the history of everyday life may 1995

THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
E D I T O R S
Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley
A LIST OF TITLES
IN THIS SERIES APPEARS
AT THE BACK OF
THE BOOK
PRINCETON STUDIES IN
CULTURE / POWER / HISTORY
THE HISTORY
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
RECONSTRUCTING HISTORICAL
EXPERIENCES AND WAYS
OF LIFE
Edited by Alf Ludtke
Translated by William Templer
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS ALLTAGSGESCHICHTE: ZUR REKONSTRUKTION
HISTORISCHER ERFAHRUNGEN UND LEBENSWEISEN
COPYRIGHT  1989 CAMPUS VERLAG GmbH, FRANKFURT/MAIN
ENGLISH TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT  1995 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
ALLTAGSGESCHICHTE. ENGLISH
THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE : RECONSTRUCTING
HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES AND WAYS OF LIFE / EDITED BY ALF LÜDTKE ;

TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM TEMPLER.
P. CM. — (PRINCETON STUDIES IN CULTURE/POWER/HISTORY)
INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES.
ISBN 0-691-05693-5. — ISBN 0-691-00892-2 (PBK.)
1. HISTORIOGRAPHY. 2. HISTORY—METHODOLOGY. I. LÜDTKE, ALF,
1943–. II. TITLE. III. TITLE: EVERYDAY LIFE. IV. SERIES
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD vii
Geoff Eley
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: What Is the History of Everyday Life and
Who Are Its Practitioners? 3
Alf Lüdtke
CHAPTER 2
“Missionaries in the Rowboat”? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as
a Challenge to Social History 41
Hans Medick
CHAPTER 3
Mentalities, Ideologies, Discourses: On the “Third Level” as

a Theme in Social-Historical Research 72
Peter Schöttler
CHAPTER 4
Have We Come Any Closer to Alltag? Everyday Reality and
Workers’ Lives as an Object of Historical Research in
the German Democratic Republic 116
Harald Dehne
CHAPTER 5
The History of Everyday Life and Gender Relations: On Historical
and Historiographical Relationships 149
Dorothee Wierling
CHAPTER 6
Popular Culture and Workers’ Culture as Symbolic Orders:
Comments on the Debate about the History of
Culture and Everyday Life 169
Wolfgang Kaschuba
CHAPTER 7
What Happened to the “Fiery Red Glow”? Workers’ Experiences
and German Fascism 198
Alf Lüdtke
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER 8
Zeroing in on Change: In Search of Popular Experience in the
Industrial Province in the German
Democratic Republic 252
Lutz Niethammer
GLOSSARY OF SELECTED TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 313
CONTRIBUTORS 317
FOREWORD
A

SIDE from the more recent growth of women’s history and gender
history, Alltagsgeschichte (or the history of everyday life) has
been the most important German historiographical development
of the past two decades. Some of its main practitioners are quite well
known in the English-speaking world—Alf Lüdtke and Hans Medick es-
pecially, and to a lesser extent Lutz Niethammer—but their special role in
the Federal Republic as the advocates of a distinctive kind of history, now
extending back some twenty years, is perhaps not as widely appreciated.
In the English-speaking world, perceptions of the historiographical land-
scape in Germany (both before and after 1989) tend to be dominated by
the leadership of the so-called Bielefeld school, a generational grouping
whose unity and extent has sometimes been overdrawn, but who were
broadly associated in the late 1960s and 1970s with the turning to U.S
influenced social-science history as the best means of modernizing West
German historical studies.
1
Alltagsgeschichte took shape in the mid-1970s as a kind of dissentient
movement to the left of this newly consolidated social-science history,
sharing many of the latter’s underlying commitments (for example, its
principled call for coming to terms with the Nazi past, or its critique of
the traditionalist methodologies and intellectual outlook of the estab-
lished West German profession, often referred to pejoratively as the
Zunft or the historians’ guild), but disliking its insistence on the primacy
of structural analysis, or “big structures, large processes, huge compari-
sons,” to use one leading U.S. social-science historian’s summary of the
creed.
2
Just as the new social-science history gained momentum a number
of programmatic publications appeared, mainly focusing on the social
and cultural history of the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

working class, but also extending back into the early modern period,
from which alltagsgeschichte quickly acquired its name.
3
Moreover, these
emergent alternative perspectives were linked to a larger aspiration, to
take history out of the university into the world of ordinary life. By the
early 1980s, in fact, a veritable movement had developed, with its basis in
many ways beyond the confines of the academy as such, in a wider do-
main of public history, reaching from museums, exhibitions, adult educa-
tion, and the programs of local government cultural offices to the mass
media, local publishing, and self-organized local research. Much of this
grass roots activity became loosely grouped in the West German history
workshop movement, whose emergence at the time of the peace move-
viii FOREWORD
ment and the launching of the Greens also lent this activity an unmistak-
able political edge, sharpened by the gravitation of interest toward the
Third Reich. A high point in this process of diffusion came in 1980–81,
when the competition for the President’s Prize for German History in
Schools was devoted to the theme “Daily Life under National Socialism,”
following earlier competitions on “Movements of Freedom” in one’s own
locality (1974–76) and “The Social History of Everyday Life” (1977–
79).
4
By the early 1980s a flourishing context of research and debate,
both inside and outside the academy, had taken shape.
What did the advocates of alltagsgeschichte want? What the early texts
had in common was a shifting of the social-history agenda away from the
prevailing ground of the social-science historians, but without returning
it to the older institutionally or politically bounded forms of labor his-
tory, which had previously identified the history of the working class. The

goal was to develop a more qualitative understanding of ordinary peo-
ple’s lives, both by investigating the material circumstances of daily exis-
tence at work, at home, and at play (“the production and reproduction of
immediate life,” in Friedrich Engels’s well-known phrase) and by entering
the inner world of popular experience in the workplace, the family and
household, the neighborhood, the school—in short, all those contexts
normally assigned to the cultural domain. By exploring social history in
its experiential or subjective dimensions, it was argued, conventional
distinctions between the “public” and the “private” might also be tran-
scended, and a more effective way of making the elusive connections
between the political and cultural realms be found. Moreover, the new
advocates argued, it was precisely these “insides” of the “structures, pro-
cesses, and patterns” of social analysis—“the daily experiences of people
in their concrete life situations, which also stamp their needs”—that had
previously been left out.
5
Alltagsgeschichte became the rubric ideally
suited for bringing them in.
There is a large amount to be said about the detailed intellectual con-
text of these departures, much of it heavily shaped by the complex and
distinctive formation of the West German New Left in the 1960s (as in the
influence of Ernst Bloch, the ambivalent relationship to the Frankfurt
School, and the general search for a theory of human needs). Pierre Bour-
dieu’s “theory of practical action” also had an important place, as did the
impact of Edward Thompson and other British Marxist historians, and a
broad indebtedness to Anglo-American anthropology. Among these
influences, the turn to “ethnological ways of knowing” (to use the subtitle
of Medick’s contribution to this volume) is perhaps the red thread.
This was basically a response to the optimistic teleology of moderni-
zation and the “objectivist” concern with structures and processes of

FOREWORD ix
macrohistorical development that seemed to be so dominant in West Ger-
man “historical social science.” On the one hand, the Alltagshistoriker
regarded the claims of “progress” with a skeptical eye, and here the per-
spective of history from below—the interest “in historical ‘losers’ or in
nonestablishment views of the processes of change”—found natural sus-
tenance in much recent anthropology, which since the 1960s has been
impressed as much by the costs as by the gains of the underdeveloped
world’s encounter with the West.
6
Shifting perspective onto the “internal
costs” of social transformations in this way brings the casualties of prog-
ress more to the forefront of historical inquiry, as Edward Thompson and
others in the Anglo-American discussion had so eloquently argued. On
the other hand, the turn toward ethnology also involved a shift from im-
personal social processes to the experiences of human actors. “If social
science had traditionally assumed the existence of objective sets of rela-
tionships, the need now was to study the social and cultural world from
the perspective of the women, men and children who composed it.”
7
That
is, the priority should be a social history of subjective meanings derived
from highly concrete microhistorical settings. This was not to supplant
but to specify and enrich the understanding of structural processes of
social change. In fact, shifting the focus to everyday life would specifically
transcend such a “sharp dichotomy opposing objective, material, struc-
tural, or institutional factors to subjective, cultural, symbolic, or emo-
tional ones.”
8
We can see these commitments powerfully at work in the

writings of the editor of this volume, Alf Lüdtke, who has been a tireless
exponent of the everyday life approach. For Lüdtke such an approach
begins with the call for history from below, the fundamental orientation
alltagsgeschichte shares with cognate tendencies in Anglo-American so-
cial history: “At the center . . . are the lives and sufferings of those who
are frequently labeled, suggestively but imprecisely, as the ‘small people.’
It involves their work and nonwork. The picture includes housing and
homelessness, clothing and nakedness; eating and hunger, love and hate.
Beyond this, certain thematic emphases have emerged, such as the history
of work, of gender relations, of the family, and especially of popular cul-
tures. The attention is no longer focused on the deeds (and misdeeds) and
pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state.”
9
In the first in-
stance, therefore, the history of everyday life involves the marking out of
a particular empirical terrain.
Second, there comes the stress on subjectivity and experience, on the
social production and construction of meaning, theorized partly via the
turn to ethnology/anthropology mentioned above, but also via forms of
ethnographic analysis taken from ethnomethodology and symbolic inter-
actionism in sociology. Third, Lüdtke insists on the need for “systematic
x FOREWORD
decentralization of analysis and interpretation” through the careful con-
struction of historical “miniatures.” It is by exploring forms of “micro-
history” in this sense that we stand a greater hope of capturing more of
the ambiguities and contradictions of ordinary people’s perceptions and
behavior as they actually live their lives.
10
Fourth, this implies no retreat
into the particular, or to a narrow segment of social reality, but entails

rather a different way of allowing the big questions of process and struc-
ture to be posed. In fact, alltagsgeschichte “cannot be isolated from the
relations of production, appropriation, and exchange, and the related in-
terest structures of society.”
11
Nor, fifth, does it suggest leaving politics
out of the analysis or neglecting the political dimension, because the same
local or microhistorical contexts allow questions of both the public and
the private, the personal and the political, to be searchingly posed. Fi-
nally, this agenda also has major political implications for the present,
because for Lüdtke the effort at understanding the “Otherness” of popu-
lar culture in the past aims at recognizing much more fundamentally the
contextuality of historical situations and actors than historicists are will-
ing to accept. It is precisely this respect for the distance between “us” and
“them” that prevents any facile process of identification. The emphasis
on difference—via the multiplicity of forces, actors, and voices—simulta-
neously opens a new perspective on the potentials for historical change.
12
During the 1980s, this agenda proved highly contentious to the estab-
lished voices of the West German historical profession, including espe-
cially the high priests of social-science history, who saw the advancement
of new forms of cultural history as a disastrous falling back from the
standards of “scientific” research and discussion they had labored so
hard to instate during the previous decades. Moreover, although slowly
some acknowledgment of the new approaches has been achieved, there
are still deep resistances in the mainstream of German historical studies,
and the advocates of alltagsgeschichte have made remarkably few inroads
into the institutional centers of the profession, in some cases enjoying far
greater influence and recognition abroad than in Germany itself. Where
social-science historians call for fresh attention to the importance of cul-

ture, they invariably stop the discussion just where Medick, Lüdtke, and
their colleagues begin, cleaving to older types of cultural anthropology,
rather than entering the current discourse of reflexive and postmodern
anthropologies, Anglo-American cultural studies, literary theory, and the
U.S based new cultural history, to which alltagsgeschichte bears such
clear affinities. Alltagsgeschichte per se is often gratuitously slighted, and
where the value of its contribution is mentioned, the presentation fre-
quently disguises the history of extreme contentiousness involved, and
the bitterly fought struggles that were necessary to gain legitimacy for the
new ideas.
13
In these respects, boundaries are still clearly being drawn.
FOREWORD xi
Nonetheless, the history of everyday life now has an impressive bibli-
ography and scholarly achievement to its credit. A new journal has also
been launched, Historische Anthropologie. Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag,
which promises to rival Geschichte und Gesellschaft as the main source
of radicalism and innovation. The various authors of this volume have
built powerful national and international reputations for themselves, and
continue pushing against the boundaries of given historical understand-
ing. Their influence on younger German historians, at least in the English-
speaking world, has become very great. Hans Medick is by any criterion
one of Germany’s outstanding early modern historians; Peter Schöttler is
one of the very few major voices mediating between the French and Ger-
man historical and intellectual worlds; Harald Dehne opens a valuable
window onto the former East German historical scene; Dorothee Wier-
ling has pioneered the relationship of alltagsgeschichte and gender his-
tory; Wolfgang Kaschuba is a leading voice of the German discipline of
Volkskunde, working at the interface of ethnology, history, and cultural
studies; and in their different ways Alf Lüdtke and Lutz Niethammer have

been transforming the existing protocols of discussion first of the Third
Reich and now most recently of the former GDR.
14
This collection of
programmatic essays now provides excellent and much-needed access for
a general English-speaking readership to this important body of work.
Geoff Eley
University of Michigan
Notes
1. This intellectual history cannot be presented in detail here. The main mem-
bers of this grouping—men such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, and Hein-
rich August Winkler, and in somewhat different ways Wolfgang J. Mommsen and
Hans Mommsen—have an established presence in the North American academic
world. They are frequent visitors to its conferences and research institutes, and
their works are reasonably available in translation. Their flagship journal, Ge-
schichte und Gesellschaft, subtitled Journal for Historical Social Science,
launched in 1976, has become the premier historical journal of the German-
speaking world. Good introductions may be found in the following: Georg Iggers,
“Introduction,” in The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West
German Historical Writing since 1945, ed. Georg Iggers (Leamington Spa, 1985),
1–48; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Historiography in Germany Today,” Observations
on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age,” ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.,
1984), 221–59; Geoff Eley, “Introduction,” in From Unification to Nazism: Rein-
terpreting the German Past (London, 1986), 1–20.
2. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New
York, 1984).
xii FOREWORD
3. To my mind, these were the pioneering interventions: Hans Medick, “The
Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and
Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” So-

cial History 1 (1976): 291–315; Lutz Niethammer and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier,
“Wie wohnten Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976):
61–134; Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen für Unterricht und Studium
(hereafter SOWI): “Bedürfnisse, Erfahrung und Verhalten,” 6 (1977): 147–96,
esp. Alf Lüdtke’s guide to reading, “Fundstellen zur historischen Rekonstruktion
des ‘Alltagslebens,’” 188–89; Jürgen Reulecke and Wolfhard Weber, eds., Fa-
brik—Familie—Feierabend: Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte des Alltags im Indu-
striezeitalter (Wuppertal, 1978).
4. One important trace of this activity is the successful film Das schreckliche
Mädchen (abysmally translated as The Nasty Girl), a fictionalized account of one
particularly explosive local research project, namely that of Anna Rosmus, a na-
tive of the Bavarian provincial town of Passau: in 1980/81 she studied the Na-
zification of her hometown on the level of the everyday.
5. Alf Lüdtke, “Zur Einleitung,” SOWI 6 (1977): 147.
6. Hans Medick and David Sabean, “Introduction,” in Interest and Emo tion:
Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Medick and Sabean (Cambridge,
1984), 1.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Ibid., 2. I have provided a more detailed account of this recent intellectual
history in Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experi-
ence, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—a New Direction for German
Social History?” Journal of Modern History 61 (June 1989): 297–343, where
extensive bibliographical citations may be found.
9. Alf Lüdtke, “‘Alltagsgeschichte’: Verführung oder Chance? Zur Er-
forschung der Praxis historischer Subjekte,” unpublished paper, 1.
10. Ibid., 10, 12.
11. Lüdtke, “Zur Einleitung,” p. 147.
12. Again, I have provided full references and a more extensive discussion of
Lüdtke’s work in “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte,” 318ff.
13. See for instance the editor’s introduction to Winfried Schulze, ed., Sozial-

geschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie. Eine Diskussion (Göttingen,
1994), 6–18, which flattens the debates surrounding alltagsgeschichte in the ear-
lier 1980s into a single alphabetized footnote, thereby obscuring both the pio-
neering contribution of Medick and Lüdtke and the extremism of their oppo-
nents.
14. For Niethammer, see especially Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von
Plato, eds., Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930–1960, 2d ed.,
3 vols. (Bonn, 1986), and Niethammer, Die volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine
Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin, 1991); and for
Lüdtke, see his “‘Ehre der Arbeit’: Industriearbeiter und Macht der Symbole. Zur
Reichweite symbolischer Orientierungen im Nationalsozialismus,” in his Eigen-
sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den
Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993), 283–350; Lüdtke, “‘Helden der Arbeit’—Mühen
FOREWORD xiii
beim Arbeiten. Zur missmutigen Loyalität von Industriearbeitern in der DDR,” in
Sozialgeschichte der DDR, ed. Harmut Kaelble, Jürgen Kocka, and Harmut
Zwahr (Stuttgart, 1994), 188–213; Lüdtke, “Polymorphous Synchrony: German
Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life,” International Review of
Social History, supplement, 38 (1993): 39–84.
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THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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1
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY
LIFE AND WHO ARE ITS PRACTITIONERS?
Alf Lüdtke
W
HAT Alltagsgeschichte—the history of everyday life—is and
the uses it serves remains a matter of spirited debate, not just

among historians. But the controversy itself has evidently
helped to spark further interest in the field. Recent years have witnessed
a flood of new articles, books, glossy coffee-table volumes, films, and
television series all dealing with “historical everyday life”—publications
and productions that have found a welcome market, and often stirred
considerable attention.
It is not just the topic that is controversial—even the term Alltagsge-
schichte has been subject to criticism, and the label is indeed something of
a less-than-ideal solution, employed for want of a better name. Nonethe-
less, the designation retains its utility as a brief and succinct formulation,
targeted polemically against a tradition of historiography that has largely
excluded “everyday life” from its purview.
In sketching its essential contours, we are immediately struck by a
characteristic feature of much research and most presentations that deal
with the history of everyday life: they center on the actions and sufferings
of those who are frequently labeled “everyday, ordinary people” (kleine
Leute), a term as suggestive as it is imprecise. What is foregrounded is
their world of work and nonwork. Descriptions detail housing and
homelessness, clothing and nakedness, eating habits and hunger, people’s
loves and hates, their quarrels and cooperation, memories, anxieties,
hopes for the future. In doing the history of everyday life, attention is
focused not just on the deeds (and misdeeds) and pageantry of the great,
the masters of church and state. Rather, central to the thrust of everyday
4 ALF LÜDTKE
historical analysis is the life and survival of those who have remained
largely anonymous in history—the “nameless” multitudes in their work-
aday trials and tribulations, their occasional outbursts or dépenses
(Georges Bataille).
In studies on the everyday toil and festive joys of men and women, the
young and the old, individuals emerge as actors on the social stage. But

this historiographic perspective also sharpens our sights for history’s vic-
tims and the multiple contours of their suffering. One representative ex-
ample is the case of the brutal torture and murder of tens of thousands of
women, as well as many men and children, that accompanied the waves
of witch-hunting hysteria which swept across the early modern era.
1
That topic has become a major subject for research and representation,
extending far beyond the narrow confines of the immediate professional
discipline. In particular, feminists regard the memory of historical op-
pression as an indispensable ingredient in a process leading to a better
understanding of how one’s own individual identity has been shaped and
constructed.
But in Germany, it is studies of Alltag in the Nazi period that have had
truly reverberating implications—both for public debate and private dis-
course on one’s own history. These investigations attempt to give (back)
a human face to the victims of German fascism—the hounded, exploited,
and murdered millions.
2
For example, only the painstaking reconstruc-
tion of the “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” brand of contempt for the foreign
forced laborers employed in such massive numbers in the Nazi war effort
beginning in 1941–42 was able to shed crucial light on attitudes toward
them: the way in which, at the grass roots, local level, feelings of national
and “folk-racial” resentment commingled with an amalgam of fears and
a sense of subservience conditioned and inculcated by one’s biography—
at least among the great majority of Reichsdeutsche.
Inquiry into the history of everyday life points up the extent to which
most “average people” actually clung to the Nazi regime in their concern
to survive. In the end, it was the “others” who bore the “costs” of that
process—especially those whose exclusion seemed so “businesslike” in its

methodical application: fellow human beings labeled as “subhuman crea-
tures,” “elements alien to the folk community” (Gemeinschaftsfremde),
and “foreign workers” (Fremdarbeiter). Thus, research into everyday his-
torical realities has also explored the “inner perspective” of the acquisi-
tion and exercise of power by the Nazi rulers. In the light of such inquiry,
the gaping distance between rulers and ruled is reduced—a presumed gulf
that has so often appeared to exonerate the majority of their guilt. A
window is opened on that “shared . . . experience” (Raul Hilberg) that
animated bureaucrats and others actively to contribute their skills to mass
murder. Those who supposedly were only cogs in the machine, carrying
out orders, became active accomplices.
3
INTRODUCTION 5
Insights such as these can no longer be ignored in the continuing con-
troversy about the true contours of German history. This became amply
evident in the much-discussed “historians’ debate” of the mid-1980s. Re-
ferring to the experiences of those who had been directly affected by
events, Andreas Hillgruber, for example, argued that historians should
“identify with the concrete fate of the German people in the East” and the
“desperate efforts” of the German armies in 1944–45, which “took such
a heavy toll.”
4
Findings from research into everyday life on the countless
atrocities committed or defended by German functionaries, civil servants,
police, and the military at the concrete, local level after 1933 or 1939
have become central in refuting such theses. These studies on “fascism’s
everyday face” have underscored the extent to which suffering among
Germans toward the end of the war was associated in consciousness with
the concatenation of terror and suffering caused by Germans them-
selves—and highlighted the fact that many Germans at the time also real-

ized this connection. That is a key point in the historiography of everyday
life: actions and experience cannot be separated from the context of their
genesis and impact.
Investigations of the ways in which “most people” managed somehow
to “get by” during the era of German fascism have been explosive in their
impact, especially because they have tended to reveal the degree to which
the preponderant majority of Nazi Volksgenossen were in fact themselves
perpetrators or accomplices. Such research, of course, does not address
itself solely to those who were contemporaries of these events. We
younger generations can no longer feel safe simply by girding ourselves
with theories and analytical concepts. Evidently, it is not enough simply
to determine what the “situation and circumstances” were back then, and
explore whether these have changed. It is obvious that the historical ac-
tors were (and are) more than mere blind puppets or helpless victims.
The “Repetitive” Character of Everyday Life—
or Forms of (Re)appropriation?
Several key conceptual orientations and emphases of alltagsgeschichte
should be specified more precisely.
5
Two principal foci can be distin-
guished.
The first stresses everyday activities in which an element of “repeti-
tiveness” predominates.
6
This perspective, as elaborated by Peter
Borscheid, asserts that via repetition, “everyday thinking and action be-
come pragmatic,” because routines function to “relieve” the individual of
constant uncertainty or doubts. For social groups and institutions, routi-
nization means “submission to authority” as a precondition of their “sta-
bility.” This orientation, which takes its conceptual cues from the social

6 ALF LÜDTKE
thought of Arnold Gehlen, reflects the continuity of that older conceptu-
alization of social history viewed as “structural history,” where stress
was placed on the “structure” of social forms and configurations.
7
In
keeping with such a static conception, its more recent variant, associated
with the history of everyday life, presupposes a clear-cut separation be-
tween the spheres of everyday life and the noneveryday. At the same time,
an explicit hierarchy is assumed: everyday life is the preschool, as it were,
for the sphere of noneveryday eventfulness. But its crowning conception
centers on the mechanisms of historical change: this view posits that
nothing but a “select few personalities” are granted the privilege to “cross
over” into the realm of the noneveryday. Yet these select few are the only
ones “able to bring about further development in the quotidian basis . . .
of everyday life.” Such development necessitates action by persons “out-
side of the sphere of Alltag.”
A second set of approaches, in themselves rather diverse, nonetheless
represent a fundamentally different perspective. Certain shared orienta-
tions emerge, and these are also the crux of the essays gathered together
in the present volume. In contrast with the nondynamic concept just
sketched, the reference point is not static structure, what remains “eter-
nally the same.” On the contrary: the dynamism and contradictory char-
acter of radical historical change are linked with the “production and
reproduction of real life” (F. Engels).
8
In this view, reconstructions in the
history of everyday life involve more than situations recurrent in the daily
struggle for survival (and momentary experiencing of workaday events).
Rather, such reconstructions reveal in particular the way in which partic-

ipants were—or could become—simultaneously both objects of history
and its subjects.
From the perspective of the direction in social history known in Ger-
many as “historical social science” (historische Sozialwissenschaft), the
expansion of market relations, the implementation of wage labor and the
increased division of labor, bureaucratization and “modern” forms of the
central state, as well as the transition to what A. E. Imhof has termed a
“lifetime in safety and security”—these constitute the central historical
processes over recent centuries.
9
By contrast, alltagsgeschichte—con-
ceived as the history of everyday behavior and experience—does not try
to raise fundamental secular change to a level detached from human
agents, occurring behind their backs, as it were. Rather, historical change
and continuity are understood as the outcome of action by concrete
groups and individuals. Human social practice is shifted into the fore-
ground of historical inquiry.
10
Scrutiny is not focused on what Engels called the “average axis”
11
around which interests rotate. Instead, the multifaceted ways in which
individuals and groups make known (or conceal), implement (or block)
INTRODUCTION 7
their considerations of cost and utility are foregrounded. The thrust here
is to demonstrate how social impositions or stimuli are perceived and
processed as interests and needs, anxieties and hopes; indeed, how they
are generated in the very process. To phrase it differently: the focus is on
the forms in which people have “appropriated”
12
—while simultaneously

transforming—“their” world.
From this vantage, conditions for action appear ambivalent in their
complexity: though given, they are in equal measure a product. These
conditions change and acquire nuance within such “reappropriations.”
Hence, historical subjects are not detached from the social “field-of-
force” (E. P. Thompson).
13
Initially, what this implies is that they cannot
be considered “autonomous” personalities. It is not a question of “ego
strength” as a counterpole, pitted against social conditions for expres-
sion. Individuals and groups do not construct the profile of the modes in
which they perceive and act in some sphere removed and beyond the web
of social relations—no, such a profile is generated in and through that
very web.
14
Acts in which people distance themselves from social rules
utilize (or refer) to socially understood languages, discourses and codes:
the matrix of resistance also marks a social relation. Of course, that rela-
tion is created anew by the subjects in concrete situations, and in a man-
ner specific for them.
Decentering and “Otherness”
Doing alltagsgeschichte involves more than striking out on a new ap-
proach to historical research and representation. This work is part of a
more inclusive effort, namely, the attempt to forge a fundamentally new
perspective on the way historians see the “achievements” of the modern
era.
It is no longer merely a matter of broadening customary concepts by
including calculations on the so-called costs of secular modernization
since the sixteenth century. Instead, inquiry privileges crucial questions
about the motivating factors underlying that complex of historical shifts

and transformations subsumed under the term “modernism.” Doubts
now abound about any theses which posit “rationalization” as some sort
of ineluctable process—one which supposedly provides the motive force
for promoting the process of secular “emancipation” from uncompre-
hended (or “mythical”) forces. Concepts linking “rationalization” with
the progress of humankind have also lost much of their persuasiveness.
There is another side, methodological and theoretical, to the coin of these
doubts: does the image of the “grand contours” of historical life actually
accord with the concrete experience of “the many”? It becomes necessary
8 ALF LÜDTKE
to historicize the very assumption of the “shaping power of supraindivid-
ual forces,” that is, “societal structures and processes.”
15
Are they not
themselves the product of a society and culture that are decidedly “bour-
geois” in character—a society in which a ruling elite, as disciplined as it
was domineering, sought, through its explorers and entrepreneurs, to
measure the rest of the world by its imperial yardstick?
The concept of “peoples devoid of history” (E. Wolf) that has gained
a niche in thinking within the European metropolitan “centers” does not
only refer to the colonized nations. In these centers, the strange and alien
element of “one’s own Otherness” remains hidden and uncharted terri-
tory as well: the history of the dependent and dominated, largely mute to
date, still beckons to be disclosed. What is at issue is the “other half” of
a process encompassing all of society: the history of how the expansion of
commodity production, the state, and bureaucracy was experienced by
“the many.” How was the uneven development of the forces of produc-
tion, a process inseparable from the development of the forces of destruc-
tion, implemented in concrete terms? And in what way did these cataclys-
mic changes prove useful (or become at the very least tolerable) for the

“masses” in the metropolitan centers?
Such a shift in perspective necessitates a double effort. It is imperative
not only to describe historical processes but to explain them—though
without succumbing to the temptations of an objectivizing view. Histori-
ans who prepare their specimen objects using categories providing the
greatest selectivity proceed based on a principle akin to Bentham’s all-
seeing “panopticon”: pervasive and encompassing insight, but only from
one’s own elevated top-down vantage point. Paradoxically, the further
this view extends, the more it precludes any chance of being able to visu-
alize how things look when seen from the bottom up.
Criticism of well-worn, fixed forms of scientific objectivizing does not
substitute some mode of rapturous emotive comprehension or indiscrimi-
nate all-inclusive understanding in their stead. Rather, it is crucial to rec-
ognize that the distance between “us” and the “others” is not something
self-evident and given, but problematical; it may be possible to bridge the
gulf, but it cannot be eliminated (see the essay by Hans Medick in this
volume).
16
Above all else, this means that we must constantly strive to
comprehend our own ideas about those “others”—peasants in the seven-
teenth century, workers in the nineteenth century, the educated middle
class, civil servants—for what they really are: reconstructions after the
fact. It becomes evident that these concepts, even when rendered more
and more sophisticated (but not “sharper”!), remain nonetheless con-
structions; they are provisional and fragile.
A glance at one’s own first fumbling attempts at understanding may be
INTRODUCTION 9
instructive: there is no way that unsuitable or shattered concepts can be
quickly replaced or mended. Moreover, ambivalences cannot be resolved;
instead, they have to be reckoned as fundamental to historical praxis and

processes. Doing science can trigger the anxiety mechanism when con-
fronted by such situations without the armor of concepts or theories.
However, that very anxiety may generate one of those psychological self-
blocks that tend to impede a productive approach to multiple meanings
and fuzziness. To be sure, such shackled vision has a long tradition. After
all, isn’t one of the abiding illusions of a naive “enlightened” optimism (in
both its non-Marxist and Marxist variants) that the negation of existing
circumstances is always pregnant with something “better” to replace
them? At this juncture, a stocktaking by the profession is urgently re-
quired, namely, the historical self-enlightenment of the seemingly ahis-
torical social sciences, insight into their historicity.
The History of Everyday Life: A New “Irrationalism”?
Attempts to decenter entrenched ways of seeing in historiography are
manifest principally in the field of alltagsgeschichte. Approaches differ,
but at least in the perception of the critics, they are often regarded as
forms of that “new irrationalism” alluded to in numerous quarters. Thus,
for example, Jürgen Kocka, in a paper before the Frankfurt conference on
“The Future of the Enlightenment,” did not limit his examples of this
brand of “irrationalism” to historians such as Ernst Nolte or Andreas
Hillgruber, who reinterpret and downplay the excesses of German fas-
cism in a way that is methodologically grotesque and politically cynical.
17
Kocka cast his net wider, seeing the “history workshops” and “several
other variants” of the historiography of everyday life as foci of attitudes
and scholarly practice that are fundamentally unscientific—and thus hos-
tile to Enlightenment values.
18
Kocka gave an elaborate explanation to underpin his position. In his
view, history as a science is based on the conception of what is essentially
a unified history, over and beyond the mass of myriad individual (hi)sto-

ries. He contends that this concept of a connection between causes, ac-
tions, and effects is what allows us to grasp both the difference and the
interconnection between past, present, and future; it thus contradicts any
notion that “history repeats itself”—and is also, one might add, opposed
to mythical notions of the universe and human fate. Kocka notes that a
decisive element in “dealing scientifically with history” is the fact that
there has been an established standard of “rigorous methods” and “argu-
mentative” (i.e., not just narrative) presentation since the late eighteenth
10 ALF LÜDTKE
century. If one adheres to these standards, the resultant mode of scientific
“discourse” can shield itself from the inroads of “legend and myth, dis-
tortion and falsehoods.”
There is always an element of political judgment in any charge that the
history of everyday life does not take the rules of critical scholarship seri-
ously enough, or indeed completely ignores such rules. Thus, Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, one of the founders of “historical social science,” has character-
ized alltagsgeschichte as a kind of “bland, conventional oatmeal” dished
up as historical science. Despite that purported blandness, he nonetheless
believes it contains the germs of what is patently an extremely dangerous
attitude, namely, “cheap defeatist sentiment” vis-à-vis “the achievements,
as yet by no means outmoded, of our own culture area.”
19
In German
trade union circles as well, there was considerable skepticism when it
came to attempts by practitioners of alltagsgeschichte to calculate the
human costs of industrialism and bureaucratized policy. Moreover, in a
number of leftist salons, the charge of cultivating an uncritical affection
for all the “nameless millions” (including perhaps even those many “little
Eichmanns”?) was linked with the more straitlaced scholarly suspicion
that conceptions of social theory were being cast indiscriminately to the

winds. The history of everyday life was, they contended, nothing but sen-
timental celebration of those “ordinary, everyday people,” eternally one
and the same.
In the “historians’ debate” of 1986–87, critics opposed to the revision-
istic “new trend” (Wende) in history à la Nolte were not only concerned
with forestalling what they felt was an illegitimate “exoneration” (Ent-
schuldung) of Germans as a nation. At the same time, they sketched out
the proper direction future criticism should take: Kocka argued that the
conditions which gave rise to the possibility of fascism could be explained
only if “large-scale contours, big patterns” on the level of macrotheory
and macroconcepts were investigated, such as “industrialization and cap-
italism . . . nation and revolution.”
20
Once again, this approach implies
that there can be only one interpretation of rationality. It also claims the
ability to treat the most disparate historical modes of life as similar, and
to systematize them—nothing and no one is “alien” to its omnivorous
scope and grasp. Moving along a parallel track, Jürgen Habermas es-
poused the thesis that criticism of the assorted concoctions brewed by the
Wende in historiography—namely, the various efforts to generate na-
tional-conservative “meaning and value,” to use Michael Stürmer’s par-
lance—was possible only from a position of “close ties with the West”
and “constitutional patriotism.”
21
In Habermas’s view, there had pre-
sumably been a dominant unchallenged consensus in Germany up until
the “new trend,” a consensus that could be interpreted as an answer to