Youth Welfare and the Political Alchemy of Juvenile Justice

In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “ Sonderweg thesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

Infant mortality in Imperial Germany started to decline in urban areas from the 1870s onwards, whereas national rates did not decrease before the beginning of the twentieth century. Therefore, key explanatory factors determining the levels and trends of infant mortality are investigated in an urban context. These include the decline of birth rates, the legitimacy status of infants, feeding practices, environmental conditions, and economic growth. Through a rising living standard and by creating a health-preserving environment, urban populations lost their traditional disadvantage in survival chances. This went so far that even high risk factors, such as the abandonment of breastfeeding, could be counterbalanced. In this sense, a study of past urban health conditions functions as a paradigm for the situation in industrialized societies.