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Tramps in Germany, 1880-1914
| In the wake of the severe economic crisis of the 1870, tramping unemployed workers became a mass phenomenon intensely debated among welfare and criminal law experts of many industrialising countries. In Germany, these debates resulted in the establishment of a new system of assistance, the Wayfarers Aid (Wandererfürsorge), which sheltered and at the same time endeavoured to control migratory craftsmen and labourers in order to keep them from loafing and begging. This system originally found many supporters, but it was soon also criticised, one major point of criticism being that it allegedly did not differentiate effectively enough between honest job seekers and work-shy vagabonds, thus actually promoting vagrancy instead of checking it. From the viewpoint of some critics, tramping per se was an anachronistic form of mobility in modern industrial society that should be abolished, not assisted, and increasingly it was even qualified as something pathological, as a symptom for mental abnormality. This paper will sketch the dimensions and functions of tramping in late-nineteenth-century Germany, the system of the Wayfarers Aid and the changing representations of wayfarers in expert discourse around the turn to the twentieth century.
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