Experience Types

Definition

Experience types (Erfahrungstypen) are Lutz Niethammer's analytical construct for the complementary constellations of attitude and memory that a generation forms out of a shared historical situation. Working from 150 life-history interviews in the GDR, Niethammer argues that "one comes closer to realities in the GDR via more complex and less quantifiable experience types; it is these which are operative in everyday communication, and their interaction provides a conditioning framework and sounding board for politics" (Niethammer, p. 295). His six exemplary cases of the "generation of construction" yield complementary types: the antifascist functionary (Ludwig Haber); the real party worker (Pia Diemer); the builder of state industry (Siegfried Homann); the war widow (Sieglinde Erger); and the apolitical couple representing "that foundation of authoritarianism and 'secondary virtues' (diligence, performance of duty) inherited by the GDR" (the Karrers) (p. 279). The construct is explicitly a heuristic: "not … representative," designed "for the isolation of saturated heuristic types" that "can be checked and evaluated" (pp. 280–281).

Key Thinkers

• Lutz Niethammer — the concept's author, in "Zeroing in on Change" (no author page yet — see log).
• Karl Mannheim — "connections between generations," cited for the generational grounding of experience (p. 232).
• Dorothee Wierling & Alexander von Plato — co-interviewers.
• Historical Experience — the general category of which experience types are the specification.

Related Concepts

• Historical Experience — the broader category.
• Oral History — the method that produces experience types.
• Lebensweise — the shared mode of life within which an experience type forms.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the framework in which experience types do explanatory work.
• Microhistory — the case-based scale from which types are generalized.
• Habitus — a comparable concept of group disposition, though experience types are explicitly historical and generational.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Niethammer's chapter (pp. 252–303), especially "Further Interim Remarks" (pp. 278–281) and "The Specificity of Experience" (pp. 294–303): the six cases, the quantitative tables, the "double generation" of GDR political leadership, and the "pervasive economism" of the older generation's experience.

Open Questions

• If experience types are "historically specific" and "essentially nontransferable" (p. 303), can they function as historical explanation at all, or only as rich description of a generation?
• How do Niethammer's types map onto class categories? The chapter finds working-class, lower-middle-class and gendered patterns but resists reducing experience to class position — a tension the volume elsewhere thematizes.