Die Armennot

At the beginning of this week I finished re-reading another Gotthelf work, Die Armennot, a title I have never translated to my satisfaction (though it is not difficult)--something like The Poverty Emergency.  This is an outlier among Gotthelf's works.  His large output consists entirely of fiction, except for this one book, a study of rapidly increasing poverty in the 1830's.

In it, he declares that poverty is the great crisis of the age, comparing it to earlier eras' fears of the Turks or the plague.  The poor are increasing, he says, speaking of the "proletariat" almost a decade before Marx and Engels published their "Communist Manifesto."  What is especially alarming, Gotthelf thinks, is not the mere fact of poverty itself, which always exists, but the growing hostility and aggressiveness of the poor toward those who are better off, which he fears could provoke a class war.

Gotthelf attributes this phenomenon to various factors, some of them specific to Switzerland (though he regards it as a European and even global problem).  But of particular interest to me is his situating it in the post-French Revolutionary context.  The ideals of freedom and equality have made their way across the mountains to Switzerland, he says, but they are inevitably misinterpreted by the poor and uneducated, who understandably view them as a promise that the goods of society will be taken from the wealthy and redistributed to them (equality) so that they can satisfy their unfettered desires (freedom).  Hence their anger and hostility when this does not happen.

Gotthelf himself, focusing especially on poor children, argues that only genuine Christian love can supply their needs and solve the problem of class conflict.  In particular, he proposes that charitable societies erect homes for poor children.  These would be run by a married couple who would be father and mother to the children and also responsible for giving them a proper education.  Gotthelf himself was actively involved in founding and running just such a home, a project that was near and dear to  his heart, and he gives a long description of its origins and early years in order to demonstrate that his proposal is a realistic one.

I don't know that Gotthelf's idea could solve the problem of child poverty on a large scale, but I find it interesting that he was proposing in 1840 an idea that we today would call a "faith-based initiative."  And surely he is right that what poor children need are not simply laws (even good laws) and bureaucracy (even good bureaucracy), but rather love and care--or, as he puts it, "Wärme und Licht" (warmth and light).