The present chapter provides a historical survey of the development of social
protection in Germany up to 1945.1 It is based on the realization that the modern,
complex “system” of social protection is an “evolved” one and can be best
understood by knowing how it came into being. It has layers of historical growth
and is a far cry from the kind of rigor one expects of “systems” in the scientific or
philosophical sense. But in the professional discourse of social theory and social
law it may well be referred to as a “system,” and this can be useful to the historian if
he is asked to specify the past phenomena he is searching for and in which he
expects to find a bridge to the present.
Of course, a look back at history can be useful also in that can provide today’s
actors clues to how much of the past is preserved in the various structures that exist
today. If something should or must be changed, it pays to examine the long-term
developmental trends. Many declarations of political intent and reform projects
have failed simply because they underestimated the inertia of historically evolved
material. Long-term trends can be reversed only if one has detailed knowledge
about the forces driving them. In this limited sense, historical information—in
conjunction with sociological, economic, and legal frameworks—can also serve
to lay the groundwork for innovations. Especially in the transition to one of the
most difficult periods of social policy in the first decades of the new millennium, it
could prove an urgent necessity to regard also the older legacies and institutions as
“historically evolved.”