Over the years, scholars have identified the Weimar period as among the most pivotal in the development of the German social state (Sozialstaat). Noting what appears to have been an almost unbroken pattern of expansion in the compass of social work since the late nineteenth century, social scientists and historians have recognized the 1920s as a time of especially acute growth in public assistance. Government expenditures from the First World War onward show a particularly marked increase in three areas: public housing, public health, and social insurance. Together, these three spheres constituted the primary sites of Weimar social interventionism. Analysts have found it more difficult, however, to agree on the historical significance of these interventions, with discussion largely centered on the question of whether, and to what extent, the social programs of the Reich and municipalities overburdened the social state and thus contributed to the demise of the Weimar political order.

It is a commonplace of German historiography and the history of economic thought in particular that German economists pursued a Sonderweq in the second half of the nineteenth century, rejecting the theoretical bases of laissez-faire doctrines that were common in Britain and France in favor of a study of economic history. This is generally viewed as taking place in two stages: first, an “older German historical school” that began to question the accepted dogmas of Smithian economics beginning in the 1840s, with the work of Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies. This allegedly preceded the “younger historical school” of the 1870s and after, dominated by Gustav Schomoller, Lujo Brentano, and Georg Friedrich Knapp. In calling the existence of this older school a myth, I want to draw on the currently fashionable connotation of the word “myth”: to say, in other words, that this received notion contains some important elements of truth—but masked in such a way as to distort its significance.

Disabled veterans were certainly in a rotten mood following World War I, and not without reason. A lost war, unrest at home, and physical pain were not things to celebrate. Most aggravating of all, however, were the problems associated with obtaining an adequate pension: for years after the end of the war the pension system caused bitterness among people who felt wronged by the very government that was supposed to take care of them.

National identity is a complex political equation that is nevertheless often represented in a single image. Historically, nation-states have erected monuments to display their power and legitimacy in material form. Yet, despite their apparent physical stability, the meaning of such structures is subject to alteration and reinterpretation. Thus they provide the intriguing possibility of exploring the ambiguities that emerge when a multi-dimensional social phenomenon like the nation is given a unified representation.