Lüdtke, Alf

Bio Sketch

Alf Lüdtke (b. 1943) is a German social historian and one of the founders and leading theorists of Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life. Long a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, he has held visiting fellowships at the Davis Center, Princeton (1981–82), the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1992), and the University of Chicago (1993–94). His research spans the history of bureaucratization and state violence (the Prussian police in the nineteenth century) and the history of workers' experience and labour policy, 1860–1945, with a focus on industrial work processes, wage structures, and the "image" of work and workers. He is known above all for the concept of Eigensinn — the self-willed, self-assertive everyday behaviour of workers — and for his insistence that history be written "from below" and from the concrete experience of ordinary people. He edited and introduced the volume The History of Everyday Life (Princeton, 1995), the principal English-language gateway to the German field.

Key Works

The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (ed., Princeton UP, 1995) — *The History of Everyday Life* (1995) — the edited volume: the Introduction, "What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?", and the chapter "What Happened to the 'Fiery Red Glow'? Workers' Experiences and German Fascism."
Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (ed., Campus Verlag, 1989) — the German original of the above.
"Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horse-Play: 'Eigensinn' and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany around 1900" (1984) — the essay that introduced Eigensinn to an English-language readership.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Relevance to the Core Research Area

Lüdtke supplies the wiki's historiography-of-the-everyday anchor: the German Alltagsgeschichte tradition gives the everyday cluster its historical method and its theory of everyday agency (Eigensinn, complaisance), complementing the French critical tradition (Lefebvre, de Certeau) and the sociological/phenomenological traditions already present. His insistence that experience and action be reconstructed in their context, and that the researcher must "come nearer" while preserving distance, is directly relevant to any historiography of the domestic interior and to the wiki's broader concern with how ordinary life is lived, contested, and remembered.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995)