ABSTRACT
One crucial dimension of the late nineteenth-century German economy which facilitated fluctuations in employment was the mobility of the work force. Presupposing mobility, unemployment in the modern sense has always been associated with urban industrial societies. During decades when the German states had relied almost exclusively on agriculture, employment tended to be seasonal. Despite many improvements in attitudes toward the unemployed, one especially difficult notion to dispel was that laziness constituted an important source of idleness. Contemporaries observed that it was difficult to inculcate industrious habits in workers who were accustomed to interruptions in their labor occasioned by numerous religious holidays, seasonal slack demand, wars, plagues, inebriation and variable business conditions. With demobilization, a new disruption of the wartime equilibrium occurred and hundreds of thousands of laborers were thrown out of work. Although demobilization never produced unemployment on the scale which it reached during the 1930's in Germany, it is significant that there were pronounced political repercussions in both instances.
