"Creating Free and Good People": Idealization of the Countryside in the Berlin Orphan Administration, 1890-1914

The human environment of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Berlin was a confusing, frightening place. This was true for rich and poor alike. Much of the literature on urban reform in Germany focuses on the triumph of futuristic visions of improvement, the later years of the Kaiserreich being a fertile epoch where most German cities made experiments in urban administration. Particularly after 1890, perceptions of social dislocation sparked a wave of (primarily bourgeois) social reform movements, many of which were aimed at intervening in the lives of (primarily working-class) children across Germany.¹ In the years before the First World War, Germany could be said to have led the world in its public child welfare systems. Most impressive of these was the massive apparatus of child welfare constructed in the capital city, Berlin. Yet the impression of modernization can be misleading; Berlin's system of orphan relief and child welfare was also deeply affected by institutional and social attitudes of the ruling elites, and in particular, their ambivalence to the urban environment itself.

This resistance to, even revulsion for, the urban reality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was hardly unique to Germany, and the gritty reality of industrialization had disturbed people all across the Western world since the late eighteenth century. The Romantic fascination with the countryside was very common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and exerted a powerful pull on reformers, pedagogues, and religious leaders across Germany.² This had a direct bearing on child welfare: beginning in the 1830s, Johann Heinrich Wichern began building an orphan colony in the fields outside Hamburg, a model, which by 1848, would have dozens of affiliates and imitators all across Protestant Germany.³ In the city of Berlin, the myth of the pure, healthy, and moral countryside was a powerful one—and given the dire circumstances of life for most of the city's population, an entirely understandable one. But this myth was also quite powerful among the liberal elite that dominated the organs of social welfare in the city. In Berlin, the children under municipal care felt keenly the effects of this fascination with the countryside and were, in the words of Emil Münsterberg, "young folks, sinking ever lower in this great city, but who could be raised up again, and become once more free and good people."⁴

The reasons for this belief in the healing power of the countryside were many and varied: the urban patrician elite felt increasingly isolated from their own urban milieu and felt that the negative effects of urban life were overwhelming the advantages, especially for the working classes.⁵ Thus, for many of the men administering the Berlin Orphan Administration (Waisenverwaltung Berlin), the best answer to the ills of the city was to send as many children as possible to the countryside. The countryside, indeed, represented something of a magical solution, one that became increasingly comforting as the new century progressed. The promised benefits of the countryside allowed the city elite to avoid facing the more intractable problems of the urban environment. This became more and more important as the Social Democratic Party ever more loudly condemned the problems of the city and whose proposed solutions to the city's ills seemed dangerous or would have impinged on the property rights of the city's elite.⁶ The city's bourgeois elite and the city administration were unwilling to face fully the plight of the urban poor—because to do so would have called into question the basic nature of wealth distribution and property ownership in the city. The men who owned the tenements where the poor lived in squalor were largely the men who operated the social welfare apparatus of the city.

From 1870 to 1905, the population of the city of Berlin grew from one million to two million; almost as many people lived in the ring of suburbs around Berlin, where most newcomers settled and where new industries were springing up on a huge scale. On the eve of the First...