Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From Below”?

Abstract

Thereis 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 wordAlltagin its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs,Volkshochschulenand 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,Alltagsgeschichtehas not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners ofAlltagsgeschichtehave never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses (die Vielen). Indeed,Alltagsgeschichtehas challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony ofStrukturgeschichtewithin the German historical “guild” (Zunft) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research.Alltagsgeschichteoriginally 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.

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