Alltagsgeschichte vs. Historical Social Science

Framing

This debate is the West German historiographical controversy of the 1980s over whether history should be written from structures and "big processes" or from the everyday experience of ordinary people. On one side stands historische Sozialwissenschaft ("historical social science"), the Bielefeld-school programme of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka that turned to social-science methods and treated big structures, large processes and huge comparisons as the proper object of history. On the other stands Alltagsgeschichte, the mid-1970s dissentient movement to its left, which argued that structural history left out "the daily experiences of people in their concrete life situations, which also stamp their needs" (Eley, p. viii). The quarrel is simultaneously methodological (what counts as rigorous history), theoretical (the relation of structure to agency and experience), and political (how the Nazi past is to be understood and judged). It is closely bound up with the Historikerstreit of 1986–87, in which everyday-life research on grassroots complicity refuted revisionist attempts to relativize German guilt.

Positions

The Bielefeld school holds that history as a science rests on "the conception of what is essentially a unified history, over and beyond the mass of myriad individual (hi)stories," on "rigorous methods" and "argumentative" presentation since the late eighteenth century (Lüdtke, pp. 9–10). Its practitioners insist on "the primacy of structural analysis, or 'big structures, large processes, huge comparisons'" (Eley, p. vii), and argue that fascism's conditions "could be explained only if 'large-scale contours, big patterns' on the level of macrotheory and macroconcepts were investigated, such as 'industrialization and capitalism … nation and revolution'" (Kocka, quoted p. 10). Wehler dismissed alltagsgeschichte as "bland, conventional oatmeal" containing "cheap defeatist sentiment"; Kocka placed it, alongside Nolte and Hillgruber, under "a 'new irrationalism'" hostile to Enlightenment values (pp. 9–10). Habermas's "constitutional patriotism" was the debate's philosophical wing. Key texts: the volume's representations of Wehler, Kocka and Habermas; Geschichte und Gesellschaft.

Position B: Alltagsgeschichte — Experience, Agency and "Coming Nearer"

The alltagsgeschichte position begins with history from below and the subjectivity of ordinary actors: the field "cannot be isolated from the relations of production, appropriation, and exchange," yet it refuses to let historical change occur "behind their backs" (Lüdtke, p. 6). It practices "systematic decentering" through miniatures and microhistory; it treats theory as encompassing "the very act of 'conceptualizing'" (Vorstellen), not just concepts; and it historicizes the observer's own categories. Against the charge of irrationalism, Lüdtke argues that research into experiential contexts "forges a link between the dominant model of 'Western' rationality and the reality of the lives of 'the many'" — a turn that threatens "the guild of scholarly mandarins" and "the guardians of 'leftist' theory" alike (p. 11). It is emphatically not mere anecdote: the "centrality" of interpretation and the "mediations" between modes of life and forms of behaviour are the field's analytical core.

Position C: The "Patchwork" Compromise — Neither Totality nor Anecdote

The volume's own resolution refuses both poles. It rejects the "histoire totale" as impossible ("it is impossible to piece together in quick fashion some sort of 'histoire totale,'" p. 21) and rejects the reduction of the everyday to local colour, while declining Habermas's "colonization of the life world" as "more subtle but also [neglecting] the fundamental ambivalences of historical social praxis" (p. 17). The "uneven" change of Marx, rendered as Gemengelage, allows the coexistence of contradictory moments without a sequential hierarchy of conditioning. Medick names the target "a centrist view of history" and proposes the "double Otherness" of ethnology as the corrective. Kaschuba makes the symmetrical demand: social history must "also include the everyday history of all strata and classes" (p. 171).

Key Texts

The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the debate's primary English-language documentation: Eley's foreword, Lüdtke's Introduction (especially "A New 'Irrationalism'?"), and Medick's chapter.
Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — situates alltagsgeschichte within the broader anthropological turn.

Current State

The controversy has cooled, but its terms recur wherever the wiki asks whether the everyday can explain anything beyond itself. Within this volume, the alltagsgeschichte side wins the methodological argument — the field institutionalized itself, launched journals such as Historische Anthropologie, and reshaped the historiography of Nazism and of the GDR — but the structural side's demand for large-scale explanation remains the charge that the field, and the wiki's own everyday cluster, has never fully answered.

Relevance to the Core Research Area

For the wiki's everyday cluster this is the historical-methodological counterpart to the Theories of the Everyday debate: where that debate asks what the everyday is, this one asks how it should be studied — through structures or through experience, from above or from below, in totality or in patchwork. It supplies the historiographical grounding for Everyday Life and Everyday Architecture, and connects the everyday to the power and space thread via the question of complicity under domination.