Theodor Lohmann
From early on Lohmann had been influenced by the pious German Lutheran Great Awakening movement of Ludwig Harms, characterized by proselytism and sanctification.
His thesis received a great deal of academic attention for its proposal of an extensive reform of society in the light of the newly emerging socialist theories.
In 1861 he was assigned to the administration's cultural department, and as general secretary in 1869 Lohmann participated in the first Evangelisch-Lutheran synod in Hanover.
"Nothing illustrates the (Bismarck) government's lack of energy and imagination more strikingly than its approach to the working class," according to Gordon Craig.
After the departure of his friend Wagener, the politically artful Bismarck seems to have turned to Lohmann and his associates in the bureaucracy for ideas.
Craig also writes: For the Emperor, the attempt to apply Bismarck's (and Stumm-Halberg's) approach to the social problem, resulted in movement away from initial sympathy for the reform position toward an escalating rhetoric of violence that alarmed many of his servants, who believed his comments were undermining the stability of government.
The "net effect was to embitter the working class and to deepen the gulf that existed between it and the rest of German society since 1878.
Despite Bismarck's opposition the traditional role of German ancillary health insurance funds and companies in the program was considerably strengthened.
As a result of his career in government, Daniel Rodgers, the Princeton historian whose Atlantic Crossings[10] is a touchstone of transatlantic history puts Lohmann in the company of William Beveridge, the major intellectual architect of the postwar British welfare state, the Stockholm economists of the 1930s and Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brain trust" who shaped the New Deal.
After he left the Prussian administration Theodor Lohmann immersed himself in supporting the Inner Mission and traditional missionary work, among other things in the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden ("Society for the Advancement of Christianity among the Jews").
Lohmann also worked for the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der evangelischen Missionen unter den Heiden ("Society for the Advancement of the Evangelisch Missions among Unbelievers").
According to Gordon Craig, this volume "anticipated much that was to be said six years later in (Pope) Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, and the outstanding Christian Social reformer of the next generation, Friedrich Naumann.
He was subsequently involved in a further amendment of the German Trade, Commerce and Industry Regulation Act, which brought new improvements for the workers, e.g. the prohibition of nightwork for women and young people.
