[Editor's Note: Four posts regarding this query follow.]

1
Submitted by: Charles Maier (csmaier@fas.harvard.edu)

Just to offer what may be too obvious a fact to merit mention:  there is
clearly a perceived motivation for women to buy war bonds at a time their
men are risking the supreme sacrifice at the front.  Also women survive war
and even without war tend to live longer (as American university fund
raisers recognize); some of the disparity in holdings just reflects
widowhood.  It would be worth comparing the gendered distribution of paper
assets in 1913 and 1929.  A kleinrentner party will also attract those for
whom life insurance policies provide a significant degree of property
holding; within a brief period after stabilization of the Mark/Reichsmark,
Germans had significantly returned to the life insurance market.

The issue, of course, in the mid-Weimar years that mobilized so many of
these groups was no longer preventing inflation, but pressing for legal
revalorisation for debt that had become worthless, and the failure of the
Republic to weight down the economy with heavy private debt payments (not
to speak of public debt) was one that led to the fragmentation of the party
system, as Larry Jones, Gerald Feldman, Michael Hughes, and others have
noted.  Of the three monetary reforms in this century: 1923-4, 1949, 1990
-- only the last has opted for significant upgrading of devalued paper
holdings, and the last was in a small enough segment of the country that
the economy could risk it.  Not without initial opposition from the central
bank and some residual harsh impact on unemployment.

By the way, the "rentes" or French bonds that constituted so great a
component of French middle class wealth before 1913, like the British
Consol (from Pitt's "consolidation" of national debt during the French
revolutionary war, I believe), were promises to pay perpetual interest, but
never to repay the capital amount invested -- in contrast to the usual U.S.
war bond or savings bond.  The British had gone much more aggressively into
equities or industrial bonds than the French.

2.
Submitted by: Renate Bridenthal (rbriden1@juno.com)

Apologies to the H-German list.  I meant to "forward," not "reply" to the
query about Kleinrentner.

3.
Submitted by: Young Sung-hong (yhong@notes.cc.sunysb.edu)

Since Rafael Scheck's inquiry regarding Kleinrentner is generating so many
comments, I though that it would be useful to distribute to the entire
list a longer version of the comments that I sent directly to Scheck.

Virtually everything that most people would ever wish to know about the
Kleinrenter can be found in my book, Welfare, Modernity and the Weimar
State and David Crew, Germans on Welfare.  To this should be added the
appropriate sections in Wilfried Rudloff, Die Wohlfahrtsstadt.  These
works also provide a comprehensive guide to the secondary literature, both
from the 1920s and scholarly work from the past decade.

According to the most authoritative contemporary source (Wilhelm
Schickenberg [the director of the Hanover Wohlfahrtsamt], Die
Reichsversorgung der Kleinrentner, 1927), contemporaries regarded as
Kleinrentner persons who before the war had enjoyed an income of 600 to
3,000 marks annually which they derived from capital worth DM 15-60,000.
Even though they sometimes led a life of genteel poverty and had a
standard of living below that of skilled workers, their gentility, their
status as rentiers, and their self-image was based on the fact that they
did not have to work for a living.  This was the all-important social
dividing line.

The term Kleinrentner was, I believe, coined in the post-war years when it
became necessary to delineate a specific social group which had never
before been the object of state legislative action.  There is no
distinction between Kleinrentner and Kapitalkleinrentner, for the income
of these pensioners necessarily came from their Kapital (in whatever
specific form it may have been invested).  The overwhelming majority
(75%+) of the Kleinrentner were women, most of whom were--as Michael
Hughes noted--Haustoechter of various ages or the widows of husbands of
the professional or lower middle classes; this is abundantly clear from
all of the contemporary literature.  Many of the Kleinrentner did support
the DNVP, which curried their favor because the inflation-induced poverty
of the Kleinrentner fit well with the polemics against the revolution and
the Republic by the nationalists.  However, one should be very careful
about buying into the rhetoric--the "victim theory" on which the DNVP and
the other parties of the center and right hoped to cash in--according to
which these people had become impoverished precisely _because_ they had
invested their capital in ways which supported the war effort and the
monarchy. For an examination of their actual wealth before the onset of
the long inflation and the ways in which they invested it, see pp. 103-5
of my book and the sources in the notes.

The definition of the Kleinrentner, the aims of Rentner organizations, and
policies to assist them developed across the early 1920s as the inflation
accelerated.  Local Kleinrentner assistance programs date from the
immediate post-war period.  Ad hoc measures take at both the local and
national levels from 1919 to 1923 were systematized by the major welfare
laws of 1924/26 (and these welfare laws were modified in some respects by
revaluation legislation). Kleinrentner were eligible for public
assistance because they were poor, but they received higher benefits and
other forms of privileged treatment (in comparison with the traditional
poor, who were eligible only for general municipal assistance) because of
their poverty was ostensibly due to circumstances beyond their control,
rather than their own failings. However, these benefits were subject to a
means test (which changed over time).  Despite Labor Ministry efforts to
the contrary, the policies of municipal welfare officials tended to
diminish the benefits they received from the revaluation legislation.  In
practice, the Kleinrentnerfuersorge was a cross between welfare and a
pension program (whose establishment was the aim of the Rentnerbund), and
so it's not precisely correct to speak of them as pensioners, at least as
happy ones.  This was the issue which drove most debate over Kleinrentner
assistance after 1924.

Their efforts to revise the revaluation legislation and persuade the
government to grant their demands for a pension system separate from the
welfare system and based on the notion that the state was compensating
them for state-caused impoverishment dragged on through the second half of
the 1920s, before the depression rendered these arguments moot.  There was
some Nazi legislation on the Kleinrentner, as Norbert Goetz has indicated,
though it's not clear that the Nazi legislation fundamentally improved the
position of the Kleinrentner, especially since it came after the
devastating impact of the depression on public assistance for all groups
of the needy.

4.
Submitted by: Helmut Schulz (helmut@sitcom.net)

One more note on this subject:

The correct spelling is: Kleinrentner.

In the majority of cases a Rentner is a recipient of Social Security
pension payments. The other meanings such as Kapitalrentner are
uncommon.

A Kleinrentner is obviously a person drawing a small Social Security
pension. Women have been the majority of Kleinrentners because they
receive the widows pensions (about 60%) and if they have a pension
based on employment of their own, they tend to have spent shorter
periods in employment than men and generally have held lower paying
positions.

The problem of the Kleinrentners was significant during the Weimar
republic as evidenced by the two dissertations. The Social assistance
payments established after WW2 in addition to the Social Security
Pensions mitigated the situation.

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