Too Much Information? Too Little Coordination? (Civil) Registration in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Too Much Information? Too Little Coordination? (Civil) Registration in Nineteenth-Century Germany
During the conflict between the Liberal-Protestant state and the Catholic Church (Kulturkampf), Germany introduced a system of registration of births, marriages, and deaths by public authorities. This replaced a system of data-gathering by churches which informed state authorities of the entries in their registers. The transition from church to state did not imply a secularization of registers. Moreover, civil registers were not combined systematically with other sources of information on the population; for instance, they played little role for the registers on residents, migrants, and travellers. This chapter argues that the profusion of registers theoretically allowed German states access to a great deal of information on individuals, although they rarely linked it. While registration thus always fell short of fulfilling expectations, it produced a tradition of informing the state about matters considered private in other countries which greatly increased the scope of planning population development.
Keywords: Kulturkampf, migration control, Standesämter, civil registration, public health, secularization
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