Alltagsgeschichte

Definition

Alltagsgeschichte — the history/historiography of everyday life (Alltag) — is the German historiographical movement that emerged in the mid-1970s as "a kind of dissentient movement to the left of this newly consolidated social-science history" (Eley, p. vii). It centres historical inquiry on the actions, sufferings and experience of "ordinary people" (kleine Leute) rather than on structures, elites or "big processes," and treats historical subjects as simultaneously "objects of history and its subjects" (Lüdtke, p. 6). Its practitioners insist that "actions and experience cannot be separated from the context of their genesis and impact" (Lüdtke, p. 5), and that the "big questions" of change be reconstructed "from the bottom up" through microhistorical studies and "miniatures" rather than assumed from macro-theory. It is defined as much against its critics — H.-U. Wehler's dismissal of it as "bland, conventional oatmeal" and Jürgen Kocka's charge of a "new irrationalism" — as by its own programme.

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the movement's leading theorist and the editor of the wiki's source volume; the "systematic decentering" of analysis, the Eigensinn of historical subjects, and the programme of "coming nearer" (Annäherung).
• Henri Lefebvre — the French precedent for a critical theory of the everyday that alltagsgeschichte draws on (via de Certeau's L'invention du quotidien).
• Michel de Certeau — cited by Lüdtke as the model for reading "social praxis" as creative everyday operation.
• E. P. Thompson — the "history from below" and "field-of-force" lineage that Lüdtke frames alltagsgeschichte within.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the habitus concept Lüdtke both uses and warns against reifying.

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life — the object alltagsgeschichte historicizes; the concept page for the theoretical tradition.
• Eigensinn — the field's signature concept of self-willed, self-assertive everyday behaviour.
• Lebensweise — the mode-of-life category against which Alltag is distinguished.
• Microhistory — alltagsgeschichte's method: case studies, local contexts, "miniatures."
• Historical Experience — the experiential dimension the field restores to social history.
• Historical Social Science — the adversary discipline whose structural primacy alltagsgeschichte rejects.
• History from Below — the broader historiographical impulse.
• Thick Description — the interpretive method imported from anthropology.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the primary source: Eley's foreword periodizing and defending the movement (pp. vii–xi); Lüdtke's introduction defining its field, its two models of the everyday, its method of decentering and "miniatures," and its response to Kocka, Wehler, Habermas and the Historikerstreit; the volume's eight chapter studies.
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — alltagsgeschichte named among the anthropological-turn currents that canonized the everyday as a field of active agency.

Open Questions

• Does alltagsgeschichte's "systematic decentering" leave any place for the large-scale explanation its critics demand, or does it remain, as charged, a collection of miniatures?
• Can Alltagsgeschichte's German political stakes — coming to terms with Nazism — be translated into other national historiographies, or is the movement bound to its moment?
• How does a historiography of everyday experience relate to the wiki's design-theoretical concern with everyday space?