AIM: This paper analyses, in what way psychiatrists considered housing and work as criteria of social integration of mentally ill people and what models of care were suggested in Germany throughout the 20th century. METHOD: Publications in 29 German professional and scientific psychiatric journals through the complete period from 1900 to 2000 and monographs were searched for papers on the above issues. RESULTS: Until the second half of the century, integrative initiatives related to housing and work generated in asylums without the aim of a full social integration of the patients. In the activistic concept of NS-psychiatry, work became an obligation for patients and a criterion for selection that decided on life and death. Not until the late 1950s, there again was an orientation towards integration in psychiatric care in both German states. Whilst already in 1963 the "Rodewisch Theses" outlined recommendations for the rehabilitation of the mentally ill already in the GDR (East Germany), a similar mark of reform ideas was published in the "enquete" in the FRG (West Germany) in 1975. In the GDR initiatives were limited to a small number of locations. In the FRG and the re-unified Germany various forms of sheltered housing and work were established - also with significant regional variation. However, a clear discussion of underlying aims and implications for the structure of mental health care was not found in the psychiatric literature. CONCLUSIONS: In the 20th century a tradition of psychiatric ideas related to housing and work did not develop in Germany. Particularly, there were only sporadic contributions from university psychiatry. Work was more frequently explicit subject of discussions than housing. Both areas were - slowly and in discontinuity - established as criteria of integration of people with mental illnesses, which was increasingly accepted as an aim of mental health care.
