Historical Experience (Erfahrung)

Definition

Historical experience is the category through which alltagsgeschichte restores the subjective dimension to social history. In Alf Lüdtke's programme, the field does not raise secular change "to a level detached from human agents, occurring behind their backs"; rather "human social practice is shifted into the foreground," and the focus falls on "how social impositions or stimuli are perceived and processed as interests and needs, anxieties and hopes" (Lüdtke, pp. 6–7). Experience is not private and prior to society: "conditions for action appear ambivalent in their complexity: though given, they are in equal measure a product," and the profile of perception and action "is generated in and through that very web" of social relations (p. 7). Lüdtke insists that "actions and experience cannot be separated from the context of their genesis and impact" (p. 5). In Lutz Niethammer's usage, "experience types" are the complementary constellations of attitude that a generation forms from its shared historical situation, and experience must always be conceived "in the respective plural" (Lüdtke, pp. 19–20).

Key Thinkers

• Alf Lüdtke — experience as the object and justification of alltagsgeschichte; the "inner side" of structural processes (p. 8).
• E. P. Thompson — the "field-of-force" and the experience/praxis tradition Alltagsgeschichte draws on.
• Lutz Niethammer — "experience types" and the reconstruction of experience through life histories.
• Hans Medick — "all experience is construed experience" (Geertz) as the interpretive premise.
• Pierre Bourdieu — habitus as the socially constituted generator of experience and perception.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the field built around historical experience.
• Eigensinn — one form experience takes in action.
• Lebensweise — the structural "mode of life" within which experience is formed.
• Oral History — the method that recovers experience.
• Historical Anthropology — the approach that studies experience culturally.
• Experience Types — Niethammer's typological concept.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Lüdtke's Introduction (pp. 6–8, 19–20); Medick's anthropological account of the social production of meaning (pp. 61–62); Kaschuba on "identity via work" and the "collective background of experience" (pp. 178–181, 190–191); Lüdtke's chapter on the "rhythms of experience" under fascism (pp. 232–234); Niethammer's "The Specificity of Experience" (pp. 294–303).

Open Questions

• If experience is "construed experience," how can it ground historical explanation without circularity — experience explaining meaning, meaning explaining experience?
• Does the category of experience (relying on a subject who has it) survive the volume's own finding that "old party activists" experienced Nazism as attractive? The category must contain perpetrator experience, not only victim experience.