World War I and the German Welfare State: Gender, Religion, and the Paradoxes of Modernity

The German government hoped to win World War I in order to secure hegemonic global power. However, by the summer of 1916, this war had become a total war, bogged down in a new form of muddy trench warfare. This led to the unprecedented growth of state intervention into the economy to regulate war-related production and ensure the adequate distribution of consumer goods, highlighting the extent to which access to these commodities was determined by the existing unequal relations of power and money. This chapter analyzes how World War I was a turning point in the development of the modern welfare state, the result of a multitude of essentially contested social, ideological, and political responses to the problems raised by the transformation of liberal civil society and the market economy. The essay also examines the contradictions and paradoxes of the modernization of the German social-welfare sector during World War I.