As mentioned in Chapter 1, in terms of the “natural history” of the youth problem, the conferences of the Center for Workers' Welfare Institutions and Protestant Social Congress and the Erfurt essay contest in 1900 began the progression from the stage of awareness to the stages of policy determination and reform. The conferences and writings of the reformers served three fundamental purposes. First, they traced the origins of the working-class youth problem in order to determine its elements and measure its dimensions. Second, they explored in detail particular facets of the youth problem that they considered most serious: the deteriorating health of young workers, the declining morals of urban youth, and the rising rate of juvenile delinquency, among others. Third, they attempted to hammer out programs of legislation, institutional reform, and officially sanctioned and financed activities that could ameliorate, if not eradicate, the youth problem. Behind these endeavors lay an image of young workers that would be sketched at these conferences and would persist through the war, albeit with some minor retouching.

Many of the binary oppositions that are standardly used to characterize the “Great Transformation” originated in the social thought of Imperial Germany: Ferdinand Tönnies's “community” versus “society,” Max Weber's contrast between traditional and rational action. The rapidity of Germany's industrialization and urbanization in the last half of the nineteenth century gave rise to a widespread sense of displacement and estrangement that prompted numerous German thinkers to grapple with the meaning of modernity.