The paper centers on the question of how widespread was the impact of the lively discussion of housing and household reform during the Weimar Republic. Therefore the focus is on the experiences of working-class women. Against the background of material conditions in proletarian households, it analyzes which norms and standards concretely shaped working women's everyday housework in the urban working-class milieu in the 1920s, and how these norms and standards arose. The paper demonstrates the substantial reservations and resistance with which even better-off working women approached all efforts at rationalizing their housework in the 1920s. They wanted better living conditions and new household appliances, but the vast majority could not afford both. The specific norms and standards against which a “good” housewife was measured, norms and standards which corresponded more to the “old” model of the “economical, clean and tidy” housewife, also blocked acceptance, however.

Since 1917, the European social democratic movement has given fulsome support to Zionism. The article examines the ideological basis on which Zionism and, in particular, Labour Zionism gained, from 1917, the backing of social democratic parties and prominent socialists. It argues that Labour Zionism's appeal to socialists derived from the notion of “positive colonialism”. In the 1930s, as the number of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution increased considerably, social democratic pro-Zionism also came to be sustained by the fear that the resettlement of Jews in Europe would strengthen anti-Semitism and the extreme right.