Alltagsgeschichte

In everyday story is about how people lived in everyday life and experienced their lives and history. It's about to Repeating the " life-world " (Alfred Schütz ) and the subjective experiences and perceptions as well as the longer-term mentality of the people.

Development

Your German or German-speaking branch was built around the mid-1980s. One source was the Swedish movement of a history from below in the grassroots " Dig where you stand " movement, which the journalist Sven Lindquist drove forward in 1978. The previous interpretation of labor history by left- historian was very abstract and theory- impregnated, partly reduced to the history of the labor movement, without interest in the cultural history of the workers and their movement. For this, the tendency was for self-organization, to citizens' initiatives ( and basic movements ) in history workshops.

Based on a critical, " undogmatic " reading of Marx ( "People do not make their history freely, but they make themselves "), an attempt should be made, especially to reconstruct the actions of those and make understandable the existence had until then ( and so on class, religion, government, society ) are not counted as historical inroads except in the context of the socio-historical structures. Models were historian Eric J. Hobsbawm as the British and Edward P. Thompson or the Italian Carlo Ginzburg or the Frenchman Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. From the older folklore or cultural history, history of everyday life differed by a lack of traditionalism and the critical perspective. This view should open the possibility, among other things, to understand historical action of its own logic and to ask the question of the relationship between individuals and small collectives to the " structures " were, from which they were minted and they influenced in turn. Methodically, the process of the thick description by the ethnologist Clifford Geertz were used, which promotes social and local peculiarities to days. The history of everyday life turned in the early period of the particular against the " Bielefeld School " embossed social history " without people " and their emphasis on impersonal structures that almost completely determine the actions of individuals.

The history competition brought about by the Federal President on the subject of " National Socialism in Everyday Life" 1980/81 a wide referral to the schools and increased public recognition of everyday history.

Another facet was the interest in the ancient history of everyday life, which showed, for example, since the opening in 1974 of the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne. The interest spread to other periods such as the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Also developed industrial museums, which showed the development of the history of technology in the context of everyday life, in addition came up with an industrial archeology.

In France, particularly the Annales school existed from the 1920s to the history of everyday life pulses with the aim of writing a histoire total of a society. The recognition of non- elitist popular culture as a research interest led to new ways, such as the use of Inquisition and heretics interrogation protocols for profit everyday historical details for Medieval and Early Modern Times. Even in the United States was " popular culture " has long been of academic interest.

Areas of interest and problems

Aspects of everyday life can be, for example: work, crafts, home, food, clothing, medical and hygienic situation, sports, celebrations, home, school, education, experiences with religion, war experiences.

Points of contact and overlap thus consist of disciplines such as social history, demography, genealogy, micro-history, cultural history, medical history, ethnography ( ethnology), regional history, local history and historical geography.

The sources are everyday products, such as photos or paintings, diaries and letters. Also important is the oral history.

Critics - especially those from the perimeter of the Bielefeld School - throw the everyday history theory hostility, before naive belief in the immediate everyday and exaggeration of the resistance potential of the little people against big historical trends. Hans -Ulrich Wehler called the everyday history polemically " romanticized Neohistorismus ".

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