Betroffenheit and Anteilnahme

Definition

Betroffenheit and Anteilnahme are the paired affective concepts through which Alf Lüdtke frames the historian's relation to the suffering and the complicity of the past. Betroffenheit — "personal emotional concern" — is the aim many practitioners of the history-workshop movement avow: "Their prime objective is to awaken a feeling of Betroffenheit, personal emotional concern" (Lüdtke, p. 23). Lüdtke criticizes it because "the observer (and not the 'other') is the one betroffen, the one on stage," and because it can "foreclose feedback" and substitute "a gesture of moral self-assurance" for self-critical reflection (pp. 23–24). Against it he sets Christa Wolf's Anteilnahme — "active identification and involvement" — which "is not aimed … primarily at the others—they are not targeted"; whoever identifies "does not wish to change other individuals, but instead tries to understand them—and him/herself as well" (p. 24). "Without such Anteilnahme, 'no memory, no literature' is possible" (p. 24). Crucially, Anteilnahme "does not aim at a naive 'nestling up' to the subject. Rather, what it facilitates is greater awareness of the shape of that distance separating 'them' from 'us'" (p. 25).

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the distinction's elaborator.
• Christa Wolf — Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood); the source of Anteilnahme as an alternative to Betroffenheit.
• The history-workshop movement — the practitioners whose stated aim was Betroffenheit.
• Annäherung — the methodological correlate: coming nearer while reconstructing distance.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the field in which the debate arises.
• Annäherung (Coming Nearer) — the methodological counterpart.
• Historical Experience — the object of the involvement.
• Otherness — the distance Anteilnahme must keep in view.
• Memory — personal and collective memory as what Anteilnahme activates.
• History from Below — the ethics of recovering the "nameless."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's Introduction, "Passive Concern or 'Active Involvement'" (pp. 23–25), including the Christa Wolf discussion and the Heiner Kipphardt reference ("brother Eichmann").

Open Questions

• Is Anteilnahme distinguishable in practice from empathy, or does it merely rename the historian's projection while disclaiming it?
• When "the many" were perpetrators as well as victims, what does "active involvement" with them require? Lüdtke's answer — critical distance toward the Eichmanns — sets the concept's limit and its hardest test.