ABSTRACT
The social group which most constantly occupied the minds of the authorities in state and municipality in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany was that of the poor. Once more the problem of the poor confronted the authorities. The poor in the first half of the nineteenth century were much more likely to be those whom misfortune had robbed of their livelihood or those whose economic position was not strong enough to cope with rising prices, those whom Antje Kraus calls the 'potential poor'. The Great Fire of 1842 compounded the misery of the poor, for it was their homes which bore the brunt of the disaster. Germany was as yet a poor country; for many years after that period from about 1850 to 1873, which economists call the 'takeoff period' of her industrial revolution, a large percentage of her populace lived a life of frugality, even of need.
