ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently, the social history of Germany has been dominated by studies of urban life. This is particularly true of the lower classes, despite the fact that 31 per cent of the German labour force still worked in agriculture as late as 1907.1 Rural society was regarded as somehow conservative and unchanging, and, with the exception of the Prussian rural elite, attracted comparatively little attention.2 In the last two decades historians have begun correcting this imbalance, and a number of important studies of rural life during the Empire and Weimar Republic have been published. However, in the main, this research has focused upon the landowning peasantry and the rural society of the west.3 The very different rural landscape of East Elbian Germany, where the lower social strata consisted of rural labourers with little or no land of their own, is much less well explored.4 It was claimed, as recently as in 1996, that the agricultural workers of the Second Empire were a ‘forgotten
1 Gerd Hohorst, Jürgen Kocka and Gerhard A. Ritter (eds) Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreiches 1870-1914 (Munich, 1975), p. 57.
