Istoria vietii cotidiene

8/11/2019 Istoria vietii cotidiene

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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


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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 .,


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.


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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).


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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).


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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.


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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.


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).


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.


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) .


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.


13/14


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)-

Documents

Istoria vietii cotidiene