The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life

Author: Alf Lüdtke (ed.), translated by William Templer Year: 1995 (originally published as Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen, Campus Verlag, 1989) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/ludtke_1995-history_of_everyday_life.md

Summary

An edited volume introducing the German Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) to English-speaking readers. Geoff Eley's foreword and Lüdtke's long introduction define the field as a mid-1970s dissentient movement within West German social history: history "from below," centred on the experience and agency of "ordinary" people (kleine Leute) rather than structures and elites. Its eight chapters (Hans Medick on ethnological ways of knowing; Peter Schöttler on mentalities, ideologies and discourses; Harald Dehne on everyday-life research in the GDR; Dorothee Wierling on everyday life and gender relations; Wolfgang Kaschuba on popular and workers' culture; Lüdtke's own study of workers' experience under German fascism; Lutz Niethammer's oral-history study of the GDR's "generation of construction") advance three shared theses: that historical subjects are simultaneously objects and subjects of history; that experience and action cannot be separated from their context; and that the "big structures" of modernization must be reconstructed "from the bottom up" rather than assumed. The volume is also a document of the West German Historikerstreit and the methodological war between Alltagsgeschichte and historical social science.

Key Claims

The programme of Alltagsgeschichte

Alltagsgeschichte took shape in the mid-1970s as "a kind of dissentient movement to the left of this newly consolidated social-science history," sharing its commitment to confronting the Nazi past but rejecting its "insistence on the primacy of structural analysis, or 'big structures, large processes, huge comparisons'" (Eley, p. vii).
It aims to develop "a more qualitative understanding of ordinary people's lives" by investigating "the material circumstances of daily existence at work, at home, and at play ('the production and reproduction of immediate life,' in Friedrich Engels's well-known phrase)" and by "entering the inner world of popular experience" (Eley, p. viii).
Its six commitments, per Eley's summary of Lüdtke: history from below; the stress on subjectivity and experience; the "systematic decentralization of analysis and interpretation" through "miniatures"; a refusal to retreat into the particular (alltagsgeschichte "cannot be isolated from the relations of production, appropriation, and exchange"); the retention of the political dimension; and the recognition of the "Otherness" of the past, which "prevents any facile process of identification" (pp. ix–x).
The central question is not the "average axis" around which interests rotate but "the multifaceted ways in which individuals and groups make known (or conceal), implement (or block) their considerations of cost and utility": "the focus is on the forms in which people have 'appropriated'—while simultaneously transforming—'their' world" (Lüdtke, pp. 6–7).
Research into the everyday shows that most "average people" under Nazism "actually clung to the Nazi regime in their concern to survive," and that "those who supposedly were only cogs in the machine, carrying out orders, became active accomplices" (Lüdtke, p. 4).
On the Historikerstreit: findings from everyday-life research on "countless atrocities committed or defended by German functionaries" refute Hillgruber's plea for historians to "identify with the concrete fate of the German people in the East"; the key point is that "actions and experience cannot be separated from the context of their genesis and impact" (Lüdtke, p. 5).
The field intends a "fundamentally new perspective on the way historians see the 'achievements' of the modern era," historicizing "the very assumption of the 'shaping power of supraindividual forces'" and asking how "the expansion of commodity production, the state, and bureaucracy was experienced by 'the many'" (Lüdtke, pp. 7–8).
Two opposed models of the everyday are distinguished: a "repetitive"/static model (Borscheid, via Gehlen) presupposing a separation of everyday from non-everyday and reserving historical change to "a select few personalities"; and the volume's model, in which "the dynamism and contradictory character of radical historical change are linked with the 'production and reproduction of real life'" (Lüdtke, pp. 5–6).
Reconstruction in this mode "does not mean that some long-standing hidden structure of historical 'courses of events' is waiting to be uncovered"; Bourdieu's habitus risks exactly this misunderstanding (Lüdtke, p. 14). What matters are "the mediations—as well as the ruptures, discontinuities—between the thought-images, modes of interpretation, and rules for action valid in a given context" (p. 14).
The volume abandons the quest for a "totality" of historical process: "The call to 'dig where you're standing!' was necessary but is not sufficient"; Habermas's "colonization of the life world" thesis is "more subtle but also neglects the fundamental ambivalences of historical social praxis" (Lüdtke, pp. 16–17).
The category of Betroffenheit (emotional concern) is criticized in favour of Christa Wolf's Anteilnahme—"active identification and involvement"—because "without such Anteilnahme, 'no memory, no literature' is possible" (Lüdtke, pp. 23–24). Anteilnahme "does not aim at a naive 'nestling up' to the subject"; rather it makes one more aware of "the shape of that distance separating 'them' from 'us'" (p. 25).
Reconstruction requires "systematic decentering"; the "uneven" (Marx) development of production and interpretation leaves opportunities for action jumbled with limitations "in a kind of 'patchwork' (Gemengelage)"; theory must encompass the act of "conceptualizing, idea formation" (Vorstellen), not merely concepts (Lüdtke, pp. 15–16).
Legitimate "praise" of the volume's subjects is not indiscriminate: the recognition that "the many" under fascism were "at the same time perpetrators, accomplices, and victims" blocks exoneration and requires critical distance "vis-à-vis all the identifiable Eichmanns and their minions" (Lüdtke, p. 24).

Medick: ethnological ways of knowing

Medick borrows Bernard Cohn's image of "missionaries in the rowboat" to attack a "centrist view of history" that assigns phenomena to the margin or centre according to their role in the "great transformation." This centrism marks not only historische Sozialwissenschaft but also Braudel, whose Civilisation matérielle treats everyday "material culture" as ahistorical (pp. 41–42).
Against this, cultural anthropology opens a "double Otherness": both "the strange and alien aspects of our own European culture and history" and the role of cultural difference as a motor of historical change (pp. 42–43).
Historical social science fails because it remains caught in "the categorical dichotomy of the subjective and objective dimensions of the historical process," dealing with culture only as "a social subsystem that is relatively static and closed off upon itself" (pp. 43–44).
Ethnographic participant observation offers a corrective but not immediate access to the "other": "Only romantics or spies" seek to become natives; Geertz's question is "What happens to Verstehen, when Einfühlen disappears?" (pp. 50–51).
The central method is thick description, which keeps "in full mind, and in the most comprehensive manner possible … anything that is new, strange, unknown, and hard to interpret in the cultural 'texts' to be explored," reading them "over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (pp. 51–52). Its theory "grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions" (Geertz quoted p. 53).
Geertz's dictum "all experience is construed experience" is applied to social history: "the whole of social life … is culturally shaped" (p. 53).
Medick's two case studies: Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia (thick-descriptive reconstruction of the Revolution as cultural/religious transformation) and Sahlins on Captain Cook's death as "the historical completion and fulfillment of a mythical historical expectation" (pp. 55–56). Mintz's Sweetness and Power shows that "meanings arise out of use" and that the taste for sweetness is inseparable from the colonial sugar economy—history on a "grand" scale is "frequently … [the everyday's] forgotten and repressed portion" (pp. 57–59).
The "subject" returns only "within this context of the social production of meaning," in "the ongoing struggle for meaning(s)"; reciprocity, dependency and resistance are not "structurally given" but become real within that struggle (pp. 61–62).

Schöttler: mentalities, ideologies, discourses

Schöttler maps the "third level" (Labrousse) between economy and society. The Annales history of mentalities (Bloch, Febvre; outillage mental, mentalité) first scrutinized it "without reducing it to 'ideas' or to the 'social'" (pp. 73–74).
Ginzburg's two objections: the concept of mentality tends to "reduce every historical problem to psychological problems," and it is "class-neutral," underestimating lower-class cultures of resistance (p. 75). Schöttler partly defends the Annales (Bloch's Les classes et le gouvernement des hommes) but documents its rationalist resistance to psychoanalysis—Bloch on the thaumaturgic kings rejecting any psychotherapeutic explanation; Le Goff's "the history of mentalities has … no need whatsoever for psychoanalysis" (pp. 76–77).
Althusser's concept of ideology offers "a more precise conception": four theses—ideology has its own materiality; it represents "the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence"; it "interpellates individuals as 'subjects'"; and it "has no history" (pp. 82–83).
Pêcheux combines "ideological formation" and "discursive formation," insisting that "what is important is not just the words employed, but … especially the constructions in which these words are associated"; words "change their meaning" by moving from one discursive formation to another. He distinguishes identification, counteridentification and disidentification, and locates "dominated ideologies" at "the point of domination itself" (pp. 85–87).
Foucault's concept of discourse is a "specific linguistic materiality which is institutionalized as a manner of expression in society, endowed with 'built-in' effects of power and resistance"; it replaces hermeneutic exegesis with the "positive" description of "discursive fields" (pp. 87–89).

Dehne: Alltag and Lebensweise in the GDR

Jürgen Kuczynski's Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes (1980–82) was the first Marxist attempt at a complex historiography of working-class daily life, and sparked GDR research (pp. 116–117).
Dehne distinguishes Alltag (everyday life) from Lebensweise (mode of life): Lebensweise is the macro-structural, law-governed, long-wave, socially binding dimension; Alltag is the microstructural, empirical, cyclical, subject-side dimension—"the individual point of intersection between the subject and society" and the "interface between social and individual reproduction" (pp. 121–126).
The dialectic of everyday life is "the synchronisms of complaisance, detachment and resistance"; within it opens "a certain scope or latitude for action … from the unquestioned, reproductive continuation of received routines to the radical transformation of circumstances" (pp. 126–127).
Against reifying a class as a subject: "A social class, qua social subject, does not eat, sing or sleep, and cannot enter into sexual relations" (Lothar Kühne quoted p. 121).
Bourdieu's habitus is useful for grasping how routinized individual appropriation occurs "in the forms of symbolic reproduction"—but its forms appear "little amenable to change," and GDR theory pairs it with "historical forms of individuality" (pp. 130–132).
Case study: the dissolution of the shared family meal (Tischgemeinschaft) under factory production, where a cultural-symbolic form lives on in workers' values, shaping their efforts to keep the noon meal at home (pp. 131–132).

Wierling: everyday life and gender

Everyday life is "not limited to specific domains"; it is "the domain in which people exercise a direct influence—via their behavior—on their immediate circumstances" (pp. 150–151).
Gender history and alltagsgeschichte are "not close kin, but they can and should enter into a carefully considered alliance"—the most productive relation being "that of an 'open relationship'" (pp. 150, 162).
Joan Kelly's rejection of the "women as a class/minority/race" analogy made gender "a universal category of historical research"; yet German women's history mostly still writes the history of women rather than gender (pp. 152–153).
The bond between women and the everyday risks ahistorical and universalizing "nature" claims; both "everyday life" and "women" connote "nonpolitical, private, informal, powerless" (pp. 154–155).
The most fruitful programme is to seek gender in the concrete contexts of daily interaction and power: "no longer must (or can) [relations between men and women] be understood in isolated purity, as relations which are solely economic, ideological, or political" (p. 158).
Brecht's warning sets the limit of the everyday register: "The decision about the meat missing from your dinner plate is not made in the kitchen" (p. 163).

Kaschuba: popular and workers' culture as symbolic orders

"History's Interior": the fundamental choice is whether everyday life is "a mere 'situation' … reduced to behavior that is only 'stereotypical reproduction' of given and preset cultural patterns" or "an arena where active and creative abilities" are aimed at material and social reproduction (pp. 169–170).
Two symbolic orders coordinate lower-class life: popular culture (late feudalism) and workers' culture (industrial capitalism); they are not simply sequential but interlace, sharing the character of producer cultures, cultures of material praxis (pp. 172–176).
"Identity via work" is the core value: the self-image of the first factory-worker generations is "rooted primarily in the ability to prove that they were able-bodied and could earn a living by themselves" (pp. 178–179). The "proletarian work ethos" is not an import of bourgeois values but links to preindustrial "moral economy" and craft codes, and "actively and demonstratively confronted the prevailing set of guiding values for the society as a whole" (pp. 180–181).
"Culture is learned as a game and in games": horseplay, pranks and body language are "a decisive factor shaping the symbolic language of 'workers' culture'" and a mode of "proletarian solidarity on the job" (pp. 182–185).
Class habitus persists in the present: "it is simply due to their 'proletarian habitus' that in the eyes of those who 'distribute opportunity' … they are automatically assigned certain jobs"; social "careers" frequently cost working-class children "a substantial portion of biographical and social identity" (pp. 192–193).

Lüdtke: workers' experience and German fascism

Against the left's expectation of a proletarian antifascist uprising (Georg Schwarz's "fiery red glow"), the chapter asks how fascism established domination and why the overwhelming majority of industrial workers "choose to keep their silence" (p. 198).
The regime used "carrot and stick"—"symbolic offerings" (May Day 1933 as the Nazi appropriation of the workers' day of struggle), wage latitude and "integration," alongside brutal terror. Timothy Mason's triad: "oppression, neutralization and integration … mutually enhanced each other" (pp. 210–211).
The dominant worker attitude is neither resistance nor conviction but complaisance (Hinnehmen), "a sense of detachment … fueled by independent needs, interests, and practices of one's own making" (p. 204); this is "not simply an expression of apathy" and "does not signify an apolitical stance" (p. 204).
The central concept is Eigensinn (see eigensinn): "a mixture of self-affirmation and prankish obstinacy," neither heroic resistance nor mere adaptation: "Rooted in this 'situation,' the workers developed a third approach alongside the (rare) alternative of open opposition or the more widespread option of silent complaisance: variants of eigensinnige movements of evasion" (p. 226).
"'Patchworks' were the shaping factor. Cooperation and Eigensinn alternated in different rhythms. … Eigensinn remained integrated into calculated work—or interrupted the flow of that work, but only for a few moments" (pp. 227–228).
The everyday was characterized by "the synchronism of politicization and privatization," which "facilitated the complaisant toleration of impositions coming down from the Nazis, as well as various moves to evade and avoid conflict" (p. 231).
The "aesthetization of politics" (Benjamin) "was not just an attempt at manipulation—it was also a response to everyday experiences and ambitions" (p. 237).

Niethammer: oral history in the GDR

Niethammer's team conducted 150 life-history interviews in three GDR industrial regions (1987)—a "minor sensation," since such documentation of biographical experience had not previously been possible (pp. 252–253).
Method: begin from the investigator's puzzlement before "highly suggestive yet stubbornly obscure" statements ("the other self"); the interpretive maxim is "how much (pre)history does the text require in order to communicate its message?" and, for narrative "molecules," "how much implication of history … does the private anecdote contain?" (pp. 256–267).
The chapter's typology of the "generation of construction" (Aufbau-generation) yields complementary experience types—the antifascist functionary, the real party worker, the builder of industry, the war widow, the apolitical couple—whose "inner discord" (Zwiespalt) is not East-vs-West but "a constant inner discord" produced by a state that systematically dupes its citizens (pp. 272–278).
The cohesion of GDR society rests on "familial dependency ties" rather than property or privilege; possession of a house was "more a burden than a privilege" (pp. 282–283).
The SED emerges from Niethammer's data as "a popular party of a new type," gathering mostly previously non-political or "reorientated" individuals under "the authoritarian leadership of a small Communist minority" (p. 289).
The GDR's "pervasive economism" narrows everyday language and discourse until "imagination and future prospects suffocate" (pp. 296–297); the older generation's fund of experience is "little suited for transfer to the younger generation as a legacy capable of generating meaning and galvanizing motivation" (p. 301).

Connections

Concepts: alltagsgeschichte, eigensinn, lebensweise, history-of-mentalities, historical-anthropology, thick-description, microhistory, oral-history, historical-experience, complaisance, moral-economy, popular-culture, workers-culture, historical-social-science, Annäherung, betroffenheit-and-anteilnahme, patchwork-gemengelage, historicity, experience-types Authors: Alf Lüdtke (editor and contributor), Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, E. P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno (Benjamin's "aesthetization of politics") Debates: theory-of-the-everyday, everyday-vs-iconic-architecture, power-and-space Related source notes: source-notes/lefebvre-1991-critique-of-everyday-life, source-notes/bourdieu-1977-outline-of-a-theory-of-practice, source-notes/de-certeau-1984-practice-of-everyday-life, source-notes/heller-1970-everyday-life, source-notes/felski-2000-invention-of-everyday-life, source-notes/yoka-paschalidis-2015-semiotics-hermeneutics-everyday, source-notes/upton-2002-architecture-in-everyday-life

Chapter contributors without wiki pages (PAGE NEEDED): Hans Medick, Peter Schöttler, Harald Dehne, Dorothee Wierling, Wolfgang Kaschuba, Lutz Niethammer, Geoff Eley, William Templer (translator). Figures heavily cited but without pages: Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Clifford Geertz, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Marshall Sahlins, Sidney Mintz, Louis Althusser, Michel Pêcheux, Eric Wolf, Jürgen Kuczynski, Timothy Mason.

Direct Quotes

"Alltagsgeschichte took shape in the mid-1970s as a kind of dissentient movement to the left of this newly consolidated social-science history, sharing many of the latter's underlying commitments … but disliking its insistence on the primacy of structural analysis, or 'big structures, large processes, huge comparisons.'" (Eley, p. vii)

"The goal was to develop a more qualitative understanding of ordinary people's lives, both by investigating the material circumstances of daily existence at work, at home, and at play ('the production and reproduction of immediate life,' in Friedrich Engels's well-known phrase) and by entering the inner world of popular experience in the workplace, the family and household, the neighborhood, the school." (Eley, p. viii)

"Central to the thrust of everyday historical analysis is the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the 'nameless' multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations." (Lüdtke, pp. 3–4)

"Those who supposedly were only cogs in the machine, carrying out orders, became active accomplices." (Lüdtke, p. 4)

"That is a key point in the historiography of everyday life: actions and experience cannot be separated from the context of their genesis and impact." (Lüdtke, p. 5)

"The focus is on the forms in which people have 'appropriated'—while simultaneously transforming—'their' world." (Lüdtke, p. 7)

"Discontinuities and gaps are elements in the network. … What is important are the mediations—as well as the ruptures, discontinuities—between the thought-images, modes of interpretation, and rules for action which can be considered valid in a given context." (Lüdtke, p. 14)

"'Active involvement,' in contrast to the classic concept in historical hermeneutics, does not designate a fusion of 'meaning horizons' (H. G. Gadamer). Any attempt at 'coming nearer' to the realities always remains a kind of reconstruction." (Lüdtke, p. 25)

"Rather than attempting to place the experience of others within the framework of such a conception, which is what the extolled 'empathy' in fact usually comes down to, understanding them demands setting that conception aside and seeing their experiences within the framework of their own idea of what selfhood is." (Geertz, quoted by Medick, p. 71)

"What is brought out by [the evidence] … is the ongoing struggle for meaning(s). That conflict is constantly present in the context of social relations—relations which at the same time are constituted by that very struggle." (Medick, p. 62)

"Ideology touches the unconscious via the path through what is impossible. Lapses and slips highlight the impossibility of an ideological domination devoid of contradiction." (Pêcheux, quoted by Schöttler, pp. 86–87)

"A social class, qua social subject, does not eat, sing or sleep, and cannot enter into sexual relations, even with a class with which it is on friendly terms." (Lothar Kühne, quoted by Dehne, p. 121)

"In everyday life, the multifarious and contradictory processes of mediation between social and individual reproduction take on concrete shape. … From the standpoint of the realization of reproductive demands, everyday life can thus be viewed as the 'interface between social and individual reproduction.'" (Dehne, pp. 123–124)

"The decision about the meat missing from your dinner plate is not made in the kitchen." (Brecht, quoted by Wierling, p. 163)

"Identity via work" … "the salient formative factors are 'identity via work' and the direct linking of the results of material and symbolic reproduction." (Kaschuba, p. 178)

"Culture is learned as a game and in games." (Kaschuba, p. 183)

"Rooted in this 'situation,' the workers developed a third approach alongside the (rare) alternative of open opposition or the more widespread option of silent complaisance: variants of eigensinnige movements of evasion." (Lüdtke, p. 226)

"'Patchworks' were the shaping factor. Cooperation and Eigensinn alternated in different rhythms. At the same time, they were interlinked: cooperation had many of its 'own independent' (eigen) features, and distancing made new cooperation easier." (Lüdtke, pp. 227–228)

"Eigensinn: Key term in Lüdtke's analysis of workers' everyday life, denoting willfulness, spontaneous self-will, a kind of self-affirmation, an act of (re)appropriating alienated social relations on and off the shop floor by self-assertive prankishness, demarcating a space of one's own." (Glossary, p. 313)

"The party was not a traditional left-wing party, yet was also above average in its degree of immunity against former active Nazis. Rather, the SED was a popular party of a new type." (Niethammer, p. 289)

"Imagination and future prospects suffocate under this avalanche of an everyday sphere that is weighted down with economism." (Niethammer, p. 297)

Open Questions

Does the volume's decisive move—separating Lebensweise from Alltag (Dehne) and contenting itself with "mediations, ruptures, discontinuities" (Lüdtke)—surrender the totality it claims to reconstruct? Is the "patchwork" a method or a metaphysics?
Is Eigensinn politically emancipatory or merely a safety valve? Lüdtke explicitly refuses a "renewed heroization of proletarian grit," yet the concept sits awkwardly with the volume's own finding that complaisance enabled fascist rule.
The gender chapter concedes that alltagsgeschichte has been "gender blind" and that women's history mostly writes women rather than gender. Has the alliance Wierling proposes been realized in the literature since 1989?
Medick and Lüdtke invoke Otherness and the "ongoing struggle for meaning"; Schöttler offers discourse and ideology as more precise instruments. Which vocabulary—anthropological Verfremdung or Althusserian/Pêcheuian discourse theory—better serves a materialist history of consciousness?
Niethammer's oral-history "experience types" remain explicitly non-representative and generationally specific; can the method scale, and does its picture of GDR cohesion survive the archival openings after 1989?
Where is the interior in this volume? Unlike the wiki's design-theory sources, the everyday here is historical, not spatial: the domestic, the factory and the street appear as scenes of experience rather than as designed space. What would alltagsgeschichte look like for the interior?