Anerkennung vor Umverteilung

For the Bernese pastor Albert Bitzius, better known as the writer Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), the social question was part of a profound religious problem. He was convinced that the hardship was generated by a society that no longer relied on Christian principles.
Unlike other ecclesiastical efforts, however, he was not concerned with "rechristianizing" the supposedly morally and ethically depraved poor and restoring the social order. Rather, he was in close contact with the new reform pedagogy and, with his home for Verding children, also influenced Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten. The progressive radical liberals, who saw the solution to social problems in a centralized, value-neutral and religiously indifferent state, did not recognize this and saw in him only the conservative reactionary and homeland poet.
In his analysis of "Die Armennoth" and "Käthi, die Großmutter", Lukas Künzler proposes a different reading of Gotthelf's social-ethical writings and shows that in his work he reacted more directly to the epochal challenges of his time than previously assumed. He reflected the fermentation in the lower classes caused by poverty and hunger just as clearly as the early socialist theorists, who saw the way to just social conditions in the revolutionary upheaval of all political-economic conditions.
Especially in our time, which again faces the question of values with migration and climate change, Gotthelf's work gains new importance and topicality.