Complaisance (Hinnehmen)

Definition

Complaisance — Alf Lüdtke's rendering of the German Hinnehmen — is the disposition of workers who neither resist nor actively consent but "tolerate," "put up with," and "go along with" a regime or an imposed condition. In Lüdtke's study of German workers under fascism, it names the dominant attitude revealed by the Social Democratic SOPADE reports: "The great mass [of workers] are indifferent, complaisantly tolerate everything and are concerned only with personal matters" (quoted p. 203). Lüdtke's thesis is that this is not simply apathy: "No matter how much the varied and diverse forms of such toleration facilitated a 'continuation' on the part of the Nazi rulers, complaisance in this sense does not signify an apolitical stance. On the 'interior side' … the dominant element was a sense of detachment: a self-distancing, fueled by independent needs, interests, and practices of one's own making" (p. 204). It is the companion category to Eigensinn: both describe the space between open opposition and open consent, and both are constitutive for understanding how fascist rule actually functioned.

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — the concept's principal theorist, in "What Happened to the 'Fiery Red Glow'?".
• Timothy Mason — the triad "oppression, neutralization and integration … mutually enhanced each other" (quoted p. 210), which frames complaisance structurally.
• Detlev Peukert & Martin Broszat — the adjacent vocabulary of Resistenz (resistivity) against Widerstand (resistance).
• Michel de Certeau — the tactical/practice tradition that complaisance complicates from the opposite pole.

Related Concepts

• Eigensinn — the self-willed evasion that punctuates complaisance.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the field that discovered complaisance as a historical object.
• Power — the relation complaisance sustains without legitimating.
• Everyday Life — the sphere in which complaisance operates.
• Historical Experience — the experiential ground of the detachment Lüdtke describes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's chapter, especially "Complaisance in the Face of Domination" (pp. 234–238) and the discussion of SOPADE reports (pp. 202–204); the synchronism of politicization and privatization (p. 231).

Open Questions

• Does naming complaisance a "movement to parry outside pressures" risk rescuing collaboration as a form of agency? Lüdtke is careful not to celebrate it, but the concept flirts with that reading.
• How does complaisance differ from the "resistance to everyday life" Maycroft describes — or from ordinary political disaffection in any regime?