Alltagsgeschichte

A New Social History “From Below”

Bibliographic Data

ID9645440
AuthorsDavid F Crew (corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume22
Issue3-4
Pages394-407
Publication date1989-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0008938900020550
OpenAlexW2017383165
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited20

There is an insatiable demand 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 about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the word Alltag in its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs, Volkshochschulen and youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” ( Geschichtswerkstätten ), 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. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm, Alltagsgeschichte has not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses ( die Vielen ). Indeed, Alltagsgeschichte has challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of Strukturgeschichte within the German historical “guild” ( Zunft ) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research. Alltagsgeschichte originally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history ( Strukturgeschichte ) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s

Economic history · Enthusiasm · German · Hegemony · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Populism · Sociology · Theology · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · European Political History Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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