ABSTRACT
Then the unspeakable difficult general situation. The misery. The slide of humanity into the darkness of distress. The repulsive whipping up of political passions.’2 This diary entry of Käthe Kollwitz from 1932 might be a summary of recent historical depictions of the social and political effects of the Depression.3 Thus the universality of the crisis became the central issue for later historians as well as for many contemporaries. But some contemporaries, above all those concerned with social policy, social workers in the public welfare sector or welfare agencies and those involved in private welfare organisations, were not content with this general statement. They realised that the economic, social and psychological distress, the ‘general misery’ , was not only a result of the almost natural course taken by the crisis, but also a consequence of the state control exercised as it ran its course. Their attention came to be concentrated on the connection between public distress and the management of the social and economic crisis at the end of the Weimar Republic under the leadership of Chancellors Brüning (from 30 March 1930), Papen (from 1 June 1932) and Schleicher (3 December 1932 to 30 January 1933). One after the other they used extensive emergency decrees to reduce wages and increase taxes, and so cut back the social insurance and public benefit systems in order to balance the budget at a time of rising unemployment and declining state income.
