ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the classic nineteenth-century alcohol problem was the consequence of ‘normal’ drinking practices widely accepted within the working-class community. As Harry G. Levine has argued in the American context, alcohol was the favorite scapegoat of nineteenth-century society. In Germany, as in other countries, the temperance movement looked far beyond the individuals who suffered the immediate consequences of heavy drinking, for in drink they saw a key to all the great social evils of their day. Middle-class temperance reformers thus loaded the Drink Question with a significance that far outweighed its real potential to shape industrial society. The German temperance movement’s effort to provide a sober, scientific approach to the Drink Question only reinforced popular stereotypes by calling attention again and again to the drinking behavior of the working classes. The German temperance movement moved in encrusted political forms.
