Lazy, Apathetic and Dangerous: the Social Construction of Unemployed Workers in Germany during the Late Weimar Republic

Abstract

At the end of the Weimar Republic, German business people, socialists, and communists used images of unemployed workers to define the boundaries of what they each considered acceptable and unacceptable in German Society. While concerns over Jews, homosexuals, and so on stayed within narrow discursive boundaries in the Weimar Republic, the public discourse on the unemployed ranged across a number of discursive boundaries and became a nodal point of social critique and commentary. Despite the marginal social status of unemployed workers, discussions about them became central to the self-understanding of different social groups in Weimar's political economy. In defining the unemployed, these communities also defined themselves and laid bare their existential concerns.