In a study of 19th century ideas of poverty, the German historian Beate Althammer observes a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, “there existed a deep-rooted tradition of ascribing to the poor a special proximity to God”. As a Hamburg teacher wrote in 1834:
Who obliges us more to sympathy and reverence than he who faces the inescapable blows of an erratic fate with manly steadiness, pious resignation and wise abstinence? What a dignified appearance is the neediness simultaneously ennobled and keenly veiled by an indestructible love of honor, which will bear suffering rather than pity!
