class struggle in imperial Germany.
ANNOTATION review article.
APPEARS IN The Historical Journal v. 38 (Mar. '95) p. 175-93
PUBL/YEAR 1995.
PAGES p. 175-93.

SUBJECT Labor and laboring classes -- Germany -- History.

Holdings: THE HISTORICAL JOURNAL
x1 > S McCabe Per PERIODICALS x
x LIB HAS 1-38 1958-1995

---------------------
AUTHOR Stachura, Peter D.
TITLE National socialism and the German proletariat, 1925-1935: old
myths and new perspectives.
ANNOTATION Review article.
APPEARS IN The Historical Journal v. 36 (Sept. '93) p. 701-18
PUBL/YEAR 1993.
PAGES p. 701-18.
Political sociology

q Holdings: THE HISTORICAL JOURNAL
x1 > S McCabe Per PERIODICALS x
x LIB HAS 1-38 1958-1995

--------------------
AUTHOR Wiesner, Merry E., 1952-
TITLE Wandervogels and women: journeymen's concepts of masculinity in
early modern Germany.
APPEARS IN Journal of Social History v. 24 (Summer '91) p. 767-82
PUBL/YEAR 1991.
PAGES p. 767-82.

SUBJECT Journeymen's societies.
Holdings: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY
x1 > S McCabe Per PERIODICALS x
x LIB HAS 1- 1967-

Fallout: a genealogy of this paper

Initial Outline
I. Introduction -- the domestic and the public
A. Effects of unemployment -- time, space, and authority
B. Gender delineation of boundaries
In German social policy, the inter-war period marked the entrance of 'employment' and 'unemployment' into the public discourse. The meaning and official definition of the terms and trends in its incessant alteration due to political interest and perceived financial necessity is particularly telling of the attitudes that were current and that could be mobilized in the enforcement of female domesticity.

II. The Breakdown of Class and Sex Borders, or 'Why the Lower Middle Class Cared'
A. Gender Borders
1. WWI feminization of male occupations
2. Tenacity After Demobilization
a. in industry
b. in white-collar occupations
B. Class Borders
1. Unemployment and the social consequences of altered family psych. and structure
Johada?
2. Fallen Economy, Unemployment and the Crises of space
a. Rosenhaft -- overcrowding and men's use of public space for privacy
b. Rosenhaft -- intrusion into the domestic
3. Class politics and class division of the neighborhood -- sharpening contrast in class subdivision
a. Eve Rosenhaft -- landlord vs. tenant
b. R. J. Evans -- social geography -- neighborhoods

III. Male resistance through the public sphere, or 'What They Did About It'
A. discourse on unemployment insurance and the labor market
1. the development of structures of unempl relief
The fact that women were most tenacious in their white-collar occupations is due in part to the relative novelty of them. Labor organization was predominantly male, and the social ties that it maintained enabled returning servicemen to re-establish male priority in those workplaces where it had been strong before the war ‹ heavy industry and manufacturing in general. In the white-collar sector, there was not the long-standing tradition of male-exclusive organization; there was little organization at all. The expulsion of women that occured in other industries during demobilisation would have to wait until a coherent public discourse of male right to work could be combined with charges against the female 'double earner' under the politicized development of unimployment insurance and welfare policy.(Evans, 1987; p. 116)
2. male priority and the emergence of 'right to work' and 'full employment' goals
B. discourse on 'the masses' -- precursors to fascism

IV. Male resistance through militarized misogeny, or 'Why They Did It'
A. Linking militarized misogeny with the sentiments underlying unemploy. discourse
B. Theweliet: the impossibility of a female professional in THE MALE PROFESSION
1. woman as Douglasian 'dirt' -- the liminal figure for the all-male order
Theweleit: erasure
C. Seccombe on the elision of domestic production under capitalism:
1. the concealment of actual relations of production

Notes
In Weimar Germany, periods of economic decline and crisis during the twenties and thirties brought out social rifts and stressed socially formed identities up to and beyond their limits. This was particularly traumatic for men, who had either been accustomed to positions of self-determination and power, or were led to expect them upon attaining age. Two of these rifts are youth relief/employment and women's participation in the labor market. When times got hard, both of these questions rose to crisis proportions in the social discourse, and, indeed, in reality. Youths found themselves without family or job identity and without income; men, already struggling to maintain employment and status, seized on the recent installation of women in the labor force as a cause of their woes...

Woman and the domestic sphere as Douglasian 'dirt' to the male military order? WWI was the first war to incorporate the people of a nation as such directly in its battles. The forms learned there thus became national forms and could not simply die to the old traditions, as had probably earlier been the tendency.

Jahoda's analysis of time as experienced by the unemployed of Marienthal implies the need for a more nuanced conception of the effects machine-driven time-regimentation has had on the industrial working-class. E.P. Thompson has described in critical terms the co-development of industrial technology and time-management during industrialization ("Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"), and many others have followed. Jahoda's analysis does not contradict such critiques, but it does suggest that, within industrial capitalism, the matrices of success ‹ or perhaps even subsistence ‹ demand a time-discipline that is socially, not personally, maintained. In such a system, industrial employment contributes not just a wage, but also a time-structure that enables workers to better manage their domestic lives, educate themselves, and organize as a class, among other things. Industrialization provides the time-structure that is required by its own wider social repercussions.

So both the general pattern of life and that of the individual show that the people of Marienthal have gone back to a more primitive, less differentiated experience of time. The new circumstances do not fit any loner an established time schedule. A life that is poorer in demands and activities has gradually begun to develop on a timetable that is correspondingly poor. [Jahoda, Marienthal, p. 77]

Debord voices the same critique in The Society of the Spectacle.:

Urbanism is the modern way of tackling the ongoing need to safeguard class power by ensuring the atomization of workers dangerously massed together by the conditions of urban production. The unremitting struggle that has had to be wage against the possibility of workers coming together in whatever manner has found a perfect field of action in urbanism. The effort of all established powers, since the experience of the French Revolution, to augment their means of keeping order in the street has eventually culminated in the suppression of the street itself. [p. 121-2]

Culled Passages

On several occasions following in the wake of WWI, the social crises sparked by economic decline and wide-spread unemployment gave rise to revealing articulations of the ideology of feminine domesticity. The return of husbands, fathers, and brothers from the battlefields of the War was paralleled in subsequent years by the periodic return from the rhythms, public space, and social identity of the work-place. Men returned from the first total war to find the work-world dramatically altered by an unprecedented feminization of industrial and clerical occupations. Later, they came home from eliminated jobs to discover the domestic sphere, with its different time-shemes, social position, and organization of authority. Contemporary public discourse of the domestic and the 'Woman' reveals the anxiety that this double-encounter produced in men, just as it permitted women to speak in new ways about the feelings of social isolation that often accompany the traditional duties and habits of domestic life. Having themselves been forced into it, men could not simply brush such concerns off as 'womens' complaining.'

Most of the factors of family alteration are interwoven, so that, for example, political activism in cities was partly the result of increased crowding in the domestic sphere and the resulting pressure on public spaces and institutions to provide relief.

Those who later assumed power through the National Socialist party may have had economic interests in deriding and regulating the idle unemployed, but mingled with these there was also the fear of becoming one of them.

Family/public space introduction:
It can be no surprise that massive unemployment has a strong effect on families. The case of wide-spread and geographically uniform unemployment in Weimar Germany shows that it affects their whole approach to time and its uses, their arrangement of family relationships, space, the boundaries between public and private, and the location and strength of authority both within the family and in the more public relationships of people in the neighborhood. These changes may be the result of several factors including shock, conscious and unconscious adaptation, adjustment to various kinds of state intercession and interference, as well as responses of a politically active nature. The intrusion of men into the domestic sphere was not the least of these factors; neither was it the necessary consequence of male unemployment. However, despite the majority of cases in which male intrusion was the result, the sexual division of life was undiminished or even increased under the pressures of unemployment.
The entrance of men into a domestic world that had evolved in their absence along with the development of industrial capitalism and which they had never before encountered was accompanied by a redoubled agency of the state in the intimate affairs of the German poor. Encountering unprecedented numbers of women in industrial and administrative jobs, men after WWI did not work as individuals to reestablish their priority in the 'working world' (which excluded domestic work); their efforts proceded at the personal, domestic level, but they also participated in wide-spread public debate in both the press and in the official documents of the Weimar Republic and of local councils. The question of male priority remained unsettled throughout the inter-war period until the Nazi regime came to power. Not only during the Depression, but during demobilization in 1918-19, again in 1924 and in 1927, the general assertion of male priority challenged the propriety of the substantial female workforce that had built up during the war. German patriarchy was highly entrenched.
The imagery and outlook on which much of it was founded is relevant not only to an understanding of how women's employment changed with the changing fortune of the German economy, but also to understanding reactions against what was felt as an increasing threat, embodied in 'the idle masses' that accompany wide-spread unemployment. Tempered by war, the German masculine identity was derived from a public work-life devoid of women. Women's presence in industrial and white-collar labor-markets that had been exclusively male before the war was disturbing. The existence of massive social phenomena such as Germany's recurring unemployment was likewise a threat to the bourgeoise masculine sense of personal integrity. The enormity of unemployment at different times in the inter-war period implied that it was not to be avoided by dint of individual exertion: this was a social phenomenon beyond the ability of any individual to contain. Thus, potential joblessness (made real to the lower-middle classes by the presence of idle masses congregating in their own streets) and the presence of women in the work-place were alike threatening to the bourgeoise male self-image, and were banished from immediate consciousness under the same constellation of derogatory terms ‹ whore, flood, filth (Theweleit, 1987; pp. 70, 74).
In his essay on turn-of-the-century reform rhetoric, "The 'Unspeakable Blessing'", Bruce Bellingham theorizes the function of this kind of name as a symbol that taps into broader cultural attitudes and enables people to think about the very poor as belonging to a fundamentally different social category from their own, relegating them to the inhuman or the subhuman. Bellingham finds a rhetoric among American social reformers that is similar to what Klaus Theweleit describes in Male Fantasies. Reformers in the US and military right-radicals in Germany shared a common metaphorical system by which victims of chronic, structural unemployment became rats and dogs; floods, torrents and tides; sediment and filth.
The effort to dehumanize through such metaphorical systems was basically a disguised effort to distance one social class from the other, a negative definition of the upper-classes' humanity. By making the eating habits, the dwellings, and the behavior of the unemployed into a subject for zoological or geological observation, middle- and upper-class observers turned everyday, palpable examples of their own potential loss of power into a foil against which the essential humanity and rightness of their own life-style could be elevated and defined.
There were real phenomena being interpreted through these dehumanizing discourses. Poverty became more visible. Forced by the constrainst of insufficient living space, poor urban families were in fact living in ways that would have been completely new to some observers. The structure of tenement housing and urban overcrowding forced families to redefine their use of space, to use what had been considered public spaces as private ones.
The consequences of these changes in the structure of urban life was political as well as ideological. The necessity of space and economy caused a reordering of family and public institutions that had inescapable political consequences. Simple compliance with necessity in new daily routines could be interpreted as a political act, since this often meant 'hanging out' in places where idleness was considered improper social behavior. Forced into public idleness, youths and men were also forced to subject themselves to questioning by police and social workers. In the first years of the '30s, when unemployment insurance and poor-relief was drastically reduced, many families could subsist only by deceiving the state. As Eve Rosenhaft has suggested, the existence of state rules that could be followed only through self-starvation tended to undermine its legitimacy. The explosion of 'idle masses' into various public spaces constituted a challenge to established expectations about their proper use and about proper behavior in public. In a society where

Male Subjectivity/Patriarchy introduction
The history of this century can be characterized as a continued battle to regain the appearance of human agency in a world governed by systems of technology-production. Much has been made of the function that WWI had in disabusing modernists of the conviction that they commanded the orderly progress of society, but it is structural innovations in the process of production, distribution, and innovation itself, that has yielded the real crisis in modern subjectivity. Since that subjectivity has been constituted almost exclusively in patriarchy, the crisis has revealed itself largely in the behavior of men. Leaning heavily on Klaus Theweleit's two-volume Male Fantasies, I will posit as a background to more focused analyses that the brutal mobilization of the fascist state in Germany is largely a reflection of insecurity in the modern (male) subject as it faced a dramatic unfolding of global capitalism and its concommitant processes of technology-production. Workers in this century witnessed the final extinction of traditional craft production and the systematization and depersonalization of management techniques. For the first time in history, it was obvious that the future of one's job, determinations of the manner in which it was executed, and what it produced were all matters beyond the ability of individuals to fully comprehend. Management has certainly taken advantage of run-away technology as a means to dampen worker militancy, but they have ultimately had little more control of world social development than their subordiantes. With varying intensities according to class, men conditioned to consider personal, human interventions (their own among these) the basis of social development confronted the revelation of a world determined by chaotic interactions among mass-consumers and the self-determining trajectory of technological innovation.
The upshot of all this was a certain insecurity in male identity. This sensitivity of the German male subject in the early part of the century was only exacerbated when, in 1918 and '19, German men re-entered a world economy that never stopped for the first world war, and probably even benefitted from it. War, the traditional motor for social transformation, had proved a kind of time vacuum. Under a largely consolidated system of global capitalism, it no longer mattered much when a section of land exchanged political hands. So long as it didn't fundamentally undermine the production and exchange of industrial goods, war didn't much matter to long-run development of technologies which would in turn determine the structure of social development for subsequent years. For all their endurance and suffering on The Front, soldiers, whose place in the social imaginary was influenced by past conceptions of military aristocracy, heroism, chivalry and glory, had completely lost their foundation in the social scheme by the end of the war. Just as they had been reduced to paralyzed waiting on the battlefield by the new technologies of trench warfare, so had their place in the social field of ranks, respect and power been largely unaffected by the exploits of war. For all their military effort, socially they had stood still while the world, and capitalism, moved on without them.

123 Abstract
1) The 'working poor' cope with unstable, developing capitalist urban-industrial labor markets by assigning to women the task of organizing community 'safety-nets' which integrated the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoise in many urban settings.

= kinship communism outside the state

2) While WWI was a blow to the Western world's sense of rational stability and indefinite progress, it also crushed last vestiges of romantic individualism that had kept at bay most state intervention in social problems, such as the overwhelming urban poverty that was often the result of gross fluctuations in industrial markets. ... The inter-war period is characterized by unprecedented bureaucratization and 'rationalization' of both state and capital. It is the final consolidation of corporate over entrepreneurial/artisanal capitalism, and the birth of direct cooperation of state and capital in the pursuit of social policy.
This process of social (i.e.: political and capital) rationalization entailed the erosion of neighbourhood support networks and their replacement with federal and local government welfare programs. It marks the height of what Foucault means by increasing state regulation of what had been community-determined life-practices. The erosion of neighborhood support networks meant essentially the erosion of women's traditional authority in the domestic sphere and the reconstitution of 'family' as atomized and nuclear.

=kinship communism in transition and decay

3) In Germany, these rapid social transformations developed into a crisis early in the '30s, when, after several years of massive unemployment, the state could no longer afford to live up to its welfare promises and poor communities were thrown back onto what was left of their community support networks. By that time, women were for the most part either engaged in what was left of the women's wage-based economy (which they had entered during WWI), or pressed into the new mold of nuclear family life, unable to resort to the neighbourhood sharing that had previously been a vital resource to poor families. Moreover, the land-lords, small shop-keepers, public-house patrons, and other petty-bourgeoise community-members who had previously been an integral part of these networks were now struggling for their own existence (Rosenhaft in Evans) and, more importantly, had re-positioned themselves ideologically in response to the state's assumption of the 'poor problem'. They had been saddled with much of the burden of state-sponsored unemployment insurance programs built up after the War, were still paying into these funds, and consequently tended to believe it was now the state's responsibility, not theirs, to deal with poverty and unemployment. As much as any inherent structure of capitalism, the policies of the Weimar Republic's Democratic Socialist government created a division in poor communities between the proletariat and the lower middle class.
Be that as it may, industrial capital is primarily responsible for the transformations and disruption of family patterns that ultimately played a major role in the consolidation of Nazi power in 1933. The trend had been for the state to disparage the domestic (use R. Reiter) even as it usurped its functions of resource-distribution and mutual aid among the poor; the early years of the Nazi regime are largely characterized by a total reverse in this trend of division between the domestic sphere of neighborhood support and the public world of the state. In Germany, totalitarianism meant that the state seized on the regulation of family and community as its constitutive function (use T. Mason, Hausen, Kramer, and Evans).
=kinship communism erased by state totalitarianism