From the Margins: Poverty in Divided and United Germany

Please join us for the fourth lecture in our Spring 2025 series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington.

Christoph Lorke: From the Margins: Poverty in Divided and United Germany
In both East and West Germany, debates about issues and citizens on the margins of society served political ends and cultural needs. Talking about “poverty” and “poor people” was part of negotiating questions of belonging, the imagined value of work, and individuals’ willingness to conform to the political system in both societies. This talk will highlight both changes and continuities in the discussion of poverty before and after unification, and also discuss how social marginality offers a distinctly new perspective on German history since 1945.
Christoph Lorke is a historian and a researcher at the Institute for Westphalian Regional History in Münster. He is also a lecturer at the University of Münster. In his study "Liebe verwalten," published by Schöningh/Brill in 2020, he looked at foreign marriages in Germany for the period from 1870 to 1945. He works on poverty, social inequality, transformation, urban history, migration.
About the Spring 2025 Lecture Series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington:

In his bestseller Poverty, by America, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sociologist Matthew Desmond highlights systemic reasons for the persistence of widespread poverty in the United States. Desmond argues that it is in the interest of many affluent Americans to keep some people poor and calls for a social movement to abolish poverty. The GHI’s 2025 Spring Lecture Series addresses the ongoing debates about the causes and persistence of poverty with a historical perspective, featuring four lectures that will trace how European and North American societies treated poverty over the course of the twentieth century.

Throughout the twentieth century, poverty remained a social concern, a political talking point, and an often devastating lived reality. Industrialization had given rise to precarious urban living conditions well before the turn of the century, but even after crises like the Great Depression and the devastation of the World Wars were overcome, the economic deprivation of significant parts of the population endured. In the propaganda battles of the Cold War, economic hardships were identified as products of either socialism or capitalism. Up to today, poverty challenges the legitimacy of political leadership by contradicting their promises of prosperity.

These talks will feature leading scholars offering new perspectives on precarious living in modern society. Going beyond established narratives, the lectures highlight how migration decisions, non-profit organizations, social science research, and the financial industry have all shaped the crises and opportunities those living on the economic margins have faced.
Doors will open at 6:00 pm and will close promptly at 6:30 pm with the beginning of the lecture. Access to the lecture after doors close will be at descretion of the GHI. Registration does not guarantee access once event capacity is reached.

The lecture will be recorded and made available for viewing.

Organized by Raphael Rössel and Atiba Pertilla of the in cooperation with the

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

German Historical Institute, 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, D.C, United States