Germany: Unemployed Man Dies From Starvation as Welfare Cutback-Reform in Germany Shows Effect

Today, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and others reported in their online editions that a 20 year old man in the German city of Speyer was found dead from starvation in his flat.

Apparently, the man's 48 year old mother was sitting by and was unable to help her son, as she was admitted to hospital with in a serious condition caused by undernutrition.

Germany has seen a series of cutbacks to its welfare system over recent years, the most significant being the so called Hartz-IV laws named after former Volkswagen board member and advisor to the Social Democrat Government, Peter Hartz. While Hartz will be best remembered for his abundant lifestyle alongside Brazilian prostitutes and a bribery scandal at Volkswagen, the laws he helped to initiate will leave an increasing mark on German society.

The Hartz-IV laws allow state authorities to cut back welfare support to zero, case an employment seeking client does not accept work offered to her. On and off, around spring time the phantom discussion over forcing the unemployed to do harvesting and field labor echoes through the media.

Neo-populists like the ultra conservative secretary general of the ruling Bavarian CSU, Markus Söder, had repeatedly  been advocating the reduction of social welfare to zero. With the now published case from Speyer, it seems, the advocats of tough punishment of the unemployed can finally harvest what they have planted.

As a matter of fact, the elegantly renamed "Federal Employment Agency"

- the German equivalent of the term "agency" had habitually been used in context of the liberal professions such as advertising, and has a decisively modernistic sound to it -

often limits its activities to shallow screening of vitae without any recognizable activities, while unemployed persons are increasingly brought under pressure by law with an all but unbearable overhead of deliberate red tape to either push them out of the statistics or lure them into committing mistakes which cut them off  their entitlement to social welfare.

It has been a lamentable development also that the public discourse in Germany has been fired up by the mass media in a way that puts the group of persons on social welfare under the suspicion of being punishable abusers of public subsidies.

The formerly growing dissatisfaction over ultra-neocon, yet bureaucratic policies is now outnoised by a steady flow of information hinting at improved economic growth. The communication strategy applied to this apparently is that only "problematic" individuals were the left-behinds of the general growth. It remains to be seen how much time this new approach to PR earns the government, apparently reacting helplessly to the challenges of an official unemployment rate hovering at or near 15 per cent in many regions of Germany.