Marienthal Study

1933

Marie Jahoda (1907–2001)

In the early 1930s, a young PhD student at the University of Vienna set out with a research team to study the impact of total unemployment on Marienthal, a small Austrian community. Marie Jahoda was a psychologist in training, but she was also a revolutionary thinker. She was an active member of the leftist Social Democrats during the heyday of Red Vienna, and her study of unemployment in Marienthal was motivated by a political hypothesis: Would unemployment lead to revolutionary class consciousness?

The researchers chose a variety of methods to evaluate this hypothesis and document the effect of unemployment on individuals, families, and the social fabric of the community. They compiled detailed records on each of the 478 families in Marienthal. They collected life histories, gave out questionnaires, and asked schoolchildren to write essays. They examined account books from the cooperative store, loan records from the public library, and census and migration figures. The researchers also initiated projects that benefited community members and generated data for their study.

In 1933, Jahoda and her colleagues published a monograph entitled The Unemployed of Marienthal. Contrary to their working hypothesis, they found no revolutionary class consciousness in Marienthal, only apathy and resignation. The bulk of the first edition was burned because its authors were Jewish. When Red Vienna fell to the Nazis in 1934, Jahoda was imprisoned for her political beliefs and released on the condition that she leave the country immediately. She emigrated to the United States, where she became part of a group of activist social psychologists in New York City. There she did research on anti-Semitism, intergroup relations, the authoritarian personality, and positive mental health.

As for the burned book, it first appeared in English almost forty years later as Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. As a seminal study of the sociopsychological effects of unemployment, Marienthal has been hailed as an enduring classic.

SEE ALSO [B = f(P, E)] = The Lifespace (1936), The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

This sign from the recent and ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement answers the question posed by psychologist Marie Jahoda in the early 1930s: Would unemployment lead to revolutionary class consciousness?