ABSTRACT

The Life Space study by Martha Muchow was published posthumously by her brother, Hans Heinrich Muchow. Kurt Lewin, one of the most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century, is known primarily for the management style studies he conducted while in exile in the United States. Muchow’s writings exhibit a number of implicit and explicit values that can be viewed as exemplary, even according to moral concepts, such as respect for children and underprivileged families. Muchow, Kurt Lewin, and Siegfried Bernfeld can be considered early representatives of the concept of taking into account how the actors themselves shape lifeworlds, an approach that is currently being used in historical socialization research. In the 1920s, another field of application opened up for child and adolescent psychology with the introduction of a social welfare system, in particular youth welfare, which resulted from the first Reich Law for Youth Welfare put into effect in 1924.