The History of Everyday Life - A Second Chapter PDF

The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter
Author(s): Paul Steege, AndrewStuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy and PamelaE. Swett
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 80, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 358-378
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Review Article
The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter*
Paul Steege, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and

Pamela E. Swett
Villanova University, University of MissouriKansas City, Oregon State University,
and McMaster University
By the mid-1990s, as cultural history won the field from social history, Alltags-
geschichtethe history of everyday life that emerged in 1980s West Germany
seemed a minor casualty along the way. The doyen of German social historians,
Hans Ulrich Wehler, offered an unsentimental obituary: It has been clear for
some time that the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) has been a failure,
theoretically speaking. All of the smart people have moved on to the New Cultural
History. This development also will take its course in America, where currently
students of those historians who once declared themselves enthusiastically for the
history of everyday life are fighting a rearguard battle.1 The reports of Alltags-
geschichtes death, however, have been greatly exaggerated. The history of ev-
eryday life played an important role in shaping the future of German historiog-
raphy in North America. In this article, we wish to suggest several fruitful ways
in which future scholarship may use Alltagsgeschichte, particularly in the trans-
planted form that has taken root on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, to
integrate social and cultural history into what might be called a self-critical history
of the present.2
Alltagsgeschichte grew in 1970s West Germany from decidedly international
roots, not least from E. P. Thompsons efforts to rescue the poor stockinger, the
Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even
the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of
posterity.3 Like its politically charged cousins in Britain, Alltagsgeschichte
* This essay began its life in discussions following two sections on Alltagsgeschichte at the
2003 meeting of the German Studies Association, and we gratefully acknowledge the other
participants in that exchange: Belinda Davis, Geoff Eley, Peter Fritzsche, Mark Landsman,
Nathan Stoltzfus, and Dorothee Wierling. In addition, we would like to thank Seth Koven, Moritz
Follmer, Shannon Jackson, Steven Ostovich, Clancy Martin, and K. Scott Baker for subsequently
helping us to formulate our ideas.
1 Andreas Daum, German Historiography in Transatlantic Perspective: Interview with Hans-
Ulrich Wehler, German Historical Institute Bulletin 26 (Spring 2000), http://www.ghi-dc.org/

bulletin26S00/b26wehler.html (December 30, 2002).
2 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI,
2005).
3 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), 12. Eley, A
Crooked Line, 5253.
The Journal of Modern History 80 (June 2008): 358 378

2008 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2008/8002-0005$10.00
All rights reserved.
History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter 359
emerged from the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, in which new social
movements found their political and academic voices. The particularly heated
debates in West Germany that questioned the validity of this new historical
approach cannot be severed from the peculiarities of German historiography.
Working in the shadow of National Socialism and its genocidal policies, historians
of Germany have for nearly half a century debated the ongoing relevance of a
Sonderweg, a unique path, in Germany history that might explain the Nazi rise to
power.4
The German social science historians who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s
saw their approach as an improvement over a historicist tradition they rejected.
They focused on structure and process, eschewing the subjective experience of
individual actors. According to one practitioner, the explanatory power of his-
torical science gained thereby; it became keener and more intellectually honest
and learned to access the depths of historical truth that had previously been
locked.5 Challenging the first postWorld War II German historical work that
saw National Socialism as a momentary catastrophe in German national devel-
opment,6 these historians instead posited a longer genealogy that derived from
Germanys failed nineteenth-century modernization and the continued dominance
of conservative, authoritarian politics in the twentieth century.7
By the mid-1980s, Alltagsgeschichte provoked a heated debate among these
historians. In a bitter clash at their annual national conference, the reigning
members of the German historical profession questioned the very legitimacy of
this everyday-life approach, especially as its practitioners turned their attentions to
the Nazi period.8 Those leading historians whose revisionist scholarship in the
1960s had battled historicist apologies for the recent German past now denounced
scholars willing to look at ordinary life under the Nazis, accusing them of
trivializing the regimes crimes.9 In a political environment where the Nazi past
remained very close to the public surface, this mere historiographic debate
4 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, How German Is It? German History 24, no. 1 (2006): 12226.
David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York, 1984). Forum (interview with
Blackbourn and Eley), German History 22, no. 2 (2004): 229 45.
5 Jurgen Kocka, Zuruck zur Erzahlung? Pladoyer fur historische Argumentation, Geschichte
und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 395 408, here 403.

6 Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: The Social and Historical Influences which
Led to the Rise and Ruin of Hitler and Germany, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Boston, 1969).
7 For a succinct summary, see Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From
Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover and London, 2005), 6577.
8 Geoff Eley, Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the
Politics of the Everydaya New Direction for German Social History? Journal of Modern
History 61, no. 2 (1989): 297343, and foreword to The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing
Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Ludtke, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ,
1995), viixi; Carola Lipp, Writing History as Political Culture: Social History versus Alltags-
geschichte; a German Debate, Storia della Storiographia 17 (1990): 66 99; Eve Rosenhaft,
History, Anthropology, and the Study of Everyday Life: A Review Article, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 29, no. 1 (January 1987): 99 105.
9 See the transcript of the colloquium held at the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte in Munich on
November 17, 1983: Alltagsgeschichte der NS-Zeit: Neue Perspektive oder Trivialisierung?
Kolloquien des Instituts fur Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 1984).
360 Steege, Bergerson, Healy, and Swett
achieved remarkable bitterness. The more established historians vigorously de-

fended the new orthodoxy of West German social science history and succeeded
in limiting the career options of dissenters in the hierarchical German historical
profession.
To us, first encountering these vitriolic exchanges in our graduate student
readings, it was not the everyday-life historians examination of ordinary life
during the Nazi era but rather the confident language of structural history that
betrayed a brutality. We had never known a cardboard person who lived life as
class interest. To adopt for the study of twentieth-century Central Europe a
methodology that disregarded human experience in search of more profound
structure and process eerily (though unintentionally) replicated on paper the
violence of the recent past it sought to explain. Erasing people did not seem to be
a fruitful starting point for understanding a German century that was, in large
measure, about erasing people.
As historians writing well after the cultural turn, we are highly cognizant of
the necessarily limited coherence of any historical explanation, but we also
confront the dilemma that the fragmentation of historical narratives has made the
histories that professional historians produce increasingly irrelevant beyond the
academy.10 For even the most sophisticated general readers, much of the best
recent scholarship has lost its bite, serving rather as fodder for those looking to
condemn postmodernism for its cultural relativism. Compared to the social
history of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there is now little obvious interplay
between the focus and methodology of historical scholarship and social and
political engagement more generally. For historians seeking a voice that can
resonate beyond academic discourse, the writing and interpretation of German
historywhich continues to matter in explicitly public ways offers one produc-
tive example.11 The point is not to suggest that all national histories have the same
skeletons in their historical closets. Rather, we can use the still very public
wrestling with the implications of these German pastspersonal and collec-
tiveas an occasion to clarify the blurred and uncomfortable analytic lines of
everyday life that may not be as starkly drawn in other cases: between complicity
and resistance, between the opportunity for and the futility of ethical action in the
face of ruthless violence.
Building on Alltagsgeschichtes efforts to confront these ambiguities in the
midst of actual human practice, its transplanted American version offers one way
for historians both to wrestle with the conceptual challenges posed by cultural
history and to engage the political challenges of social historyabove all, by
focusing their attentions on human actors (including historians). Removed from
the particularly German political pressures of the earlier debates on Alltagsge-
schichte, its second chapter confronts methodological dilemmas that matter for
any historian trying (to take on Geoff Eleys challenge) to write relevant history
10 Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past (Princeton, NJ, 2004).
11 One need only consider the 2006 decision by the German novelist and Nobel laureate,
Gunter Grass, to out his membership in the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old volunteer.
that informs and is informed by politics.12 The writing of German history has been
characterized by a remarkably productive trans-Atlantic discourse in which En-
glish and German-speaking historians play complementary roles. At the same
time, the vibrancy of this international exchange perhaps conceals some level of
isolation as well: the internal stakes of twentieth-century German history have
been so high that it often seemed less critical to move beyond these German
provinces into other historiographies topical, geographic, or theoretical terrain.
This essay seeks to define everyday-life history more precisely in the hope of
suggesting how an occasionally provincial historiography can nonetheless speak
powerfully to the theoretical center of the discipline.
The four authors of this article are all historians of German-speaking Central
Europe. As graduate students, we turned to Alltagsgeschichte in order to wrestle
with (if hardly to master) the problem of a shattered German past.13 Yet the
existing historical scholarship on everyday life did not readily lend itself to
singular definitionand it still does not. To some practitioners, Alltagsgeschichte
revealed the microphysics of power not detectable through study of society,14
the unofficial relations of power15 that undermine structural processes for which
individuals matter little except in summation. To others, the parameters of the
everyday encompassed everyday interactions that in some way involved the
state, though these interactions rather than the states authority served as the
operative component.16 Alf Ludtkes 1989 edited volume Alltagsgeschichte came
closest to articulating a manifesto for us, but it certainly provided no formula for
doing the work.17 In this sense, Alltagsgeschichte practices what it preaches; it is
not a reified thing but an approach that only exists through practicethat is,
through being adopted and tried out.
Having all tried out this approach in our own work, we have identified several
features common to many everyday-life histories. Such histories locate stories in
particular lived realities; they emphasize the agency of human actors in their daily
lives; and they dwell in the stories of these individuals as a way to narrate that
history. Alltagsgeschichte is certainly not unique in its application of these
techniques of ethnographic-historical interpretation, but we believe nonetheless
that it is their particular combination that makes everyday-life history a critical,
polemical, humanistic, and distinct mode of historical inquiry. We do not wish to
discount the utility of other historical approaches in answering different kinds of
12 Eley, A Crooked Line, xiii, 5.

13 Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past.
14 Philipp Sarasin, Arbeit, SpracheAlltag: Wozu noch Alltagsgeschichte? WerkstattGe-
schichte 15 (1996): 72 85.

15 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I
Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 5.

16 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times; Soviet Russia
in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), 3; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil (New York, 1963); Michael R. Ebner, The Fascist Archipelago: Political
Internment, Exile, and Everyday Life in Mussolinis Italy, 1926 43 (Ph.D. diss., Columbia
University, 2004).
17 Ludtke, ed., History of Everyday Life, German as Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion
historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt and New York, 1989).
questions, nor do we claim to employ the only historical approach to take seriously
historical actors humanity. As four of the authors contributing to the second
chapter of everyday-life history, we believe that it has the potential to make
several significant contributions to historical criticism contributions that were
not always intended as such by its German inventors but that were latent in its
practice.
We want to encourage these strategies by making them explicit. Through
integrative interpretations of the seemingly transparent practices of daily life,
Alltagsgeschichte emphasizes history as a human product, acknowledging human
beings limitations in but also their responsibility for making their own history. In
the process, everyday life as such becomes a phenomenon worthy of serious
historical reflection, research, and analysis. A la Joan Scott, the everyday is a
category both of analysis and of human experience.18 But it is not parochial. The
history of everyday life draws explicit causal connectionsin all their contradic-
tory tensions between the processes of the microhistorical context and the
metanarratives of macrohistory. Moreover, our focus on their everyday com-
pels us in turn to reflect on our own: to make more explicit the connections
between historians and their subjects and to interrogate the ways in which
historians are also agents in everyday life, making and not just writing history.
Historical characters do not simply move through continuities and ruptures of their
own accord: they provide a context, and offer an encouraging array of options, for
the historians actions as well.19 Taken together, the work of the historian of
everyday life is thus never just about those persons in the past but alsoand in an
explicitly critical fashionabout all of us in the present.
The history of everyday life achieves spatial integration neither in cross-cultural
comparison nor in simple summation but by theorizing the organic relationships
between phenomena in these many everydays.20 It achieves temporal integration
not by reducing history either to an accounting for the current world or to utopian
visions of alternate universes but by demonstrating pragmatic options through
which ordinary people may shape their present. In effect, our recasting of this
strategy of everyday-life history respectfully removes this protest epistemology
from its original context (the new social movements of the 1960s in Germany) and
applies it more universally as an epistemological strategy for critical history in the
twenty-first century. Alltagsgeschichte is not unique in its application of many of
these epistemologies; but we are convinced that the story of German Alltagsge-
schichte can speak to historians of other times and places who are concerned with
the practical and theoretical challenges of writing macrohistory, microhistory, or
something in between.21
18 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
19 Harry Harootunian, Historys Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of
Everyday Life (New York, 2000), 2122.
20 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991);
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographics: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
(London, 1989); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, 1973).
21 James J. Sheehan, The AHA and Its Publics, Part I, Perspectives 43, no. 2 (February
I. PLACE
Geoff Eley has written that everyday-life historians creat[e] a third space
between the older institutional accounts of labor history and the structural ap-
proaches to industrialization and working-class formation preferred by social
science historians. It is not surprising, then, that these historians have looked for
new spaces, both literal and metaphoric, in which to stage their investigations:
households, streets, neighborhoods, bars, and recreational spaces, among oth-
ers.22 Early practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte were also responding to non-
German scholars who explored the political potential and communal identities
created by men and women coming together in public places for a common cause.
While the work of Natalie Zemon Davis and E. P. Thompson on crowds has been
criticized for undervaluing the tensions and power struggles that likely existed
within reformation-era France and industrializing Britain, respectively, their stud-
ies did recognize the importance of location in determining the identity of the
group, the will to collective action, and the responses of external forces.23 For us
they also point to the ways in which locations are ultimately social in nature: the
product of human labor, gestures, and interactions.24 We are interested in the
appropriation of places: how humans adapt, engage, shape, and experience these
places.
In Richard Evanss study of undercover police reports on working-class pubs in
Hamburg in the two decades preceding World War I, we learn that though
authorities assumed the pubs were hotbeds of social democratic oratory, educa-
tion, and conspiracy, these Kneipen, not surprisingly, served also as sites of social
interaction. In fact, the patrons sought out these sites as refuges from social
democratic proscriptions against certain activities, such as gambling.25 These
workers did not challenge the police to read their actions as provocatively as did
those who took to the streetsrather, they were seeking a place beyond the reach
of police surveillance and its interpretive gaze. An undercover agents decision to
try to enter these locations, which the police saw as political sites precisely
because pubs ostensibly remained closed to nonworkers, reflected the authorities
recognition of the spatial component of their efforts to determine the sites
significance. Disguised so as to mark themselves as belonging, agents entered the
2005), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0502/0502pre1.cfm, and The AHA

and Its Publics, Part II, Perspectives 43, no. 3 (March 2005), http://www.historians.org/
perspectives/issues/2005/0503/0503pre1.cfm.
22 Geoff Eley, foreword to The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies,
1890 1960, by Adelheid von Saldern (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), xiii.
23 Suzanne Desan, Crowds, Community and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and
Natalie Zemon Davis, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 4771.
24 David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York, 2003); J. E. Malpas, Place and
Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge and New York, 1999); Lefebvre, The
Production of Space; see also Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History
(Berkeley, 1997).
25 Richard J. Evans, Kneipengesprache im Kaiserreich: Die Stimmungsberichte der Ham-
burger Politischen Polizei 18921914 (Reinbek, 1989), esp. 13150.
pubs armed with questions formed on the outside by their own necessarily
circumscribed vision of the locations they sought to understand.
Common stops in the daily routine of local inhabitants (markets, assembly halls,
schools, transportation hubs) hold a variety of meanings that are often in play
simultaneously, though the particular mix depends on the nature of the event and
the individuals present. An underground rail station in 1920s Berlin could be a
social meeting point, a neighborhood border, an economic node, a violent political
hotspot, a gateway to the outside for young people, a point of entry for commuters
or state authorities.26 Understanding how and why neighbors ascribed certain
meanings to local sites enables us to make sense of how communities functioned.
What might appear to be a public location, such as a park or a rail station, may in
fact be so central to a neighborhood culture due to its myriad uses that residents
consider it to be semiprivate, worthy of pride and even of defensive action to ward
off others.
Close study of a physical place can also shed light on how the concept of
community was imagined, and functioned, in the past. For example, reading events
at a marketplace in a period of food shortage can reveal how actors marshal the most
abstract concepts (state obligations to citizens, ethnic and religious concepts of be-
longing) in the most mundane practicefor instance, that of selling or buying eggs.
In World War I Vienna, buyers and sellers imagined a community of sufferers and
deemed any individual who appeared to be seeking advantage to be an enemy of the
community. The contours of community changed by the day and even in the course
of a single transaction.27 In this instance, where the notion of community was fleeting,
the physical space of the market offers the historian a frame, a chance to hit the
pause button and to investigate highly politicized claims of the fluid everyday. It
also enables us to understand the everyday locations in which larger, imagined
communities are constituted or dismantled.28
Thus place must figure prominently in any effort to define power relationships
or unravel individual or group identities. On the one hand, we must ask who could
get in, and who only had the opportunity to look in from outside. Even if those on
the outside held the power to repress those present or remove them from the scene,
their ability to evaluate successfully what the location meant depended not only on
their ability to gain access but also on how they took up their positions.29 On the
other hand, we would also suggest that the greatly expanded and accelerated
mobility in the modern period has somewhat paradoxically brought to our atten-
tion how much peoples ability to recognize things and even other people as out
26 Pamela E. Swett, Political Networks, Rail Networks: Public Transportation and Neigh-
bourhood Radicalism in Weimar Berlin, in The City and the Railway in Europe, ed. Ralf Roth
and Marie-Noelle Polino (Aldershot, 2003), 22136, and Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of
Radicalism, 1929 1933 (New York, 2004).
27 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life
in World War I (Cambridge, 2004).

28 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London, 1983); Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past.

29 For example, Klaus Neukrantz, Barrikaden am Wedding: Der Roman einer Strae aus den
Berliner Maitagen 1929 (1930; repr. [Berlin, 1970]), 31. See also Wendy Joy Darby, Landscape
and Identity (Oxford, 2000).
of place, in turn, drives their perceptions and understandings about their own
locations in a broader sense. Recognizing peoples agency with regard to place
also helps us to acknowledge that they locate themselves as individuals and/or
members of a group. Getting away from past traditions that sought to delineate a
unified class identity, more recent studies of workers emphasize the movement of
men and women within individual localities and conclude that fragmentation and
social dislocation are central to understanding individual and group identities
identities that tend to be as mobile as those who, at various points and times, claim
them for their own. As Helmut Walser Smith has noted, a general trend in the
social sciences has been to reorient the social life of workers betwixt and
between rather than as fixed to any single social identity.30
In like manner, urban and regional histories increasingly focus on common
experiences of movement. A respect for the fleeting quality of presence in the
most recent past must figure prominently in our efforts to elaborate the histories
of particular everydays. Each day the modern man or woman visits a remarkable
array of places. The large collection of sites and the potentially short amount of
time spent in each does not, however, minimize the influence that these specific
locations may exert on the actions taken within them or, perhaps even more
significantly, the extent to which the historical actors moving in and out seek to
appropriate these sites, even if only for a moment. Retaining a sense for this series
of fleeting encounters forces the historian to remain aware of the multiple iden-
tities and multiple behaviors in play, all operating according to these actors
dynamic inhabitation of each of these places. Keeping location central reminds us
of the intersubjective nature of identity formation and the possibilities of practice
that are enacted on each occasion of entering or exiting. Yet if ones place is
always reconstituted through human interaction, then one is always entering and
exiting new places: modern life is comprised of fleeting encounters. Upon enter-
ing, individuals pick up cues from the symbols they encounter and combine this
information with what they already carry with them: their sense of purpose
entering the place, their travails in getting there, their preconceived notions of how
to read the signs met on arrival. All these immediate clues and past memories
combine anew in the present, in the everydayness of lifepositing to the historical
actor myriad potential decisions about his or her next step and thus demanding that
he or she assume a position, a stance from which to move on. Cultivating a certain
kind of self presumes in turn a certain kind of place in which that self can
potentially thrive. The physical place entered may be as seemingly straightforward
as a bus, courtyard, or park, but the experience of entering any location varies by
individual and varies for that individual on every occasion, forcing a constant
30 Helmut Walser Smith, The Boundaries of the Local, in Saxony in German History, ed.
James Retallack (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 68. See also Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and
Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850 1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1996); David F. Crew,
Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860 1914 (New York, 1979); Steve Hochstadt,
Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820 1989 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999). Outside of
Germany: Maurizio Gribaudi, Itineraires ouvriers: Espaces et groupes sociaux a Turin aux debut
du XXe siecle (Paris, 1987).
renegotiation of the physical conditions, the possibilities for action, and the nature
of that place itself.
As historians, we are left not only with ever-changing individual identities but also
with an increasingly complex vision of a social, political, and cultural landscape
continuously under construction.31 If thirty residents of a neighborhood show up for a
tenants meetingsome coming directly from work, some coming from cooking
dinner or a variety of other tasksand enter the assembly hall, they may enter still
feeling harassed by the days events, or happy to enter the room in which they
celebrated a recent holiday, or intimidated by the hierarchical setup of the chairs or by
party emblems on the walls. The actions that we then assess as emanating from the
meeting are by necessity a product of these multiple voices. Some voices will certainly
dominate others, but this domination, and resistance to it, takes shape in the context of
conditions and intentions uniquely formulated and reshaped in this particular place.
That location is never solely local: it involves many outside forces, from cosmo-
politan ideologies and national politics to global processes and environmental condi-
tions. The historian of the everyday is all too aware of those larger phenomena but
nonetheless is primarily concerned with how they are implemented and appropriated
on the level of everyday practice. That is, we treat place not in terms of spatial
proximity but in terms of historical actors unique ability to access and stage multiple
frames of reference (both symbolic and material) within and across the particular
location of a historical event.
Whether we as scholars are approaching societies driven by capitalism or a
planned economy, liberal democracy or a racial worldview, we must take into
account individuals who face in the everyday a flood of voices manifested
through the visual symbols, discourses, and memories that are competing for
predominance in any given place. In order to inhabit those places, these individ-
uals must take on those voices, an effort that demands all sorts of negotiations
leading to consent or complicity, rejection or resistance, self-cultivation or mak-
ing do in a variety of other ways.32 Close study of the everyday-life aspects of
murder trials in Wilhelmine Berlin has shown not only how the schedule, layout,
and public accessibility of the courtroom influenced justice but also how the
unruly behavior of judges and trial lawyers gradually liberalized the justice system
in spite of an official orthodoxy of conservatism that pervaded it.33 By focusing on
the locations of everyday life in ethnographic terms,34 Alltagsgeschichte confronts
us with the limits of our ability to explain what these individuals intentions mean
precisely; but it also enables us to draw an arguably unprecedented amount of
attention to what they do and how they do it (their practices).
This way of interpreting place also highlights the larger consequences of daily
activities. The everyday is not found only down below, and indeed it is wrong
31 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990);
Malpas, Place and Experience; Harvey, Paris.

32 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 29 42.
33 Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaisers
Berlin (Cambridge, 2004).

34 Hans Medick, Missionaries in the Rowboat? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a
Challenge to Social History, in Ludtke, The History of Everyday Life, 4171.
to believe it to exist solely as an alternative to and distinct from high politics, big
structures, and grand historical forces. The structures of cultural regulation and
political expropriation are embedded in everyday life. By focusing on the indi-
vidual subjective actors creative potential in the world, the historian of everyday
life can integrate the micro and the macro, cause and consequence, and can both
use and undermine the myths of everyday life.
The problem of the everyday is that its mythic qualities allow latent challenges
to the smooth surface of the ordinary to pass by unnoticed. Our solution is to take
those same myths as the object of investigation. That means, for historians,
interrogating the very distinction between our analytic categories of micro- and
macrohistory, structure and agencyas if there could ever be a history of the one
without the other. Those myths of the ordinary both facilitate the imposition
of forms of hegemony and provide elbow room for the expression of nonconfor-
mity. From this perspective, the everyday as location is not an empty category but
a particular kind of place constantly reconditioned by the interpolative acts of
those who colonize it.35 At the heart of Alltagsgeschichte stands a corresponding
interpretive process by which its practitioners seek to understand the production of
history as an ongoing series of negotiations and contestations through which both
historical actors and historians reconstitute the landscapes through which they
move, engage the people they encounter, and make sense of their stories.
In its scope the history of everyday life certainly takes inspiration from the
integrative depth of the histoire totale of the Annales school; but the history of
everyday life plays out on the radically smaller scale of microhistory. Brad
Gregory poses a deceptively simple epistemological question about the value of
the microscope: When we examine something in great detail and at close range,
do we understand it better?36 Theorists from a variety of academic disciplines
have taken the steam out of this sort of question by casting doubt on the existence
of the stable, coherent, knowable whole. Yet the realization that the big picture is
cracked by no means relieves everyday-life historians of the need to build out
from their stories and put them into an analytic context. In its integration of the
micro- and the macrohistorical, the history of everyday life both complements and
inverts the new world history. Instead of using exemplary local contexts to
illustrate global processes, it frames particular locations as the lived origins of
these events.37 The systems that presumably govern the world are not alien to
everyday life but immanent in it; the living of everyday life is itself part and parcel
35 Casey, The Fate of Place; Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Malpas, Place and Experi-
ence; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, 1996); Soja, Postmodern Geographies.
36 Brad Gregory, Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life, History
and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 100.

37 Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip
II, trans. San Reynolds (New York, 1972); Ross E. Dunn, The New World History: A Teachers
Companion (Boston, 2000); Michael Geyer, Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in Theory
and Practice, Lecture at Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, September 30,
2006, Pittsburgh; Carlo Ginzburg, Was ist Microgeschichte? Geschichtswerkstatt 6 (1985):
48 52; Jill Lepore, Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biogra-
phy, Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129 44; Matti Peltonen, Clues, Margins,
of the process by which both structure and ideology are reproduced and trans-
formed.38 Acknowledging this embeddedness, Alltagsgeschichte takes as its alpha
and omega the subjective experiences and actual deeds of ordinary people. It does
so not in the sense that it ignores the elite in a populist preference for the masses,
the group in a solipsistic preference for the individual, or the constraining in a
romantic adoration of human autonomy. Rather, it treats all collective phenomena
as the result of individual agency and all peopleincluding the eliteas ordinary
individuals contributing to the topography of everyday life in their capacity as
members of their collective world. It is in this sense that we understand Alltags-
geschichte as a humanizing impulse.
Recognizing that we share this humanity with the subjects of our historical
research, we must acknowledge that our scholarly habits are not qualitatively
distinct from other everyday practices. We must be self-reflexive about the degree
to which our scholarship might be shaped by the same everyday myths: for
instance, the idea that ordinary people are powerless to alter the collective world
and are therefore not responsible for its inhumanity. Alltagsgeschichte needs to
employ academic epistemologies as both tools and objects of historical analysis.39
This inversion is not a misguided attempt to reduce history to historiography and
to marginalize the real.40 It is an effort, rather, to recognize the violence of the
real both to accuse it and to uncover its potential for alternatives to that
violence by exploring its contradictions.
II. AGENCY
Historical actorsand historiansproduce and mis/appropriate their everyday

life through rituals: naturalized behaviors associated with such diverse phenomena
as producing goods in factories, street pavements in cities, identities for inhabit-
ants, meanings for signs, and so on. To self-consciously recognize their and our
roles in these multifaceted productive actions represents at once the power and
uncertainty of Alltagsgeschichte. For earlier anthropologists who spent their time
analyzing simple societies, rituals were the defining moments that allowed them
to gain insight into the ways in which other peoples made sense of the world and
of their places in it. Their definitions of rite, ritual, and their assorted variations
extend from explicit and conscious productions of meaning (ritual as a sacred or
religious act) to repetitive gestures that formalize or even trivialize custom, social
convention, or habit (ritual as an unthinking, reflexive action).41 These extraordi-
and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research, History and Theory 40, no. 3
(2001): 34759.
38 John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder,
CO, 1992).
39 Following White, Metahistory, 36 38; for an excellent example, see Ross, Fast Cars.
40 Gertrud Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society
(New York, 1994).

41 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ritual. See particularly Pierre Bourdieu,
nary events (rites of passage, ritual battles, etc.) temporarily superseded the limits
of the mundane (everyday) world as a way to create and/or validate identities or
explanations necessary to imagine the everydays coherence. By definition, rituals
took place at sitesthe sacred grove, the initiation hutthat were extraordinary,
set apart from the ordinary in order to refer to it; places from which one then
returned with the status, knowledge, and legitimacy to act with authority again in
daily life.
While anthropologists have long since moved beyond simplistic notions of
rituals as mystical/magical codes that explain primitive cultures, discussions of
political ritual in modern mass culture adopt similar notions, seeing political
rituals as a means to fool, manipulate, and/or control a credulous (mass) public.42
In our efforts to make sense of these processes, historians face the challenge that,
as William Sewell writes, symbolic systems have no more than a thin coher-
ence, which emerges as a product of power and struggles for power.43 Self-
conscious efforts to deploy certain ritual practices to create certain desired mean-
ings (adulthood, political party membership, neighborliness) cannot escape the
real locations and real people necessary to carry them out. If the ethnographic
analysis called for beyond the cultural turn demands that we extend our critical
theory from dialectics generated by the mode of production to the contested
production of cultural meanings (i.e., schemata), Alltagsgeschichte also asserts the
need to assess critically the physicality and materiality of the locations of and
participants in ritual acts (human and object resources).44 Even sacred spaces exist
not in an alternative, abstract universe but as part of the places through which
actual bodies physically move.
In his analysis of rites of passage among the Ndembu people of south-central
Africa, Victor Turner described how participants in the midst of these rituals
found themselves in a liminal state, a betwixt-and-between-ness in which they
were simultaneously part and not part of their societies. Initiates into adulthood
found themselves temporarily placed between childhood and adulthood, permitted
in that time and space to engage in behaviors that were not normally acceptable
to the regular moral order. It was only by means of these normally transgressive
acts that they were able to claim full membership in the adult community.45
Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977); Lefebvre, The Produc-
tion of Space; Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY,
1967), and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY, 1969).
42 Quotation from Victor Turner, Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols,
ed. Edith Turner (Tucson, AZ, and London, 1992), 52; Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual
in Industrial Society, the Soviet Case (Cambridge, 1981).
43 William Sewell Jr., The Concept(s) of Culture, in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New
Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999), 52, 57.
44 William Sewell Jr., A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation, Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992): 129.

45 Turner, Blazing the Trail, 153; more generally, The Forest of Symbols, 93110. Paul Steege,
Finding the There, There: Local Space, Global Ritual, and Early Cold War Berlin, in Earth
Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings, ed. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham, MD,
2004), 15572.
Although temporary, this alternative form of social organizationwhat Turner

calls anti-structure46permits a momentary confrontation with and challenge to
fundamental social coherence. As such it offers the potential for a critical reimag-
ining of the ways in which the individual moves through the places of his or her
daily life. Turner seems to suggest that, after the return to structure, these same
rituals provide the symbolic means to anchor the (new) adult into the strictures of
society: that is, they enable a return to hegemony. But the fact is that both structure
and antistructure, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are part and parcel of the
same everyday life. In the context of mass politics, if the crowd offers ritualized
means for individuals to take their potential power outside, challenging hege-
mony, the large-scale rally also offers a set of ritualized displays through which
individuals can disappear into a new hegemony of the totalitarian masses.47
Hopeful totalitarians the world over have tried to establish hegemony in ev-
eryday life by making the interpersonal political.48 But the historian of everyday
life undermines comfortable dichotomies of power and resistance by considering
the ways in which ordinary people also participate in crafting new forms of
hegemony. For instance, rather than imagining the cold war as a global conflict by
means of which hegemonic superpowers imposed their control over a city like
Berlin, consider how the very ability to assert that power depends on everyday
behaviors that escape not only the control but even the notice of the presumptive
hegemons. The 1949 western victory produced by an Anglo-American airlift
that overcame a total Soviet blockade of West Berlin depended on unruly Ber-
liners continuing to practice the black marketeering and deal making that had
enabled them to survive since the last months of the Second World War. True to
the myths of everyday life, these same unruly Berliners retrospectively tended to
explain their survival only in terms of the airlift, arguably to preserve their
autonomy in a polarized international system that so circumscribed their lives. It
is in the interaction between both kinds of deal making that we find the productive
power of an everyday-life history approach.49
The history of everyday life works closely with indigenous categories of
ordinary experience but must also engage them critically. As human beings, our
collective perception of everyday life seems to depend on our mutual assertions of
its normalcy. Extraordinary events are thus shocking inasmuch as they interrupt
these claims to ordinary life. On closer inspection, however, the extraordinary
reinforces the ordinary through a ritual process that restores order at its end,
though rarely in precisely the same form as before. Thanks to that ritual process,
both conformity and nonconformity often contribute to hegemony without losing
their inherent role in preserving it. There is also a hyperordinary, however, in
46 Turner, Blazing the Trail, 133.

47 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1979); Elias Canetti, Crowds
and Power (New York, 1995).
48 Araz Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York, 2003), 273; Slavenka
Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, 1993), 26. See also
Ross, Fast Cars.
49 Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946 1949 (Cambridge and
New York, 2007).
which ritual itself figures as a category of historical being (and explanation) that
allows the individual to recognize and make the most of his or her role in
sustaining or transforming the social structures in which he or she moves. In the
hyperordinary, lucid awareness about everyday life enables one to act within the
constraints of everyday life to comment on those constraints, perhaps even to alter
them. Yet the myths of normalcy that veil everyday life also protect the ordinary
person from retribution for his or her creative manipulation of the same registers
of experience we historians seek to examine critically.50
By deconstructing rituals simultaneous potential to stage and to undermine
multiple meanings, everyday-life history underscores ritual practice as an implic-
itly political project.51 This multivocality becomes quite explicit for the
Depression-era workers Eve Rosenhaft describes as practicing cashless or
proletarian shopping in Berlin. Should we see their decision simply to take food
or other goods as spontaneous actions of hungry men, as purely criminal exploits,
or as political ones?52 The answer is: all of the above. Like the organizing of
scarce materials that allowed many generations of Germans to survive hard
times,53 Organisieren replicates the parodic slippage between the limits on and
possibilities for maneuverability inherent in ritual.
To be sure, oppressive circumstances can often seem removed from the very
human beings who engage in them. But even in seemingly grand-scale, abstract,
or impersonal systems of hegemony (capitalism, fascism, communism, patriarchy,
imperialism, etc.) we find human beings acting upon themselves and others: that
is, human beings imbricated in social relationships. More precisely, through a
wide variety of behaviors, individuals hide their claims for status and power in the
nature of everyday life, the imperatives of existing authorities, the forces of
circumstance: they prefer not to announce themselves as living actors.54 Both
elites and outsiders benefit from disguising the nature of everyday life, as if
ordinary people had no role in shaping it. Their deceptions of self and society
serve as the preconditions for both hegemony and resistance to it; and yet we must
think around these myths if we are to understand the everyday.
To the modern self, the social is a rather abstract concept. When people look for
concrete examples of it, they tend to find them in everyday life: the people with
whom they have regular interactions. For instance, ordinary Germans tried to
50 Harootunian, Historys Disquiet, 5; Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Ordinary Germans in Ex-
traordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004).
51 Eley, Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte. See also Harootunian, Historys
Disquiet; Michael Wildt, Der Traum vom Sattwerden: Hunger und Protest Schwarzmarkt und
Selbsthilfe in Hamburg 19451948 (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 1986), 9; and Rainer Gries, Die
Rationengesellschaft: Versorgungskampf und Vergleichsmentalitat: Leipzig, Munchen und Koln
nach dem Kriege (Munster, 1991), 13.
52 Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence,
1929 1933 (Cambridge, 1983), 5354.

53 Manfred J. Enssle, Five Theses on German Everyday Life after World War II, Central
European History 26, no. 1 (1993): 119.

54 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York, 1977); Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York, 1988); Eve Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990); Butler, Gender Trouble.
divorce the Jewish Question and the actual terror policies executed by the Nazi
regime in the 1930s from their actual Jewish neighbors; but it was precisely in the
moment when they encountered a Jewish person on their own street that this
abstract problem both as a question of public policy and as an ethical dilem-
ma became disruptively concrete.55 If we were to reduce our investigation of the
problem of social relations solely to the study of aggregate groups and institu-
tionsthat is, to macrohistorywe would fail to understand that critical moment
of enactment: when ideas (here, about Jewish neighbors) become deeds (vis-a-vis
that Jewish neighbor), whether one hurts her, helps him, ignores her, and so on.
Essentially, Alltagsgeschichte poaches this ethnographic approach from anthro-
pology, but the payoff for historians lies in following that story to its conse-
quences, as deeds become habits and habits shape policy, events, experience, and
memoryfor instance, as symbolic murder lays the everyday foundation for
physical genocide. We repress those narratives of the lifeworld, deprecating them
as just everyday life, precisely because it is here that those ordinary people hold
the lions share of responsibility for making that collective world.56 Alltagsge-
schichte seeks to recover those ritualized, localized behaviors for history precisely
because it is in those microhistorical moments of interaction that history is
actually made.
By analogy, this understanding of social relations deviates from the official
tradition of sociological analysis in which organized social groups are the main
players. Sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls instead for a notion of sociality.
Generated through minuscule rituals, sociality refers to the temporary, uncertain
microgroupings at the level of lived reality in whose presence we feel a sense of
solidarity. Ranging from chitchat in cafes to routinized gestures of greetings, from
solidarities expressed in e-mails to those practiced in sexual liaisons, these prox-
emics, as Maffesoli calls them, are necessarily temporary, ad hoc, and unstable.
They are also underappreciated and ubiquitous. Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche,
Maffesoli calls on us to take imperfect, disruptive, unruly behavior as the starting
point for our analysis, whether we seek it at beaches crammed with holiday-
makers or in department stores thronged with howling consumers. These
fleeting forms of sociality constitute the everyday foundations of power, which
Maffesoli calls puissance: a will to live that shapes both the informal and formal
institutions of societyand therefore can and does shape history.57 Proxemics do
not just help constitute the rule but also facilitate the ruse that can enable ordinary
people to challenge authority behind the veil of a prank. In the way that it evokes
sentiment through spontaneous social bonding, a conspiracy of mockery tempo-
rarily unites one with others, whether they are Depression-era workers organizing
55 Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Eigensinn, Ethik und die nationalsozialistische Reformatio
vitae, in Sehnsucht nach Nahe: Interpersonellen Kommunikation in Deutschland seit dem 19.
Jahrhundert, ed. Moritz Follmer (Stuttgart, 2004).
56 Bergerson, Ordinary Germans. Till van Rahden, Words and Actions: Rethinking the Social
History of German Antisemitism, Breslau, 1870 1914, German History 18, no. 4 (2000):
41338.
57 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society
(London, 1996), quotes at 28, 31; cf. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York, 2000).
food or Depression-era Aryans greeting their neighbors with Heil Hitler! In

the rush of puissance that comes with the collective recognition of the self, they
express a stubborn aloofness from the game of power and politics. Maffesoli
hoped with these new terms to get closer to the nature of social relations in the
postmodern period, yet we find historical actors of earlier eras building similar,
fleeting relationships from which historians can try to discern how self and society
were constituted in the past.
Alltagsgeschichte has made a significant contribution to this interdisciplinary
discussion about nonconformity, at the heart of which rests the almost untrans-
latable concept of Eigensinn. At once stubbornness, willfulness, and an assertion
of self-will (Eigen-Sinn), eigensinn denotes a type of unruly behavior that is
potentially liberating for the individual but simultaneously continues to interact
with the structures of power. For Alf Ludtke, eigensinn served as self-liberating
parody, prankishness without revolutionary potential.58 Thomas Lindenberger
encouraged historians to examine the permanent interrelation and mutual inter-
penetration of Herrschaft and Eigen-Sinn, of the imperatives of political dom-
ination and the interests, needs and commitments inherent to the way people tried
to live their lives.59 One can also view eigensinn as a structure of everyday life
that has revolutionary possibilities to undermine old forms of authority, perhaps
even to create new ones. In diverse contexts, we have all attempted to point to the
eigensinnig ways in which ordinary people participate in the construction of new
forms of hegemony: total war, Nazi Revolution, and cold war.60
Our hope for future research in the field of everyday life is that it will move
further in these directions. Reconstructing the sometimes revolutionary contribu-
tions to world politics by ordinary people requires some patience and a dose of
creativity. It requires of its practitioners that they strive to stake out analytically
the connections between micro- and macrohistories. Yet it also offers a way to
avoid retribution for our hubris: by stubbornly abiding by the particularities of that
everyday. By constructing historical narratives in which real people made use of
the chance to shape their present, we draw out the human consequences of those
actions. The most formidable task confronting the historian of everyday life
remains, then, to find the means to tell that integrated story.
III. STORYTELLING
All four of us are historians of Central Europe, trained to ask questions about the
German past. But is the evolution of Alltagsgeschichte really a German story after
all? Some of the original impulse for Alltagsgeschichte came from outside Ger-
many, and its resilience is part of the broad return of storytelling in European
58 Ludtke, History of Everyday Life, 31314.

59 Thomas Lindenberger, Everyday History: New Approaches to the History of Post-War
Germanies, in The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-War German History, ed. Christoph Klessmann
(Oxford, 2001), 5152. See also Lipp, Writing History as Political Culture.
60 Bergerson, Ordinary Germans; Healy, Vienna; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies; Steege,
Black Market.
history. Sarah Maza writes, Storytelling, or in academic parlance narrative, has

returned to the historical discipline with a vengeance.61 Roger Chartier contends
that, in fact, narrative never left; even the structural histories that denied individual
agency used quasi-characters (classes, mentalities, society).62 One could add that
in postmodern narratives, discourses themselves become historical actorsal-
though we certainly underscore our conviction that, ultimately, it is not the
narrative itself but those who create the meanings who have agency. Storytelling
and narrative figure in the writing of Alltagsgeschichte in two ways: using stories
as evidence and writing history in a narrative form. But everyday life history is
neither antiquarian nor merely a retelling of a collection of little stories.
Alf Ludtke presents a story of two women packing clothes at a laundry in Berlin
in 1941 who have a run-in with the manager.63 Sheila Fitzpatrick offers another
workplace situation: that of a young engineer from Leningrad in 1937 who is
furious that the director of his factory does not seem to be taking communism
seriously and denounces him.64 The point is not that such anecdotes are, in Mazas
phrase, rhetorically appealing or, as in the case of the Holocaust, appealing
because of their sublime monstrosity. The story gives us a theater of operation in
which to begin considering what is said or not said, done or not done, in the
universe of possibilities that constitutes the lifeworld of the past. The point is not
to posit stories merely as the method by which historians access the everyday but
rather to recognize howas both category and means of analysisthe shared act
of telling stories helps make visible the mutual agency of historians and the people
they study.
History is not discovered, noted Robert Anchor. It is constructed in and
through the narrative strategies historians adopt, usually intuitively, to communi-
cate their archival findings.65 These narratives constructed by historians are
themselves based on stories we hear from sources. People understand and
remember their lives in terms of stories, writes Sheila Fitzpatrick. These stories
make sense out of the scattered data of ordinary life, providing a context, imposing
a pattern that shows where one has come from and where one is going. We find
commonalities in the serial stories from a particular time. Most people internalize
stories that are common property in a given society at a particular time.66
Fitzpatrick echoes here something that anthropologists and ethnographers recog-
nized earlier than historians: namely, that individuals stories from the same time
and place will often order themselves around master narratives, the plots that
61 Sarah Maza, Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History,
American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (1996): 14931515, here 1493.

62 Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997), 16.

63 Alf Ludtke, People Working: Everyday Life and German Fascism, History Workshop
Journal 50 (2000): 7592.

64 Shelia Fitzpatrick, Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s,
Journal of Modern History 68 (December 1996): 831 66, here 838.

65 Robert Anchor, On How to Kick the History Habit and Discover that Every Day in Every
Way, Things Are Getting Meta and Meta and Meta, History and Theory 40, no. 1 (2001):
104 16, here 107.
66 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 8.
recur insistently within a culture.67 At the same time, individuals construct

similar narratives to make sense of, and cover over, the contradictions in their
behavior as well as the gaps in their memory, in order to narrate a coherent
autobiography.68 The working historian knows that evidence rarely comes in a
nicely packaged story with a clear beginning and end. For example, we find a
record of a court trial but do not have any information on how it was resolved. Or
we learn that a museum exhibition was held, but we do not know who planned it
or who visited it. Indeed, a story is untrustworthy when it is packaged this way:
most notoriously, when it ignores collaboration or exploitation. In either case, we
must interpret one fragment in the context of other fragments. Walter Benjamin
suggests that image, rather than story, is the historians true unit of measure.
History breaks down into images, not into stories, and the issue is to detect the
crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, individual moment.69
To work with fragments requires patience. The historian of everyday life
introduces a story, an anecdote, a paradox, a fragment, an incidentand dwells on
it. In this way of reading, of thinking it through from different angles, of
lingering, the detail becomes the focus of inquiry itself, because in these moments
meaning is made. Both historical actors and historians of everyday life fit small
actions and gestures into their larger contexts. Alf Ludtke paused over how a
mans small actions during a coffee break might relate to the big topic of the
Holocaust. Had, perhaps, the office coffee-break in the Gottingen [Nazi party]
district office anything to do with the unsuccessful attempt of an assistant in the
criminal department (documented in the files) to have a Jewish home, emptied
by the Final Solution of 1942, allocated to himself?70 The time spent in
dwelling stands in inverse relation to the amount of information available about a
historical actor or incident. Sometimes only a last name, a pseudonym, or a faint
sketch of events can be found, and this incompleteness proves less of a liability
than a stimulus to ask questions of and dwell on a source.
Historians of everyday life do not necessarily have less information than
other historiansall history is fragmentary but the explicit acknowledgment of
this fragmentation foregrounds the process of interrogation with which our ac-
counts necessarily begin. Dwelling is a technique of inhabiting the story, filling up
the space in between the fragmentary historical artifacts, to make it into a
recognizable human place.71 An integrative strategy for interpretation, dwelling
allows historians of everyday life to tell a bigger story from a smaller one: for
instance, how ordinary people used rituals such as a coffee break to alter the
meanings of social resources such as a Nazi district office. Even as they asserted
67 Maza, Stories in History, 1495.

68 Bergerson, Ordinary Germans, and Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Das hat das Volk erst gar
nicht mitgekriegt: Erinnerung und Wissen um Barbarei, KFH-Focus 12 (2002): 18 26.
69 Benjamins Arcades Project, cited in Peltonen, Clues, Margins, and Monads, here n. 35.
70 Alf Ludtke, The Historiography of Everyday Life: The Personal and the Political, in
Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth
Stedman Jones (London, 1982), 38 54, here 44.
71 Alltagsgeschichte has antecedents in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger; see Casey, The
Fate of Place, 243 84.
a comfortable distance between their everyday life and Nazi politics, they engaged
in practices with direct consequences for other human beings, such as their Jewish
neighbors.
The texts we use to reconstruct the everyday are often found, or created, in
serial form: a series of court records that all pertain to cases of a certain kind, a
collection of letters of denunciation, a series of oral interviews, a series of petitions
all written to the same body. These will contain all manner of detail about people,
incidents, conflicts, practices. The systematicity of data collection, and the degree
to which we compare one kind of source intertextually to all other available
sources on the same phenomena, gives this research process a veneer of science.
Yet these data points are all fragments in themselves, with more gaps in between
them than coherence. They become a story with causal connections only through
the speculative judgment of the historian. As historians facing our notes, com-
puters, distractions, and deadlines, we select the stories (or cases) that elucidate
something we find significant. We choose a particular fragment to be interpreted,
which entails not choosing some other. Matti Peltonen notes that microhistorians
have aimed for the exceptional typical.72 Lutz Niethammer argues that histori-
ans can best gain insight into everyday life through stories of extraordinary
circumstances when silent normality breaks down.73 Just as historical actors
discover, assemble, and interpret a larger world of fragments around them,
historians of everyday life assemble their casesand this work (of discovery,
assembly, interpretation) remains as much a part of the story as the material with
which they work. It is through narrative that historians, like their subjects, bind
together their experiences of the world into claims about the world.
As with other ways of doing history, the work of everyday-life historians has
been greatly enriched by the turn to representation in history: ways of reading
learned from literary scholars have allowed us to read our sources more subtly.
The work of finding the right words can be the most interpretively powerful part
of writing history, for the fragments historians of everyday life encounter are not
as straightforward as they seem. Even what to call the woman at the Berlin laundry
or the Leningrad engineer, how to place them in a narrating sentence, becomes an
interpretive challenge. Possibilities include (roughly arranged from the modern to
the postmodern) person, individual, actor, figure, agent, subject, or performer,
depending on how much autonomy the historian grants. At this point, some critics
might cry: Gotcha! You thought you had moved away from overly determined and
externally imposed structures but alas, all of the actors in your stories, and all of
their doing and saying, takes place within the grand structure of language.74 For
such critics, the so-called actor is more properly called a subject, and subjects are
constituted through language. But in fact attention to how actors use language,
72 Peltonen, Clues, Margins, and Monads.

73 Lutz Niethammer, Zeroing in on Change: In Search of Popular Experiences in the Industrial
Province in the German Democratic Republic, in Ludtke, History of Everyday Life, 252311,
quote at 279.
74 Sarasin, Arbeit, SpracheAlltag. Compare Ulrike Gleixner, Die Tonart des Unbed-
ingten und die Abwesenheit der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte, WerkstattGeschichte 18

(1997): 83 88.
which meanings they attach to words and phrases, which symbols they con-
sciously or unconsciously draw on to articulate themselves, greatly opens our
field of historical interpretation. This language work can be extremely plea-
surable; it resembles a conversation with someone who does not quite speak
the same language. If historical actors could talk back, of course, they would
correct our misreadings of their articulations; during oral interviews, for
instance, they often do.
Alltagsgeschichte thus has the potential of moving us constructively beyond
both structuralism and postmodernism. It resists the impulse of postmodern
absolutism to kill off the subject completely75as brutal as the structuralist
impulse to erase peopleand explores, accepts, lives within ambiguity and frag-
ments. In advocating dwelling as a scholarly practice, we recognize that language
is powerful, but we do not cede all power to language; historians too are ordinary
people capable of appropriating the language of our sources to tell a version of the
story. By doing so, we get closer in our everyday lives to the reality of theirs.
Hayden White might have characterized Alltagsgeschichte as a style of narra-
tion with radical ideological implicationsit has a whiff of the Left about it. But
it also combines the comic and the satirical. Its stories offer some hope for partial
liberation from the conditions of the real world, and the promise, however quaint,
that actors with agency actually help shape this world; we hope they are also
entertaining. Like the historical actors moving through the everyday worlds we
study, however, we are embedded within circumstances that prefigure our daily
lives as historians. We insist on critiquing those circumstances as if we stood
beyond them and thus express our hope in the possibility of altering them. When
pushed to uncover their own deep and dangerous histories, ordinary people are
perfectly aware of these contradictions: they provide them with a maneuverability
in everyday life that enables them to survive and even challenge modern forms of
Herrschaft. Duplicity, Maffesoli wrote, is what allows us to live.76 It allows
us to act as if we are what we claim to be, to test the limits of the possible. Here
the historian is simply self-consciously analyzing, and making use of, the
self-deceptions inherent in everyday life.
CONCLUSION
Though skeptics still see the everyday as a flimsy category, some believe that
everyday-life history has solidly entered the mainstream of historical writing.
The polemic is passe, writes Alf Ludtke. The conflict of the 1980s resolved
itself. Everyday-life historical perspectives belong to the ensemble of the histor-
ical social sciences, national and international.77 To some degree it has become
trendy for historians to flavor their narratives with tastes of the everydayas
illustration, allusion, anecdote, or jargonwithout engaging or even articulating
75 Compare Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, Image, Music, Text (New York, 1977).
76 Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, 49.
77 Alf Ludtke, Alltagsgeschichte ein Bericht von unterwegs, Historische Anthropologie 11,
no. 2 (2003): 278 95, here 278.
the meaningful implications of that practice.78 Still, even the historians who
recently gathered to honor Alf Ludtke were surprised by the number of historians
who take Alltagsgeschichte seriously.79
To be sure, there are limits to what Alltagsgeschichte can accomplish by
narrating everyday life in academic terms. Adapting Benjamin, this kind of
creativity is not that of Creation: ordinary people can no longer create anew but
must necessarily work as critics within the confines of the given world, in dialogue
with it.80 Grounded in circumstances similar to those that proscribe and enrich
everyday life itself, this circumscribed strategy is the strength of Alltagsge-
schichte, not its weakness. Similarly, the kind of creativity we seek at the core of
the everyday life we study, and the histories we strive to write, require an act of
translation between divergent languages: academic and ordinary. Both as criticism
and translation, Alltagsgeschichte is not a synthesis, so it cannot fail as one.81
Instead it demands of its practitioners that they mind the gap. We dwell on
historical actors stories, told in the language of the everyday, while nonetheless
subjecting their myths (and our analysis as well) to critical scrutiny, attempting to
disclose their contradictions and to identify their human consequences. These acts
of criticism and translation respect everyday life in all its contradictions by
recounting stories and incidents, and yet we criticize and translate these stories
patiently not only in order to understand but also to undermine them. Here too, the
performance of Alltagsgeschichtefrom conception through production to recep-
tionis effective, if at all, insofar as it remains a creative act. We write histories
of everyday life to encourage our readers, and ourselves, to see the possibilities for
recreating their everyday life in the present.82 And in the end, that is political.
78 For example, Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790 1840 (New York, 1988).
79 Practices and Power in the Everyday Life of the Twentieth Century: Symposium in Honor
of Alf Ludtke, University of MichiganAnn Arbor, November 9 10, 2007.
80 Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, in Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York, 1986), 314 32; see also Butler, Gender Trouble.
81 See David F. Crew, review of Deutsche GesellschaftsgeschichteVierter Band: Vom Beginn
des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gruendung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914 1949, by Hans-
Ulrich Wehler, H-German, H-Net Reviews, June 2005, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev
.cgi?path!151761121349275.
82 Geoff Eley, Wie denken wir uber Politik? Alltagsgeschichte und die Kategorie des Politis-
chen, in Alltagskultur, Subjektivitat und Geschichte: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsge-
schichte, ed. Heike Diekwisch (Munster, 1994), 27; Ludtke, History of Everyday Life, 23; Modris
Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston and New York,
2000), 43.

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The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter

Paul Steege, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and

Ulrich Wehler, German Historical Institute Bulletin 26 (Spring 2000), http://www.ghi-dc.org/

Crooked Line, 5253.

The Journal of Modern History 80 (June 2008): 358 378

und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 395 408, here 403.

achieved remarkable bitterness. The more established historians vigorously de-

12 Eley, A Crooked Line, xiii, 5.

schichte 15 (1996): 72 85.

Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 5.

historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt and New York, 1989).

2005), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0502/0502pre1.cfm, and The AHA

burger Politischen Polizei 18921914 (Reinbek, 1989), esp. 13150.

in World War I (Cambridge, 2004).

tionalism (London, 1983); Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past.

Malpas, Place and Experience; Harvey, Paris.

Berlin (Cambridge, 2004).

Challenge to Social History, in Ludtke, The History of Everyday Life, 4171.

and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 100.

Historical actorsand historiansproduce and mis/appropriate their everyday

(New York, 1994).

ican Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992): 129.

Although temporary, this alternative form of social organizationwhat Turner

46 Turner, Blazing the Trail, 133.

New York, 2007).

50 Harootunian, Historys Disquiet, 5; Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Ordinary Germans in Ex-

1929 1933 (Cambridge, 1983), 5354.

European History 26, no. 1 (1993): 119.

55 Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Eigensinn, Ethik und die nationalsozialistische Reformatio

food or Depression-era Aryans greeting their neighbors with Heil Hitler! In

58 Ludtke, History of Everyday Life, 31314.

history. Sarah Maza writes, Storytelling, or in academic parlance narrative, has

American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (1996): 14931515, here 1493.

Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997), 16.

Journal 50 (2000): 7592.

Journal of Modern History 68 (December 1996): 831 66, here 838.

recur insistently within a culture.67 At the same time, individuals construct

67 Maza, Stories in History, 1495.

Fate of Place, 243 84.

72 Peltonen, Clues, Margins, and Monads.

ingten und die Abwesenheit der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte, WerkstattGeschichte 18

no. 2 (2003): 278 95, here 278.

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