Critical Theory and Radical Romanticism: Hans Thiersch's Lifeworld Orientation and German Social Work Theory

Abstract

Summary

With its long history as an academic discipline, social work in Germany has a substantial theory base. The dominant theory in the contemporary German canon is the lifeworld orientation, most closely associated with nonagenarian theorist Hans Thiersch. This paper reconstructs the theory's late twentieth-century evolution, contextualized for the international reader. Its basis is an analysis of Thiersch's own writing, considered with reference to the philosophical, political, and social work positions shaping it. The paper thus locates the theory ideationally, by examining contemporaneous academic educational-philosophical discourses; politically, in terms of social policy shifts; and professionally, with regard to the broader practice developments which it both responded to and triggered.

Findings

Contextual analysis of Thiersch's work locates it under the influence of hermeneutics/phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and critical theory. The theory has a strong ethical core, with lifeworld-oriented practitioners demonstrating a mindfulness of clients’ subjective experiences, and a dialogical approach to working collaboratively with them.

Applications

The lifeworld orientation's social pedagogic roots and its focus on community interventions, prevention, participative processes, and the actual experiences and understandings of clients make it an approach highly compatible with the current interest in relationship-based social work and radical/critical social work. Detailed consideration of German theory evolution also throws light on broader international questions of theory development, as well as offering comparative social work theory insights.

Introduction

German social work has a rich theory base (Engelke et al., 2014), and few contemporary thinkers have contributed to it as substantially as Hans Thiersch (1977, 1978a, 1978b, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2006, 2009a, 2015, 2020). Thiersch's (2009a, p. 5) “lifeworld orientation” can be considered the dominant social work theory in Germany, leaving its mark on national legislation (the 1990 Child and Youth Services Act) and becoming a defining component of the profession's identity (Deller & Brake, 2014). Theories help social workers “understanding, explaining or making sense of situations or behaviours” (Teater, 2020, p. 3). The Lebensweltorientierung (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009; Thiersch, 2009a) is notable for obliging practitioners to appreciate their clients’ own frames of reference and lived experiences, underlining the need for professional humility. It promotes a discursive approach to planning community-based social work. And, as the theory's name suggests, it orientates practitioners in their ethical dilemmas, assisting them working through the individual, institutional, and societal contradictions shaping social work.

The theory's original context was late twentieth-century West German political and professional discourses. Both were distinct. Politically, the environment was dominated by center-left and center-right ideas. Social work theory had to respond to these, while simultaneously accommodating more radical demands from a generation liberated by the 1968 social movements. Professionally, the theory was closely tied to the consolidation of a new composite German discipline, Soziale Arbeit (approximately comparable to social work and social care taken together). This is a broader field of professional activity than that captured by its English namesake “social work”: it additionally encompasses social pedagogy (in English: Hämäläinen, 2015). German Soziale Arbeit has traditionally been taught by practitioners from different disciplines, including psychotherapists, lawyers, and educationalists. This interdisciplinarity in teaching, as well as the subject's breadth, led to the danger that social work's distinguishing character becomes lost. Efforts have therefore been made to carefully pin down social work's core identity. This was often done using theory. In other words, the diffuse interdisciplinary professional identity of Soziale Arbeit seems to have given German theorizing specific, additional tasks to address, different to those in the U.K./U.S. (Borrmann, 2016; Engelke et al., 2014; Thiersch, 2020): defining the profession and its function in society; examining the interrelationship between academic discipline and practice; normatively examining how Soziale Arbeit should be; and strengthening the compound discipline's status as a scholarly field of scientific enquiry.

Interdisciplinarity in training and practice notwithstanding, a feature of German Soziale Arbeit is that its theories come from the discipline itself, rather than being imported from other sciences, as is often the case in the Anglo-Saxon countries (Borrmann, 2016). Typically, each theory is identifiable with a specific theorist or compact school from the German-speaking countries. Although international intellectual movements trickle down to Germany, ideas formally enter the German canon only on adoption by German-language theorists. A particular openness to German-language philosophy, sociology, and education makes the theory-base resemble an almost hermetically sealed epistemological system (see the contents of compendiums such as Lambers, 2020). Many international theories remain absent, anti-oppressive practice for instance. While the stubborn lack of internationality that developed during the latter part of the twentieth century must be regarded critically, it provided a space for home-grown theory. Moreover, an accompanying strength was the firm acknowledgement that social work merited its own theory base, from within the discipline itself: that of social work/social pedagogy. In other words, thinking theoretically did not imply thinking sociologically or thinking psychodynamically, but rather social work thinking. Being little-known outside its home region, the resulting German theory-base is unique and deserves more attention as an Aladdin's cave for international theory researchers.

While Thiersch's writing together with secondary material on it (Füssenhäuser, 2005) comprises hundreds of German-language books and articles, there is a paucity of literature in English (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009; Sandermann & Neumann, 2014; Schugurensky, 2014; Úcar, 2023). This article aims to broaden this narrow base. It focuses specifically on tracing the evolution of Thiersch's theory and contextualizing it in German academic, social policy, and professional discourses. Thiersch's antenna for these discourses makes his theory anticipate social work's development. Indeed, some argue the theory hereby becomes an overarching “contour” for German “professional discourses, concepts, models (…) and practice fields” (Thiersch et al., 2012, p. 175; as with all citations from German here, translation by the author). By tracing this contour, this article attempts to chronicle one narrative of German social work's evolution. Decades’ worth of German-language literature inform it, since Thiersch (2020) regards all his post-1977 writings as part of this single, ongoing project.

In terms of structure, the article opens by surveying the preeminent but waning theory school at the onset of Thiersch's career, the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. It then considers the subsequent German pedagogy theory debate, as rival approaches vied for dominance. In the 1970s, a precursor theory, the “everyday orientation” was coined by Thiersch (1978a, p. 6), and this will be contextualized in terms of the Marxist ideas it draws from. The later shift to a lifeworld orientation is discussed on the basis of its ideational heritage in Habermasian concepts, but also the practice concerns of the child welfare reform which it accompanied. For an international perspective, parallels to U.K. (and, where appropriate, U.S.) discourses, theory, and practice will be made to contextualize and contrast developments, thus offering a comparative social work theory approach, demonstrating how national theory scenes find their own particular paths. The article will conclude by considering the wider international applicability of Thiersch's mosaic-like grand theory.

Beginnings: Romanticism, Hermeneutics, and the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik

Thiersch was born in 1935 in Recklinghausen, in Germany's industrial Ruhr district. Coming from a middle-class family, he was able to study, choosing philology, philosophy, theology, and education. Following his degree, he entered academia, the timing coinciding with an exciting juncture point in the German theory scene's evolution: the existing principal theory school of the social professions was on the wane.

That school had risen four decades earlier, buoyed by the new German democracy's innovative national child welfare and family services legislation, the 1922 National Youth Welfare Act (Frampton, 2024a). Weimar-period Germany was shaped by cultural modernism: its design was epitomized by the minimalist form-follows-function of the Bauhaus, and its painting by the sober, matter-of-fact realism of the new objectivity. Such examples demonstrate the epoch's cultural focus on precision and technique. Consequently, the new modern family services might have been theoretically oriented on the sociologically and psychologically informed social casework pioneered in the U.S., which had already crossed the Atlantic to Germany (Salomon, 1926). However, this was not to be the case. Not social work but rather social pedagogy was to become the discipline theoretically framing German services, and that profession's dominant influences lay not with the health sciences, psychology, and sociology, but rather with education and the humanities/liberal arts (Geisteswissenschaften). In these cultural disciplines, not the clinical, technical possibilities of modernity/modernism were dominant (objectivity, detached representations of reality, simplification/reductionism). Instead, the focus was on the subjectivity and inner worlds of late-period Romanticism. These ideas were central to the educational school known as the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik. Founded in Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of life and integrating the ideas of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, it had risen to prominence during the inter-war period under the philosopher/social pedagogue Herman Nohl (in English: Friesen, 2020). Based at Göttingen University, where Thiersch was later to start his career, Nohl's approach led to a theoretically distinct social profession (Frampton, 2024b).

The Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik led to practitioners hermeneutically grappling with clients’ experiences, striving for a Verstehen (understanding) of their inner lives. However, this narrow theory base for the entire discipline of pedagogy became a self-referential theory island around the German scene (in English: Tröhler, 2003). The scholarly bubble made theorists blind to developments in neighboring disciplines such as sociology; the theory was hostile to empirical methods (Thiersch, 1978a, p. 11); and it followed the tendency of late-period German Romanticism to be frustratingly apolitical or politically regressive. In the post-war years, prominent figures such as Nohl's Göttingen successor Erich Weniger ran a tight ship, with students firmly encouraged to remain faithful to the school in their reading (Niemeyer, 2010). The decades-long monopoly of the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik in German discourses arguably constituted a paradigm (Kuhn, 1996), regulating how scholars were allowed to think about their subject. There is also perhaps an analogy here with post-war U.K./U.S. psychodynamic social casework (Howe, 2008), as practitioners interpreted clients’ lives using their dominant theory's prestige as proof of their expertise. Thiersch's path away from the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik integrated the approaches of two figures. His peer and intellectual sparring partner Klaus Mollenhauer (1968) was championing an emancipatory pedagogy anchored in critical theory. Weniger's successor Heinrich Roth, who Thiersch worked under, had turned to the social sciences. Combining these approaches shaped Thiersch's work.

The Epistemological Battleground

An early, 1960s philosophy of science-themed article by Thiersch (2015) on epistemology and research methods captures this critical juncture in theory history. Thiersch reviews the options for knowledge acquisition in his subject, effectively documenting German (social) pedagogy theory wars comparable to those a decade later in U.K./U.S. social work (Payne, 2005). The previously dominant Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik acknowledged the inseparableness of the client's life, values, and norms. However, its lack of any natural science idea of objectivity was a problematic weakness. This was the period in which the growth of empirical social research was defining sociology, making the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik appear outdated. It was also the period in which the positivism dispute was current (Adorno et al., 1969). Favoring a particular epistemology had institutional consequences for the caring-controlling professions: this was a political-ethical issue. Thiersch, under Roth's influence, was in principle open to the merits of empirical research. At the same time, he aligned himself with Frankfurt school critical theorists, concerned with overzealous empirical-based practitioners “absolutizing” empirical findings, forcing “questions of complex reference points or elusive conditions, such as feelings” to be disregarded (Thiersch, 2015, p. 126). He also stressed how misuse of empirical approaches endanger the practitioner's job of imagining better futures, threatening “the courage to anticipate beyond the present” (Thiersch, 2015, p. 126). Curiously, this epistemological wariness of the dangers of empirical research steering social work has since become a distinctive feature of German practice, which tends to regard critical-rationalist (evidence-based) approaches as problematic (Frampton, 2024b).

As much as Thiersch's upcoming theory-building was necessitated by limitations in existing theory, it also took as its starting point the rejection of existing practice: authoritarian and oppressive practice. The new social movements were highlighting the need for social reform. Some of these movements were not to have an immediate impact on German social work theory (Britain already had anti-racist and feminist social work from the 1980s onwards, whereas, for complex reasons, Germany had to wait until the twenty-first century for fully fledged rassismuskritische and gendersensible Soziale Arbeit respectively). However, other movements arguably had a greater influence in Germany than in the U.K. The children's institution reform movement (Heimkampagne: Schölzel-Klamp & Köhler-Saretzki, 2010) is a powerful example; the importance of such childhood-centered discourses is explainable by the fact that theorists were often members of university pedagogy departments. In addition to the German mindfulness of possible misuse of public institutions (given the country's then-recent history), discourses around childhood and youth integrated an acknowledgement of poverty and structural determinants’ role in young people's lives (Mollenhauer, 1968, note parallels with British social work rediscovering the structural: Leonard, 1966).

In the 1960s, Thiersch (2009b) was involved in the progressive youth support center Haus auf der Hufe. He became a member of its management board, and his day-to-day practice experience led him to reflect on the same symbolic interactionist ideas that would influence U.K./U.S. theory (Segalman, 1978). Understanding deviance as a process highlights the role institutional procedures play in stigmatization. In the following decade, Thiersch (1977, p. 68) re-conceptualized child welfare as “destigmatizing children's services,” proposing new assessment approaches embracing the ambiguity of clients’ lives and stressing “situation, self-interpretation, (and) solidarity.” While his early terminology failed to have sticking power, in retrospect, it can be regarded as a prototype of his subsequent theory.

Theory Contexts: Training Programme Expansion and Professional Consolidation

Thiersch's first post as professor was at Kiel in 1967, for general pedagogy. Still nominally an educationalist, he was yet to be firmly specialized in the social professions; his PhD had been on the Romantic author Jean Paul. In 1970, he took up a professorship at the research university Tübingen, in a newly formed social pedagogy department. This was a unique moment in professional training, and Thiersch was involved in the first full-length degree programme social pedagogy curriculum (Schugurensky, 2014). Following a higher education reform act, social work-teaching polytechnics were also established, creating a diverse educational landscape for social professionals. Occupations were becoming professions, as unqualified workers and generic bureaucrats were being replaced by practitioners with 4 years of tailored academic training.

It is interesting to compare this German professionalization drive with that in the U.K. Two differences may be noted, both impacting theory development. Firstly, in the U.K., the 1970s expansion was driven not by training reforms, but rather by the establishment of social services departments. The U.K. profession's growth was thus tied to a particular organizational form (statutory services), so U.K. theory orientated itself on the statutory duties of that agency. In Germany, this was not the case: because the expansion followed training reform, there were no links to particular institutional forms, practice settings, or methods. Indeed, German social work theory was more centered on the diverse voluntary sector social care settings (for instance, children's homes or family centers) than the few statutory ones. Consequently, critical German practitioners were able to avoid the U.K. double bind of criticizing the state while simultaneously being employed by it: German critical positions were to thrive accordingly. Secondly, the research-university degrees constituted an overnight boost for social pedagogy, which reached formal status-parity with professions such as teaching (Thiersch, 2020, p. 21). This was a mandate for theory-building, and German book and journal publications proliferated, filling the new university libraries. The establishment of social pedagogy professorships such as Thiersch's meant that the influence of U.S. social work (a trend in the early post-war decades) ebbed rapidly, as intellectually home-grown approaches flourished to replace it. Correspondingly, in this period, direct (social pedagogic) work was arguably more central to German theory development than social work's casework traditions.

The “Everyday”: Destruction of the Pseudoconcrete

Thiersch's (1977, p. 68) “destigmatizing children's services” linked stigmatization with practitioners’ misguided focus on their own institutional procedures. This analysis was simultaneously identifying the root of the problem and its remedy: for practitioners to abandon their institutional self-orientation (Thiersch, 2002, p. 135), and instead think about their clients’ lives. Thiersch's (1978a, p. 6, 1978b, 2006) new orientation crystallized with the term “everyday,” which he noted had already become popular with German practitioners. The then-recent translation of Lefebvre's (2014) Critique of the Everyday had promoted this term, but it had been simultaneously used with other meanings in discourses. Thiersch (1978a) regarded much of its then-current usage as problematic. On the one hand, conservative commentators had utilized the term when disparaging the new technocratic approaches of the welfare state. On the other hand, progressive-critical thinkers were employing the concept in their solidarity-based, grassroots, anti-bureaucratic self-organization. While his sympathies lay on this side, Thiersch (1978a, p. 9) was troubled by that movement's professional “pedagogic crisis,” caused by “theory anxieties” and “theory abstinence.” This led him to reject the “emancipatory turn” (Thiersch, 1978b, p. 87) of contemporaries such as Mollenhauer, in favor of an “everyday turn” (Thiersch, 1978b, p. 95). Thiersch (1978a, p. 10) was seeking an “everyday orientation” (Alltagsorientierung) for a practice in which “forms of free communication, institutionalization, academization, and professionalization” can be found in “(social) pedagogic action,” starting from the subjective reality of clients’ “own experience, own efforts, disappointments, and hopes.” Interestingly, this kept his critical perspectives tied to hermeneutics and phenomenology, recalling the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik.

Thiersch (1978a, 2006) found a critical conceptualization of the everyday ready-made in the work of the Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík (1976). For Kosík (1976, p. 43), a person's everyday is their unquestioned “world of confidence, familiarity, and routine actions,” shaped by repeatability and habits. The procedures of the quotidian places of the everyday—school, the workplace, the daycare center—however oppressive, have become taken for granted.

While the person perceives their everyday as real, in Kosík's theory it is anything but: the realness is simply an illusionary impression. In Kosík's (1976, p. 2) Dialectics of the concrete, this deceptive world of appearances, the “pseudoconcrete,” may be contrasted in a Marxist sense with the real world; the phenomenon with the essence of the thing. By availing himself of this concept, Thiersch created a social pedagogy based on dialectic-critical thinking. The practitioner was to assist the client in understanding the “pseudoconcreteness” of their everyday (Thiersch, 1977, p. 47). Kosík (1976, p. 7, italics in original) proposes the “destruction” of the pseudoconcrete “both of ideas and of conditions.” Thiersch (1978a, p. 12) picks up this idea of liberation from the pseudoconcrete, and its replacement with “praxis.”

Thiersch is under no illusions regarding difficulties hindering this destruction. His theory is a “pragmatic concept, focussed on orientation and action in the practical and socio-political situation” (Thiersch, 2006, p. 20). From a micro-level perspective, the everyday is characterized by its disempowering “unquestioned work structures, taboo problems (…), suppressed needs, or inhibited restraint in interactions” (Thiersch, 1978a, p. 14). From a macro-level perspective, the client's everyday is caught up in the “production and power structures of our society,” structures stifling self-determination and restricting action possibilities (Thiersch, 1978a, p. 15). Thiersch's theory thus suggests the social professional fights on two fronts. They must support the client in coming to terms with their life, and simultaneously maximize their potential to change this life. Social work must be prepared to transform structures and be a “thorn in the side of existing power relationships” (Thiersch, 2006, p. 50).

Thiersch's (1978a, p. 21) objective is for clients to have “a more successful everyday.” The choice of this relative formulation (merely “more successful” rather than actually successful) has semantic echoes of “good enough” parenting (Winnicott, 1953, p. 93), underlining the pragmatic-critical theme of people simply coping better in their everyday efforts (Böhnisch & Schröer, 2017).

From Everyday to Lifeworld

While the 1970s had offered opportunities for the German social professions to expand, this was less obviously the case in the politically conservative 1980s. A public disinterest in children's services prevailed (Thiersch, 2009a, p. 13). There was little will for expansion of a welfare state already under attack from the political right. Fortunately, although the political environment was not conducive to child welfare reform, the academic environment was. New scholarly positions on childhood/family and state institutions at both the national and international levels drove this. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was being drafted, moving children's participation rights and family support services up the agenda (Böhnisch et al., 2005, pp. 267–268). While Germany had long seen innovative practice, formal national entitlements to community-based family support had remained modest. The backward-looking 1961 Youth Welfare Act (Gesetz für Jugendwohlfahrt) contained only limited provision (s5 and s6). Thiersch's theorizing therefore took place against a decades-long backdrop of ongoing legislation reform discourses. Progressive voices had been crying out for a preventative, service-based system, designed for all citizens, not just endangered children (Sachße, 2018). The official Seventh Youth Report (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1986) championed proactive community children's services provision to complement residential services. This report had echoed Thiersch's theory, and when the following administrative period's report was prepared four years later, he had a place on its expert commission.

Academic political positions vis-à-vis theory and practice were also shifting. Germany's critical social pedagogues of the 1970s had been anti-authoritarian, often taking an antagonistic view of state welfarism. This aligned with the pessimism of first-generation Frankfurt School thinkers regarding the Enlightenment project. Accordingly, post-1968 social pedagogic efforts were often concentrated on supporting self-help movements and citizen's initiatives, rather than expanding the welfare state's administrative institutions as with the U.K.'s social work. Indeed, given Germany's history, statist welfare had usually been regarded by critically oriented practitioners as intrinsically oppressive. By the 1980s, this perspective was changing. In particular, the second-generation Frankfurt School social theorist Jürgen Habermas's (1989) Theory of Communicative Action was shifting the focus away from structural and institutional unfreedoms, and instead towards promoting agency, participation, and discourse.

Habermasian Frameworks

Always with his finger on the pulse of contemporary discourses, Thiersch (2009a, pp. 41; 46) noted the term “everyday” was flagging, and gradually replaced this “heuristic” concept with a new one, the “lifeworld orientation.” This terminology change does not represent a significant shift in his theoretical position. The semantic switch was perhaps triggered by the currency of Habermasian frameworks in 1980s German discourses. Thiersch and his peers had long been referencing Habermas, as well as Habermas's own sources: Schutz and Luckmann (1974, p. 3) had already used both terms together, writing of “the everyday life-world.” One difference between Thiersch's utilization of the two “orientations” was that his “everyday” corresponded closely to Kosík's. Thiersch cited Kosík repeatedly and adopted the “destruction of the pseudoconcrete” idea directly. In contrast, his later utilization of the “lifeworld” concept was more diffuse. He did not explicitly draw on Habermas, whose use of the expression differed from his own. Thiersch (2020, p. 47) often used the term “lifeworld orientation” simply to address institutional aspects of everyday worlds such as family and care: sometimes it was a synonym of everyday orientation, sometimes merely a near-synonym. Thiersch was also reluctant to back up his orientation with a fully fledged social theory. Perhaps he simply regarded the spadework for the integration of Habermas's social theory into social work theory as already done (for instance, by Gängler & Rauschenbach, 1986, former PhD supervisees of Thiersch's).

Habermas (1989) presents a contrast between two spheres, the lifeworld and system. The lifeworld concept takes its starting point in the everyday: “Only in the world of everyday life can a common, communicative, surrounding world be constituted” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1974, p. 3). The lifeworld is seen as “a culturally transmitted and linguistically organised stock of interpretive patterns” (Habermas, 1989, p. 124), giving people “unproblematic, common, background convictions” (Habermas, 1989, p. 125). The lifeworld is a domain of communication. Its foundation in shared meanings provides a space for working through disagreement and finding consensus. Habermas contrasts the communicative action of the lifeworld with the instrumental action of the system. This domain is shaped by money and power: the economy and the state bureaucracy. Instead of being transparent and consensus-based, system actions are opaque and characterized by instrumental rationality. The system is parasitic on the lifeworld, as it cannot exist without it. Habermas (1989, p. 196) draws attention to the danger of the system disturbing the lifeworld's communicative action-based natural reproduction: the colonization of the lifeworld.

Habermas's theory reframed social work. Seen institutionally as care and control, the social professions are part of the system.” However, if practitioners use communicative action, they may become mediating guests in the “lifeworld.” Social workers could be transparently supporting a client in managing their everyday. However, they could equally likely be concealed manipulators of their clients, merely creating the “illusion of the subjects’ self-will and autonomy” (Gängler & Rauschenbach, 1986, p. 194, italics in original). Colonization became a dominant professional anxiety (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009; Müller & Otto, 1986).

From Theorist to Reformer: The Eighth Youth Report

At the end of the 1980s, Thiersch was perhaps most visible not as a theorist but rather donning his social (work) reformer hat, striving to establish “societal recognition and new professionalism” for social work and social pedagogy (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 202). Thiersch's terminological switch from the Marxist reference point of Kosík (1976) to the communicative action-period Habermas perhaps marks a period in which progressive social work discourses had pragmatically departed from radical positions (Khella, 1982) and shifted to more moderate center-left ones. The context was the passing of a major progressive children's services reform, the Kinder- und Jugendhilfegesetz (Child and Youth Services Act) under a Christian Democrat-led coalition government. This substantial national legislation buttressed social pedagogic welfare state services (Böhnisch et al., 2005, p. 259). In its formulations, the codification bore witness to the legacy of Thiersch's work: residential child care was to “support children and young people in their development by combining everyday experiences with pedagogic and therapeutic services” (Child and Youth Services Act, s34), while “social pedagogic family support” was to “give families support and help to self-help in their child-raising tasks, in managing with everyday problems, in resolving conflict and crises, and in their contact with offices and agencies, via an intensive supervision and accompaniment” (Child and Youth Services Act, s31).

Concurrent to this law, the official Eighth Youth Report (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990) was published, with Thiersch as commission co-author. It resembles a white paper for reformed services (although the Act actually preceded the report submission by a few months). Thiersch (2009a) was regarding the new national legislation as a skeleton, to be fleshed out with the muscle of a concept. His commission had found one: “lifeworld-oriented children's services,” a term appearing more than 60 times within the report (Frampton, 2024b). Thiersch (2020, p. 19) retrospectively described his theorizing's 1960s origins as “defined by a stubborn insistence on the democratic and welfare-state claims of society,” and this phrase also neatly captures the 1980s mainstreaming of his quietly radical ideas. Habermas is not named in the report, but the spirit of the social philosopher's thinking is perceptible throughout: services anchored on transparency and democracy, on “particular efforts of cooperation and communication,” of a “culture of debate” (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, pp. 16–17). The social services department is to show Bürgernähe (closeness to the citizens), user-led organizations and citizen's action groups are to be seen “as a challenge and provocation for established agencies, not simply as an alternative (to them)” (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 17).

The report has Thiersch's fingerprints all over it. His existing theory, the everyday orientation, is namechecked as one of five “structural maxims,” the others being “prevention, regionalization (…) participation, and integration” (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 17; in English: Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009). The commission proposes “support which sees the human being in their social circumstances, in the taken-for-granted (ideas), in the difficulties and pressures of their social systems” (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 87). The child welfare system was to change fundamentally, now being centered on community-based family support services, these low-threshold, preventative services reducing the need for out-of-family arrangements (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 20). There are parallels here to the exactly contemporaneous ambitions for England and Wales’ family support services in the Children Act 1989, although it could be argued that over the coming decades, the German system was better able to rise to these aspirations than the British one. German family counselling was to become the local center of “decentralized” services, and an axis on which other “proactive” community services were to be structured (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, pp. 20; 181). An important theoretical construction was mentioned in the report: “Sozialraumorientierung” (socio-spatial orientation) (Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 183). This phrase, previously hardly heard, represented a soon-to-be dominant discourse, in which the social environs, rather than the individual case, is taken as the starting point for practice via tailored, localized networks of services (in English: Spatscheck, 2019). Social spatial approaches fit well with lifeworld-oriented children's services, overlapping in many central principles (Deller & Brake, 2014).

Thiersch's (2009a, p. 3) subsequent publication references the co-authored commission report extensively and, in its title at least, extends this children's services approach to much of the human services, proposing a lifeworld orientation for social work and social care. This philosophy takes:

(…) existing patterns of structures, understanding, and action as its starting point, and stabilizes, reinforces, and revives individual, social, and political resources, so that people can come to an arrangement with them, and indeed perhaps find the opportunities to experience security, creativity, meaning, and self-determination. (Thiersch, 2009a, p. 23)

Thiersch remained primarily interested in childhood/family-based practice fields. However, by the early twenty-first century, social work and social pedagogy had merged into a single discipline, addressing the whole human life course (Frampton, 2022). Contemporaries were extensively applying his ideas to adults’ services (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2008), sometimes by relating Thiersch's maxims to the concrete case, or sometimes by observing the theory's overlap with dominant concepts for the client group in question (such as activity, inclusion, or self-determination for older or disabled people). The extension of this malleable social pedagogic theory to social work and social care proved unproblematic. By this time, Thiersch's collaboration with peers, many of whom completed their doctorates under his supervision, had led to a cluster of closely related critical-hermeneutic German theories, centered on supporting clients in managing their own lives (for instance, in English: Böhnisch & Schröer, 2017).

Social Work Ethics in a Society in Transformation

German youth reports contextualize children's services with the shifting life circumstances of young people, and the Eighth Youth Report argued that West Germany's rapid social transformation necessitated corresponding social work transformation. While 1980s Britain witnessed a resurgence in social conservatism, the traditionally conservative West Germany was seeing the opposite. The primacy of the church as a moral instance and the stay-at-home Hausfrau-role of married women were being challenged in a society shaped by “pluralism and individualization” (Thiersch, 1990, p. 13) and new social movements. Beck (1992) had drawn attention to new freedoms in life options, albeit freedoms unequally distributed, and accompanied by new risks. All this led Thiersch (1990, 1995, 2002) back to the ethical and social justice questions at the heart of his theory.

Thiersch typically writes not of ethics but rather of Moral (morals, morality). A welfare state sets its own ethics/morals (Thiersch, 1995, p. 7). Practitioners’ actions are shaped by “institutional, organizational, and legal” structures, each bearing “explanations” and “restrictions” (Thiersch, 1990, p. 18). Either practitioners accept structures, or they distance themselves from them, and try to change them. The academic discipline promotes technologies, and the choice of explanation framework and methods used by social workers is an ethical/moral one. Thiersch (1995, p. 14) cautions: “the dominant morality is the morality of the dominant, (and social work and social) pedagogic morality is that of the dominant normality.” Despite the entirely separate evolution of the two theories, these reflections recall the idea in anti-discriminatory practice that oppression may be rooted in institutional and policy structures (Thompson, 2021).

Lifeworld-oriented practice rejects generalized moral truths:

Universally authoritative objectives, virtues, or values are not available to us. Moral orientations are only possible in the process of reaching agreement (Verständigung) for a possible consensus, for a clarification of options and consequences, for a clarification of positions with respect to one another. (Thiersch, 1995, p. 21)

For Thiersch (1995, p. 21), ethics should inform practice through negotiation in a situation “free of power inequalities and oppression.” Thiersch (1990, p. 23) proposes a “morally inspired casuistry,” dealing with ethical questions contextualized, case by case. His approach acknowledges not only the individual level of ethical/moral decisions, but also the intertwined societal-political levels. Unravelling these is essential, in order to resist the temptation to dodge an ethical responsibility, for instance by using institutional procedures to justify inaction.

Neoliberal reforms around the turn of the century prompted Thiersch to once again underline the necessity of robust political protest. Thiersch (1990, p. 24) argues for social workers to not mind their own business, but instead to get involved (Einmischung) in social or political matters, on behalf of their clients and in “cooperation but also confrontation.” He notes, “(…) a head-on discussion on what should be practised (…) as (social) justice in our society is needed” (Thiersch, 1995, p. 7).

Limitations of the Study

This study's methodology has been to consider German social work by focusing on its dominant theory. In singling out an individual social pedagogic theorist's work, it inevitably underplays the diversity of the German theory scene (Engelke et al., 2014; Frampton, 2024b). If this article had instead highlighted other German-language theories (such as internationalist human rights-centered theories: Staub-Bernasconi, 2019), a different picture would have resulted, and differences to international social work developments may have seemed less profound. It should be stressed, this article's narrative is, like a social work history, only one of many possible accounts.

Conclusions

The title of this article references two key movements: Romanticism and critical theory. It should be stressed that Romanticism is no longer German theory's main cultural-philosophical orientation. Thiersch is a critical theorist, not a Romantic theorist, his early adulthood Romanticism scholarship notwithstanding. The shift from a Romantic hermeneutic/phenomenological Verstehen (understanding) to critical theory's Verständigung (consensus) reflects how the German social professions became informed by Frankfurt school ideas (Mollenhauer, 1968; Müller & Otto, 1986). Critical theory anchors other key twenty-first-century German theoretical approaches such as service-based theories or Foucauldian perspectives (Engelke et al., 2014) and can be regarded constitutive for contemporary German theory. German practice's Verständigung-basis makes it communicative, relationship-based co-production: note the similarities with the critical human rights-based approach of Ife (2012). The lifeworld orientation is not prescriptive for practice; however, a family support case study (in English: Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009, pp. 134–135) provides an illustration of how it might unfold in practice. Thiersch's lifeworld-oriented social work is often direct work, with time and patience getting to know the client and developing a supportive and trusting relationship. Relationship-based practice, with the client and for the client, is at the core of this critical social work theory.

Despite the theory's primary categorization as critical, this article's titular reference to Romanticism remains pertinent for international readers, since modern German social work theory evolved from Romanticism and never fully decoupled itself from it. Thiersch's theory retains Romantic-period concepts such as pedagogic tact and the pedagogical relation(ship) (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009; in English for these concepts: Friesen, 2022). Based on Romanticism's hermeneutics, it distances itself from the technical-rational approaches of modernity. Late twentieth-century practice in the U.K. had often promoted scientific-technocratic evidence-based case management (Lorenz, 2012). While this approach to structured and methodical practice also exists in Germany (von Spiegel, 2021), it is more often challenged there (von Spiegel, 2012). Much German theory took the opposite path, retaining its hermeneutic traditions but adding a critical-political accent (Erath & Balkow, 2016). Indeed, despite later German theories formally distancing themselves from Romanticism, appreciating that movement's features (Ferber, 2010) provides a path for the international reader to appreciate German theory: the focus on the subjective lived experiences of the human being; a wariness of objectivity claims; a cognizance of the limits of natural scientific approaches to understanding the human being; a mindfulness of the irreducible complexity of human lives; an orientation on hopes, fears, and fantasies; and a tendency to understand the person in the context of their environment and their history.

These features of Romanticism highlight the incompatibility of a lifeworld orientation with scientific-technical practice. For some practitioners, this irreconcilability may be regarded as a weakness: it leaves little space for employing technical toolkits to structure social work practice, if that is the mandate for practice set by policymakers. But the lifeworld orientation's “dialogical” spirit (Freire, 1996; Thiersch, 2009a, p. 28) can be regarded as its merit and an argument for international appraisal. Its hermeneutic constructivism is a bridge to Parton and O’Byrne's (2000, p. 3) constructive social work, in which social work is seen as an “art” not a science, as a “practical-moral activity” not a “rational-technical” one, founded in narrative, “dialogue, listening to and talking with the other.” Relationship-based practice (Ruch, Turney & Ward, 2018), currently a vibrant interest, is centered on direct work and dialogue, so it can also be conceptually unified with the lifeworld orientation. The English-language discourse utilizing Habermasian critical theory frameworks, which considers how social workers can shape their communication to empower families (Blaug, 1995; Hayes & Houston, 2006; Houston, 2009), could be meaningfully integrated with Thiersch's work, analogous to how the Dutch/Flemish-speaking community (Reynaert & Roose, 2015) is already picking it up. Other critical social work approaches (Fook, 2016; Mullaly, 2007) have clear overlaps with Thiersch's perspective. It is self-evident that Thiersch's work has profound relevance for the international social pedagogy scene.

Caution must always be exercised when considering strands of theory abroad for transplanting into foreign soil (Eßer, 2020). Even in its home territory, the lifeworld orientation is vulnerable to being used in a tokenistic way, with practitioners failing to acknowledge the complexity of the theory's ideational heritage and political contexts (Thiersch, 2009a, p. 5). This article has demonstrated how the lifeworld orientation, like German social work more broadly, is a product of its native intellectual climate and socio-political context (Lorenz, 2012). The theory presupposes the German civil society with its vibrant community sector. Levels of civic engagement are high, and German non-governmental organizations have a political campaigning function parallel to being service-providers; indeed, with their distinct world-views, many non-profits have unpaid armies of volunteers (Merchel, 2011). Thiersch's discursive-participatory approach draws on traditions of citizen involvement in organizational and political life which are hard to express in English: concepts in the Eighth Youth Report such as Mitspracherecht (right to have a say, Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 201) and Mitbestimmung (codetermination, Bundesministerium für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit, 1990, p. 88) have an immediacy in the German language which their English translations lack.

Like Habermas's social theory, Thiersch's lifeworld orientation can only be contextualized with reference to the span of political positions from which it evolved: from radical/critical and social democratic, to center-left and even center-right. Thiersch is committed to a substantial social state, but mindful that its bureaucratic structures may alienate the people they are designed to help. His solution therefore is more democracy, more dialogue, and more sensitivity to the lived experiences of the people addressed by services. In the current troubled and troubling global political climate, democratic parties and political-administrative processes seem to be failing to acknowledge the “everyday” of the poor, excluded, and disadvantaged. Perhaps this makes it a timely moment to internationally revisit Thiersch's political-theoretical positions and consider their consequences for the social professions.