"Suddenly, no one wants to hear anything else about that ugly word: underclass. It sounds like shared bathrooms and cabbage soup, like steaming laundry and poor diet," wrote the Nürnberger Zeitung. "According to (leading politician) Franz Müntefering, social classes should not exist in a society like our own. For the politically correct SPD, class means discrimination against people who live on the edges of society. Müntefering obviously cannot deny that there are such people, and also that their numbers are growing rather than decreasing.

Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel took a wide view of the problem. It criticized politicians of all stripes. "SPD chief Kurt Beck said there are 'far too many people' who have 'gotten comfortable' with their poverty, and said they are lacking the will to be productive," it wrote. "And CDU parliamentary group chief Volker Kauder suddenly discovered 'waywardness in parts of society.' He demanded 'concrete concepts to deal with this,' especially regarding children. With the exception of a few dispersed lefties in and outside the SPD, everyone involved agrees on one point: None of them admit to having played any role in the country's growing poverty and resignation. And exactly that is the lie."

"The demonstrative self-criticism being exercised by certain SPD politicians these days is neither honest nor courageous – and above all inappropriate," warned Financial Times Deutschland, which instead opted to accentuate the positive. "Despite the flaws in their fine print, the Schröder government's Hartz-IV labor market reforms are due for a few authoritative words of defense. The country's current upswing is the very proof that their measures were successful. Unemployment has waned more quickly than in earlier periods of economic strength -- so quickly that pessimists have been left speechless."

According ot the Berliner Zeitung, the German language itself is a problem: it has failed to keep up with social change. "Our traditional concept of work and productivity was not based on the notion that big concerns simply outsource their business risks, pushing them all onto the backs of the precariously employed," it wrote. "Nearly all of our values -- our notions of hard work, punctuality, discipline, loyalty, and fair pay; of well-earned leisure, honor and righteous exhaustion -- are influenced by industry. That a phrase like 'the left behind' has been coined shows that we don't have any good language for the kind of social life that sprouts up when we move away from traditional work styles, as business and politics alike now demand. We will have to find a new language to fill the gap between today's social determinism and individual responsibility.

"The underclass, according to (Beck's) definition, is that portion of society that has lost not only its hope, but its ambition to climb above the lowest rung on society's ladder," asserted the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which put an editorial finger on the difficulty of finding a way out of the mess. "The question is how the abandoned underclass can find opportunities for education and advancement. If their resignation is indeed 'the result of the (Social Democrats') Agenda 2010,' as …the left branch of the SPD asserts, then the problem could be solved with a new round of wealth redistribution. But not even the Union-allied Hans-Böckler Foundation -- which published a study showing hardly any country in the EU spends as much on social support as Germany, and gets so little in return -- believes this any more."

Focusing on the solution, major Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung pointed to the need for education is the answer to improving the country's economic outlook as a whole. "Much more needs to be done for education and training," the paper wrote. "It starts with kindergarten, which is the easiest place to make integration work in society. It continues in school, which also must teach people to be competent in society. And it doesn't stop at the highest levels of society. Even today, German business is short of thousands of engineers, which translates into fewer new products and fewer jobs in the future."