8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
1/14
Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History
From Below ?
DAVID F. CREW
T
H E R E is an insatiable dem and in the Federal Republic for
accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to
identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary
people. Just abou t anything thro w n on to the (book)m arket may
include the wo rd
Alltag
in its title.
1
Trade union and SPD adult educa-
tion programs, Volkshochschulenand youth associations teach lay his-
torian s how to retrieve the traces of their lostpast.
2
History wo rk-
shops
(Geschichtswerkstatten),
inspired by the leftist-populism of the
Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction
of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany.
3
But despite this wave of popular enthusiasm,Alltagsgeschichtehas not
degenera ted, as som e critics feared, in to an enterta ining , but naive
1. Peter Bo rsche id, Pladoyer far eine Gesch ichte des Alltag lichen, in Peter Borscheid,
Hans J. Teuteberg, eds., Ehe, L iebe, Tod: Zum Wandel der Fam ilie, der Geschlechts- mid Gen-
erationsbeziehungen in derNeuzeit(Minister, 1983), 4; see, for exam ple, Frank Grub e and Gerhard
Richter, Alltag im Dritten Reich: Solebten die Deutschen 1953-1945 (Hamburg, 1982J.
2. See, for example, Gerhard Paul and Bernhard Schossig, eds.,
Dieanderc Geschichte: Ge-
schichte von unten,
Spurensicherung,
okologische Geschichte,Geschichtswerkstatten
(Cologne, 1986).
3.
See, for exam ple, Juden: Innenansichten vergangener Lebensw elten, Geschichtswerkstatt,
Heft 15 (Ha m bu rg, 1988). This vo lum e includes a report from a local history wo rksh op group
in H am bu rg con cerning its attem pts to get funding for an alternative harbor jubilee (Alterna-
tiver
Hafengeburtstag;
p. 69) which gives a sense of the critical role in local politics that many
history w ork sho p gro ups have attem pted to play. See also Da gm ar Freist, Alltagsgeschichte der
Juden: In Search of N ew Approaches to Jewish H istory,
German History: TheJournal ofthe
German History Society
7, no . 2 (August 1989): 24 8- 52 . In this paper, I have restricted discussion
to the p ractice of
Alltagsgeschichte
in the Federal Republic both because a mu ch m ore developed
debate on this subject eme rged in West than in East Germ any before 1989 and also because the
DDR discussion ofAlltag was informed by a quite different understanding of the relationships
between theory and practice. But for an introduction toAlltagsgeschichte in the German Demo-
cratic Republic see Harald De hne, D em Alltag ein Stuck naher? in Alf Liidtke, ed., Alltagsge-
schichte: ZurRekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen undLebensweisen (Frankfurt and New York,
1989),
137-6 8, and also Jurgen Kuczynski,
Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes,
Studien 1-5
(Berlin 1980-82).
394
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
2/14
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
3/14
396 Alltagsgeschichte
historians argue that ordinary human beings seldom understood and,
in any case, had little real power to alter the anonymous structures,
forces, and processes that determined their everyday lives. Con-
sequently, critics of
Alltagsgeschichte
charge that it is condemned to
analytical futility and can prov ide no n ew key to G erm an social history.
But the historians of everyday life are trying to do more than just
describe ho w large processes were passively experienced in the
small w or lds of everyday existence. Alltagsgeschichte questions ac-
cepted understandings of the big structures and large processes
industrialization, bureaucratization, and mod ernization by
deconstructing these arid abstractions into the flesh-and-blood hu man
beings w ho se conflicting ideas and actions produced history: social
practice moves to the center of the stage.
9
N or isAlltagsgeschichteless
committed than Strukturgeschichte to the use of theory. But whereas
the structural social historians inscribed Weberian sociology and
mode rnization the ory on their theoretical banners, historians of
everyday life have increasingly turned to British cultural histo ry
and French social anthropology.
While some of the earlier work on
Alltagsgeschichte
concentrated on
the material conditions of w orking class life, experience has since
becomeacentral analytical category of the history of everyday
life.
1 0
W ith this new emph asis,Alltagsgeschichteattempts to show how ordi-
na ry people refused to accept their assigned roles as the passive ob-
jec ts of impersonal historical develop ments and attemp ted, instead,
to become active historical sub jects. Th is reconstruction and analysis
of the social, cultural, and sym bolic practices of ord ina ry people is
not an easy task. Few Ge rman workers com mitted their thoug hts and
feelings to paper. D ocum en tary sources, written from above , usu-
ally reflect the attitudes of middle-class observers so that they have to
be read against the gra in. Practitioners
of
Alltagsgeschichtehave also
explored the possibilities of m ore uno rtho do x sources photog raph s,
for exam ple and non-verbal forms o f popular expression such as the
bod y language of Germ an wo rkers.
11
And oral history, like Lutz
9. Alf Lttdtke, Ein leitung: Was ist und we r trcibt Alltagsge schichte? in Liidtke, ed.,
Alltagsgeschichte,
12.
10. Good examples of this earlier work on
Alltagsgeschichte
are presented injiirgen Reulecke
and Wol fhard Weber , eds . , Fabrik, Familie, Feierabend: Beitrage zur Sozialgeschichte des Alltags im
Industriezeitaher (Wuppertal, 1978).
n . O n these issues see in particular several of the articles included in Peter Assion, ed .,
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
4/14
David F.Crew 397
Niethammer's ambitious project on the history of theRuhrgebietbe-
tween 1930 and i960, can prov ide an access to working-class expe ri-
ences not found in archival and published sources.
12
Advocates ofan anthropologically informed approach toAlltagsge-
schichte, such as Hans Medick, David Sabean, and Alf Liidtke, warn,
however, that the cultural distance separating the historian from his/
her acting subject is an even greater problem than the limitations of
the sources. They propose that the historian should a ttem pt to im itate
the anthropologist, to go, in Franz-Josef Bruggemeier's words, on a
voyage of discovery to one's own people.
1 3
Of course, this could
seldom be m ore than a metaph orical field trip . Historians canno t
become full-fledged participan t ob serv ers in the cultures they stud y;
their subjects seldom have the op po rtun ity to talk back , to challenge
and correct the historian's (mis)understandings of their social prac-
tices.
14
But an awareness of the cultural gap separating present from
past is a necessary corrective to the cultural arrogance of historians
who assume that their ways of knowing are superior to those of their
subjects. Even in one's own land, it is important to remember that
the past is another country . . . they do things differently there.
1 5
In addition to challenging the validity of existing approaches to
Tramformationen der
Arbeiterkultur:
Beitrage der j Arbeitstagung der Kommission
Arbeiterkultur
in
der Deutschen Gcsellscha ft fiir Volkskunde inMarburg vom
j).
bis6.Juni 1985 (Marburg, 1986), but
especially Wolfgang Kaschuba, Protest und Gew alt Korp ersprache und Gru ppen rituale von
Arbeitern im Vormarz und 1848, 30 -48 .
12. The results of this project have been published in three volumes: Lutz Niethammer, ed.,
Die Jahre weiss mannicht, wo man dieheute hinsetzen soil :Faschismuserfahrungen im
Ruhrgebiet,
Lebensgeschichte und S ozialkultur im Ru hrgebiet 1930 bis i9 60, v ol.
1
(Berlin and Bon n, 1983);
Lutz Niethammer, ed.,
Hinterher merkt
man,
dass es richtigwar,dass es schiefgegangen ist : Nach-
kriegserfahntngen im
Ruhrgebiet, vol. 2 (Berlin and Bonn, 1983), and Lutz Niethammer and
Alexander von Plato, eds.,
Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten : Aufder Suche nach der Erfahrung des
Volkes inNachjaschistischen Landern,
vol. 3 (Berlin and Bonn, 1985).
13. Franz-Josef Brttggemeier,LebenvorOrt:RuhrbergleuteundRuhrbergbau 1889-1919(Munich,
1983).
The key text here is Hans Medick, 'Missio nare im Ruderboo t'? Ethnologische Er-
kenntnisweisen als Herausforderung an die Sozialgeschichte,
Geschichte un dGesellschaft
10
(1984): 295-3 19, n ow reprinted in a revised version in Lud tke, ed .,Alltagsgeschichte,4884. See
also Hans Siissmuth, ed.,
Historische
Anthropologie:
DerMenschin derGeschichte
(Gottingen,
1984), David Warren Sabean,
Power
in the
Blood:
Popular
Culture and
Village Discourse
in Early
Modern Germany(Cam bridge, 1984), Robert B erdahl et al., Klassen und Kultur: Sozialanthro-
pologische Perspektiven inder Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt, 1982), and Hans M edick and Da vid
Sabean, eds.,Interest andEmotion:Essays onthe Study ofFamily andKinship(Cam bridge, 1984).
14. Alf Ludtke, Einleitung : Was ist und we r treibt Alltagsge schichte, in Lud tke, ed.,
Alltagsgeschichte; see especially section 2; De-Z entrierun g und 'das Fr em de ,' 13-14.
15. From the British film, The G o-Be twee n.
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
5/14
398 Alltagsgeschichte
German social history,
Alltagsgeschichte
also questions some of the
standard assu mptions of Germ an political history.
Alltagsgeschichte
has
adopted a particularly aggressive stance in the field of labor history.
German labor history has often been written as an unproblematic
success story, chronicling the labor m ov em ent's inevitable progress
towards a m ode rn system of rational industrial relations. But All-
tagsgseschichte provides material for a radical critique of the goals and
strategies of the organized labor movement. Historians of working-
class everyday life claim that the formal, organized politics of the
labor movement did not always serve the real day-to-day needs and
interests of ordinary workers.
16
As Alf Liidtke puts it, from this
view poin t, it is no t only the achievem ents that com e to the fore; at the
same time, deficits of the 'Free' (as well as of the Christian) trade
unions and working-class parties exhibit themselves during the Em-
pire and, even mo re, du ring the Weimar Repu blic.
17
Workers had to
develop independent ways of coping with the problems of everyday
life.
Th eir surv ival strategies were em bodied in informal social
structures and sym bolic cultural practices. Franz Briiggemeier show s,
for exam ple, that the half-open miner's family in the Ruhr took in
boa rders at different points in its life cycle, thus ensuring its economic
survival, and also helping to integrate young, single miners into the
wo rking-class com m un ity. Alf Liidtke shows ho w workers on the
shop-floor achieved the symbolic reappropriation of the indepen-
dence, time, and space denied them by industrial labor discipline (a
practice that Liidtke terms Eigensinn) by means of horseplay and
illegal work-brea ks. Som e practitioners ofAlltagsgeschichteeven pro -
pose a radical redefinition of the concept of politics
itself,
arguing that
everyday survival strategies and sym bolic practices comprised an
alternative politics of everyday life, separate from the official and
form al politics of the Germ an labor mo vem ent.
18
16. See especially Briiggemeier,
Leben vor On.
For an excellent recent overview, see Geoff
Eley, Lab or Histo ry, Social Histo ry, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of
the Everydaya New Direction for German Social History? JournalofModern History 61,
no.
2 (June 1989): 297-343.
17.
AlfL udtk e, Einleitun g, in Ludtke, ed.,
Alltagsgeschichte,
17.
18. See, for exam ple, A lfL ud tke , Cas h, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay:
Eigensinn
and Politics
am on g Factory Workers in Ge rma ny circa 1900, in Michael Hanag an and Charles Stephenson,
e d s . , Confrontation, Class C onsciousness and the Labor Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation
(Ne w York, 1986), 65 -95 , and Organisational Order or Eigensinn} Workers' Privacy and
W orkers'Po litics in Imperial Ge rm any , in Sean Wilentz, ed.,RitesofPower (Philadelphia, 1985).
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
6/14
David E Crew
399
Alltagsgeschkhte has shown what can be learned by examining the
apparently irrational features of working-class behavior. M oreover,
ithasdemonstrated the imp ortance of sym bolic and expressive nee ds
as well as material and instrum enta l inte res ts.
19
This approach has
uncovered a popular culture persisting well into the twentieth centu ry
from which seemingly archaic and outdated forms of pop ular p ro -
test, such as food riots, periodically erupted. But the official culture
of the German labor movement put a premium on disciplined, in-
strumental, and rational behavior. The rou gh er, m ore irrational
features of working-class culture appeared to hinder the organizing
efforts of
the
labor mov em ent. Consequently, trade unionists and so -
cialists sometimes found themselves in the uncom fortable position of
echoing the sentiments of the bou rgeois reformers and social exp erts
w ho wanted to colonize the worke r's life-world (Lebenswelt) in
order to achieve the social disciplining (Sozialdisziplinierung) of
working-class everyday life.
20
Alltagsgeschkhte approaches the history of the Third Reich in an
equally provocative and unsettling fashion. For example, Alf Liidtke's
recent attempts to explain the relationship between the Nazi regime
and the German people play on the ambiguities and contradictions of
the popu lar experience of Germ an fascism.
21
He argues that even
workers who had supported the SPD and KPD during the Weimar
19. See, for exam ple, Alf Liidtke, Everyd ay Life, the Articulation of Needs and 'Proletarian
Consciousness' Some Remarks on Co ncep ts, unpublished manuscript, and also David Crew,
Bedurfnisse und Bedurftigkeit: Wohlfahrtsburokratie und Wohlfahrtsempfanger in der Wei-
marer Republik,
Sozialwissenschaftlkhe
Informationen/'SOWl, Heft I (1989), 12-19.
20.
O n this point see especially Geoff Eley, Labor Histo ry, Social History,Alltagsge-
schkhte. . .
21. See especially, Alf Liidtke, Wo blieb die 'rote Glut'? Arbeitererfahrungen und deutscher
Faschismu s, in Ludtke, ed.,
Alltagsgeschkhte,
2 24-8 2, Die grosse Masse ist teilnahmslos,
nim mt alles hin . . . Herrschaftserfahrungen, Arb eiter-'Eig en-S inn' u nd Individualitat vor und
nach 1933, in H.-J. Busch and A. Krovoza, eds.,
Subjektivitat und Geschkhte: Perspektiven
politischer Psychologie
(Frankfurt, 1989), 105-28, and Fo rm ierun gen der M assen oder: M it-
machen und Hinnehm en? 'Alltagsgeschichte' und Faschismusanalyse, in Heid e Gerstenb erger
and Dorothea Schmidt, eds.,Normalita't oder Normalisierung? Geschichtswerkstatten und Faschis-
musanalyse (Munster, 1987), 15-3 4. For a com parison wi th earlier w or k on the subject of
popular o pinio n under the Nazis see the excellent studies by Ian Kershaw,
Popular Opinion and
Political Dissent in the ThirdReich:Bavaria 10.33-10.45
(Oxford, 1983), and
The Hitler Myth:Image
and Reality in the ThirdReich
(Oxford, 1987). See also M artin Broszat, Alltagsgeschichte der
NS -Zeit, in Herm ann Graml and Klaus-Dietmar Henke, eds.,
Nach Hitler: Derschwierige
Umgang mitunserer
Geschkhte:
Beitragevon Martin Broszat
(Mu nich, 1987), 131-3 9, and Detlev
J.K. Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity,Opposition andRacismin Everyday Life
(New
Haven and London, 1987).
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
7/14
4 0 0
Alltagsgeschichte
Republic displayed ambivalent attitudes towards the Nazi regime after
I933-
22
T he Nazis attem pted to exploit this sceptical acquiescence
(abwartendesHinnehmen) w i th a sym bo l ic offe ring (symbolischesAnge-
bot)
in the form, for ex ample, of Nazi insistence on the importance of
Germ an quali ty w ork
{Deutsche
Qualitatsarbeit). This was an endu r-
ing cultural icon in Germ an society that could engage the sym -
pathies ofa wide range of ordinary Germans, from factory engineer
to skilled worker, regardless of their former political persuasions.
23
Like their Italian fascist counterparts, the Nazis also appealed to
younger German workers' fascination with modern machinery. Then
too,
Germ an workers m ay have been m ade vulnerable to the mass
sym bo lism and militaristic formations o f the Th ird Reich because
they had been introduced to these symbolic forms in the Weimar
socialist and co m m un ist mov em en ts. Finally, Ludtke asks whethe r the
working-class practiceofEigensinnm igh t actually have prevented Ger-
man workers from openly resisting Nazism because it allowed them
small acts of daily self-assertion in the workplace.
24
In short, Liidtke
argues that Nazi domination was built on the ambiguities and con-
tradictions of working-class culture, as well as on the Nazi use of
terror in combination with material inducements to passivity.
G E N D E R I N G A L L T AG S G E SC H IC H T E
The sym bolic practices decoded byAlltagsgeschichteareprimarily m as-
culine. A recent article by Carola Lipp, Sabine Kienitz, and Beate
Bind er sho ws, however, that it is possible to get at the everyday
experiences of women as well as of men. Women took an active part
in the popular protests of the 1840s but their motives and modes of
sym bolic expression were quite different from those of the men. Th e
verbal abuse hurled by Stuttgart wo m en at govern me nt troops during
an 1847 bread riot was the political staging of an everyday practice
of ritual insult that women learned in the streets of the city's lower-
class n eighb orho ods.
2 5
Dorothee Wierling's contribution to Ludtke's
22.
Alf
Ludtke,
W o blieb die 'rote
Glut'?
225.
23.
AlfLudtke, 'De utsc he Qualitatsarbeit ': Ob ereinstim mu ng und Dissenz zwischen den
Klassen in D eutschla nd,
Kommune
7, no. 4
(1989): 6 2-6 6.
24.
Alf
Ludtke,
Wo blieb die 'rote
Glut '?
and Die grosse Masse ist teilnahmslos, nim mt
alles
hin . . .
25.
Carola
Lipp,
Sabine Kienitz, Beate Binder, Frauen bei Brotkraw allen, Strassentum ulten
und Ka tzenm usiken : Z u m politischen Verhalten von Frauen 1847 und in der Revolution 1848/
4 9 ,
m Peter Ass ion , ed . ,
Transformationen der Arbeiterkultur, 4963.
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
8/14
David
E
Crew 401
recent collection of essays likewise stresses the impo rtan ce of rescuing
ordinary German w om en , as well as m en, from the vast condescen-
sion
of
pos terity. But it also asks that an analysis of relationships and
conflicts between the genders be integrated into the history of eve ry-
day life. Th is gen derin g of
Alltagsgeschichte
has not yet gone very
far.
26
In the same volume editedbyLiidtke, forexam ple, Wolfgang
Kaschuba presents an excellent discussion of the role playedby the
m yth and reality of strenuous, physical wage labor in the construction
of male working-class cultures. Yethedoesnotindicate h ow these
male cultures
of
work affected everyday relationships between m en
and women.
2 7
A BALANCE SHEET?
Alltagsgeschichte
has frequently been accusedof trivializing German
history by privileging the auth entic experiencesofordinary people
without offering any real analysisorinterpretation. Th is seems pa r-
ticularly dangerous when we come to the history of the Third Reich.
For as Detlev Peukert observes, the appeal
to
everyday experience is
not
of
itself sufficient
. . . it is
always necessary
. . . to
offer
an in-
terpretation
of
the economic, social, political
and
cultural aspects
of
the period
in
question based on the system atic and analytical e labora-
tion of theory. Tho se w ho denounce the effort to systematise concep ts,
26. See, however, Alf Liidtke, Hu nger, E ssens-'G enus s' und Politik bei Fabrikarbeitern und
Arbeiterfrauen: Beispiele aus dem rheinisch-westfalischen Industriegebiet, 19101940, Sozial-
wissenschaftliche Informatioiten/SOWI14, no .2(1985): 118-2 6.
27. Wolfgang Kaschuba, Volksku ltur und Arbeiterkultur als symbolische Ordn unge n:
Einige volkskundliche Anmerkungen
zur
Debatte
um
Alltags-
und
Kulturgeschichte,
in
Ludtke,ed.,A lltagsgeschichte, 191-2 23. Paul Willis provides som e excellent com m ent son the
relationship between masculine work identitiesandpatriarchyin hisLearning to
Labour:
How
Working ClassKids GetWorking Class Jobs(Westmead, Farnb orough, Ha nts., England, 1977),
especially 147-51.
See
also, DavidF. Crew, Class and C om m un ity: Local Research on W orking-
Class History in Four Countries, in Klaus Tenfelde, ed.,
A rbeiter undArbeiterbewegung im
Vergleich: Bericht
zur
internationalen historischen Forschung,
His to r i sch e Zei t schr i f t , Sond erhef t e ,
vol. 15 (Munich, 1986), 327 -32. Kathleen Ca nnin g show s that the reconstructionofwomen 's
experiences and culturesof work both illustrates and challenges the German labor movement's
highly gendered construction of class ; seeher Rethinking German Labor History: Gender
and the Politics of
Class
Form ation 189 0-19 30, unpu blished paper presented to conference on
TheKaiserreichin the1990s: Ne w Research, New D irections, New Ag endas, Universityof
Pennsylvania, February 24, 1990. See also Jean Quatae rt, Social Insuran ce and the Fam ily Work
of Oberlausitz Home Weaversin theLate Nineteenth C entury , in J. C. Fout, ed.,
German
Women inthe N ineteenth Century:A Social History
(Ne w Y ork, 1984), and TheShapingof
Women's Work in Manufacturing: Guilds, Households, and the State in Central Europe, 1648-
1870,
American Historical Review
90 (December 198s): 1122 -48.
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
9/14
402 Alltagsgeschkhte
analyses and jud ge m en ts . . . are driven to the position that the only
kinds of 'authentic' everyday experience that can be cited are those of
the'alte
Kampfer\
W ehrmacht veterans and the man in the corner shop
who 'never had a clue what was going on'. This sort of history ends
up merely reproducing some of the most influential propaganda for-
mulae of National Socialismitself.
28
Some types
of
Alltagsgeschkhte
have undo ub ted ly tended to sub m erge disturbing aspects of history
by forcing them into almost fictional narratives.
29
But this allega-
tion far more accurately describes conservative-revisionist attempts to
no rma lize twen tieth-century German history and to relativize the
significance of Nazi genocide. Andreas Hillgruber has suggested, for
example, that If the historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of
1 9 4 4 - 4 5
O n l y o n e p o s i t i o n
i s
p o s s i b l e
. . . h e
m u s t i d e n t i f y h i m s e l f
with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and with
the desperate and sacrificial exertions of the German army of
the
East
and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population
from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the
arbitrary killing and the com pulsory d eportations.
3 0
With these state-
m en ts, Hillgruber seriously distorts the history of the war in the East.
It is difficult, for example, to identify, as Hillgruber suggests, with
Germ an troops who have recently been described as behaving on the
whole with extreme brutality and barbarism toward the Red Army,
they also laid waste whole areas of the territory they occupied and
massacred or otherwise caused the deaths of millions of innocent ci-
vilians as a m atte r ofpolicy.
31
In addition , A lf Liidtke reminds us that
the he roism and self-sacrifice of the Germ an armed forces pro-
longed the war and allowed Nazi genocide to continue in the death
camps beh ind the lines. Nor does Hillgruber b other to discuss the fact
that the concrete fate of the Germ an pop ulation in the East with
which h e asks his readers to identify was a result no t of Soviet aggres-
sion but of Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941.
Alltagsgeschkhte
has, on the other hand, provided a complex and
28.
Detlev Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany,
243.
29.
D agm ar Freist, Alltagsgeschichte der Jude n: In Search of N ew Approaches to Jewish
History, 250.
30. Andreas Hillgruber,
Zweierlei
Untergang:Die
Zerschlagung des Deutschcn Reiches
und
das
Ende
es
europdischen Judentums
(Berlin, 1986),24.
31. Richard J. Evans, InHitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from
the Nazi Past
( N e wYork,
1989),
60. See
also T heo Schulte, TheGerman Army and Nazi Policies
in Occupied Russia (Ox ford, 1988).
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
10/14
David F.Crew
403
disturbing picture of the mu ltiple everyday ambiguities of 'ord inary
people' making their choices among the various greys of active con-
sent, accommodation and nonconformity.
3 2
In his recent article on
the Third Reich, for example, Liidtke declares that it is frequently
impossible to draw clear lines between the vic tims and the villains
(Opfer und Ta'ter) in the Nazi regime. T he same working-class victims
of Nazism m ight, in another context, also becom e its accomplices. In
a brilliant study of pop ular op inion in Bavaria, Ian Kershaw shows
that The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, bu t paved with indif-
ference.
33
An d Detlev Peukert dem onstrates the ubiquity of every-
day racism in the Th ird Reich and argues that the pop ular intolerance
which moved many Germans to approve of the Nazi regime has not
yet disappeared in West Germ any after forty-five years of formal
democracy.
34
Moreover, apparently innocuous and unpolitical fea-
tures of National Socialist everyday life (the pro m ise, if not the
reality, of mass consumerism, for example, popular fascination with
new technology, or enjoyment of the pure ente rtainm en t films
churned out by the Goebbels propaganda machine) appear to have
created a broad basis of popular acquiescence, compliance, and sup-
port for the Nazi regime. These, clearly, are no t the lessons abo ut their
past that conservative-revisionist historians such as Nolte and Hill-
grub er or politicians like Kohl wan t citizens of the presen t-day Federal
Republic to learn.Alltagsgeschichte encourages citizens of the FRG to
think critically about the place of Nazism in their own history and
abou t the political relevance of everyday life in West Germ any today.
Un like Hillgruber's misappropriation of the history of pop ular ex-
perience,
Alltagsgeschichte
makes it difficult for present-day Germans
simply to em pathize w ith the fate of the Ge rma n pop ulation in
the last years of the war, or, on the other hand, to distance and dis-
sociate themselves from the everyday experience of National Social-
ism. By examining the intense moral ambiguities of everyday life
under National Socialism, Alltagsgeschichte has helped to ensure that
the Nazi years will continue for m any Germans to be a Past Tha t Will
Not PassAway.
3 5
32. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 243.
33. Ian Kershaw,Popular Opinion and Political
Dissent,
277.
34. Detlev Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany,
208-35.
35. The title of Ernst Nolte's
Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung article (6 June 1986): Ver-
gangenheit, die nicht vergehen will.
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
11/14
4 0 4 Alltagsgeschichte
At a time whe n no t on ly the radical right but even the conservative-
center in West German politics stridently insist on an end to public
discussion of collective gu ilt, Alltagsgeschichteplays a much-needed
subversive role in the construction of public memory. But can it pro-
duce a coherent, alternative narrative of the German past? What new
general interpretation of German history, if any, will emerge from
Alltagsgeschichte'?Historians of everyday life have been content mainly
to demonstrate the deficiencies of existing narratives. They argue, for
example, that popu lar experiences fit poorly, if at all, into the chronol-
ogy of political history. In the memories of the subjects interviewed
for Lutz Niethammer's oral history project there is no sharp line be-
tween w ar and peace. These ordinary Germ ans in the Ruhr re-
m em bered M ay 1945 as the m on th w hen the fighting stopped but the
wartime struggle for survival continued. The currency reform (Wdh-
rungsreform)
was a far more important turning point in their postwar
lives than the founding of the Federal Rep ublic.
36
Alltagsgeschichte
has also ques tioned the ideas of progress and
m odern ization upo n which conventional narrations of m odern Ger-
m an history rest. The ne w or tho do xy introduced by the Bielefeld
school in the 1960s explained N azism as a consequence of G ermany's
failure to m od ern ize prop erly in the late nineteenth century. Ac-
cording to this interpretation, it was Ge rmany 's preindustrial elites
and preindustrial tradition s that eventually bro ug ht Hitler to po w -
er.
37
By contrast, Alltagsgeschichte has adopted a postmo dernist
critique of the very concepts of progres s and m odernization ,
arguing that Nazism was one of several possible products of the
patholog ies and contradictions of m odern ity
itself,
rather than a
consequence of Germany's antimodern
Sonderweg.
Detlev Peukert
suggests, for exam ple, that the road to N azi genocide was built on the
contradictions, crisis, and failure of aseemingly progressive exper-
iment in social engineering, the ambitious state welfare system con-
36.
See especially Lutz Nie tham m er, Heim at und Front: Versuch, zehn Kricgserinnerungen
aus der Arbeiterklasse des Ruh rgebietes zu verstehen, in Lutz Nieth am me r, cd., Diejahreweiss
man
nicht,
wo
man die
heute hinsetzen
soil,
163-23 2, and Lutz Nieth am mer, Privat-Wirtschaft:
Erinnerungsfragmente einer anderen Um erzieh ung , in Lutz Niethamm er, ed.,
Hinterher merkt
man, dass es richtig war, dass es schiefgegangen
ist,
17106.
37 . See especially Hans-Ulrich Wehler, DasDeutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918(Gonmgen, 1975),
available in Eng lish translatio n asT heGerman Empire 1871-1918(Dover, Ne w Ham pshire, 1985).
For a critique of theSonderwegargument see David Blackbourn and Geoff
Eley,
ThePeculiarities
of German History: Bourgeois Society andPoliticsin Nineteenth-Century Germa ny ( N ew York , 1984) .
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
12/14
David
F.
Crew 405
structed in the Weimar Republic. His discussion blurs the distinctions
normally made by political historians between Weimar and Nazi Ger-
many and between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In place
of the old chronology, Peukert inserts an analytical category describing
an entire historical epoch which began w ith the twentieth centu ry and
which has not yet ended the classical m oder n .
3 8
Neither the alternative chronologies of popular experience and
memory produced by oral history nor theAlltagsgeschichtecritique of
mo dernization and progre ss makes the writing of a general ac-
count of German history impossible. Indeed Peukert has structured
his own recent surveys of the Weimar Republic and of everyday life
under National Socialism around the contem porane ity of the no n-
con tem pora neo us and the crisis of classical m od ern ity.
39
But an-
other aspect of the
Alltagsgeschichte
approach does have more radical
implications;
Alltagsgeschichte's
pursu it of the radically de-centered
subject leads to the conclusion that there can be no single, privileged,
or master narrative and that the history of everyday life requires
the complex reconstruction of a variety of individual lives and e xperi-
ences. In theory, there could be as m any histo ries of the First W orld
War or of the Third Reich as there were individuals w ho lived thr ou gh
and experienced these periods of the Ge rm an past. R eading traditional
written records against the grain , the practice of oral history, the
deciphering ofKorpersprache and symbolic actions does provide new
evidence about the history of everyday life. Yet, even w ith the help
of these new sources and methods, will Alltagsgeschichte actually be
able to gain access to the experiences of any m ore thanasmall m inority
of ordinary people ? An d how will we kn ow w heth er the individual
experiences that
can
be reconstructed in sufficient detail are represen-
tative?
Th ick description of revealing m iniatures also tends to dissolve
the collective subjects of m ore conventional narratives class, na -
tion, party, m ove m ent, and, m ore recently, gender. C onse -
quently,Alltagsgeschichtehas begun to drift away from what was once
the major concern of the new social his tory in Germ any the co n-
38. Dctlev Peukert,
Inside Nazi
Germany, 26-46 and 208-35;
DieWeimarerRepublik: Krisen-
jahre der Klassischen Moderne
(Frankfurt, 1987); and, most recently, Die Genesis der 'En dlo sun g'
aus dem Geist der Wissenschaft, in Detle v Peukert,Max
Webers Diagnose
der
Moderne
(Gottingen,
1989).
39. Detlev Peukert, DieWeimarer Republik andInsideNazi Germany.
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
13/14
8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene
14/14
David F.Crew 407
DAS HAUS DER GESCHICHTE HAT VIELE ZIMMER ?
The theoreticalandmethodo logical discussion ofAlltagsgeschichtewill
undoubtedly continueto bepermeatedby aninsistenceon theneed
to distance oneself from purely rationa list and teleological un-
derstandings of history and on the importance of learning to live
with ambiguity, uneven dev elopm ent, and contradiction in history
(Gemengelagen).
41
The uninitiated will som etimes find the languag e
of
Alltagsgeschichte disorienting
and
even confusing.
But
this effect
is
quite intentional
and it
will,
I
think, continue
to
hamper efforts
to
achievethekindof working compromise with
Strukturgeschichte
that
Jiirgen Kocka
has
proposed
in a
Frankfurter Rundschau
article. Until
nowone of the harshest criticsof
Alltagsgeschichte,
Kocka adoptsan
altogether more conciliatory tonein this piece, suggesting thatStruk-
turgeschichte
and
Erfahrungsgeschichte
can no t only coexis t butevenen-
richoneanother; thesynthesisof thehistory of structuresand the
history of experience is the seldom realized go al. Kocka suggests that
the house of history has many rooms and he doesnot see why
Alltagsgeschichteshouldbeunabletofindapermanent hom ein one of
them.
42
Yet as
long
as
Alltagsgeschichte
continues
to
propose such
a
radically different approach
to the
w riting
of
social history
in
West
Germany,
it is
unlikely
to be
content w ith just
a
room
of
its
own in
a house whereStrukturgeschichteis still
the
landlord.
41.
AlfLiidtke,
Einleitung,
in
Liidtke,
ed.,Alltagsgeschichte, 21-26.
42. See
also Kock a's recent
collection ofessays,Geschichte und Aujkldrung:Aujsatze
(Gottingen,
1989)-