This symposium was organized to coincide with Alf Lüdtke’s visiting professorship at the University of Michigan during October and November 2007 and in advance of his retirement in 2008. It aimed to take stock of his extraordinary contributions to the field of modern German history, to the practices of historical anthropology, and to the still-flourishing study of the history of everyday life, both in and beyond the field of modern German history. The symposium explored the methodological and conceptual issues that have made everyday life history so influential among historians and scholars across fields and disciplines. Participants included faculty and Ph.D. candidates from Michigan and from several other institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The panels were organized around the keywords and concepts that featured most prominently in Alf Lüdtke’s scholarship: ¬Eigensinn, everyday life, Herrschaft, physical violence, states of exception, and visualizing history.
The symposium not only honored Alf Lüdtke, who participated in conversations at every panel, but it also stimulated significant methodological discussion about the history of everyday life, the ability to situate it in conventional and unconventional source materials, and the kinds of historical writing it has inspired. In addition, the symposium sought to sustain and reaffirm the rich scholarly exchange between American universities (in this case the Univeristy of Michigan and the University of Chicago) and the former Max-Planck-Institut-für-Geschichte in Göttingen and the University of Erfurt. Alf Lüdtke’s visiting professorships at both institutions in the 1990s and his generous hosting of graduate students and faculty from both institutions at Göttingen and Erfurt are exemplary of this exchange.
After a short homage to Alf Lüdtke on behalf of the fellows of the German Historical Institute delivered by CAROLA DIETZE, the opening panel of the conference featured KATHLEEN CANNING, DAVID CREW, DAVID WILLIAM COHEN, and GEOFF ELEY, whose contributions both reflected on their long-term intellectual collaborations with Alf Lüdtke and aimed to introduce younger generations of scholars, including many graduate students and scholars from other fields, to his most influential contributions to everyday life history, historical anthropology, and visual history. Canning reflected on the concept of Eigensinn, which has remained a sharpening stone for subsequent generations of historians who continue to contemplate the issues of agency and subjectivity that remained unsettled in the wake of the “linguistic turn.” Cohen, historian and anthropologist of Africa, explored Lüdtke’s placement of itineraries of experience at the center of the project of historical anthropology. Eley’s contribution emphasized Alf Lüdtke’s place in the politics of knowledge in German history, tracing the genealogies of Alltagsgeschichte in the theory of needs and also noting its significance in laying the groundwork for a history of emotions. David Crew took stock of Alf Lüdtke’s important contributions to visual history, particularly his study of photography in the history of the twentieth century as presented in the co-edited volume, Die DDR im Bild: Zum Gebrauch der Photographie im anderen deutschen Staat (2004) and the expansion of the term Eigensinn to encompass visual Eigensinn.
The next panel, “Notes from the Field: Reading Power and/in the Everyday,” featured MAUREEN HEALY, whose paper, “In Search of Little Stories: Confessions of a Lost Alltags-Historian,” discussed the relevance of Alltagsgeschichte to her new project on “The Turks in Central European Historical Memory.” In his paper, “Extraordinary Reports on Everyday Life,” HARRY LIEBERSOHN illuminated understandings of everyday life in the ethnographic writings of Karl Bücher and Bronislaw Malinowski. KATHERINE PENCE’s analysis of “Consumer Politics and Everyday Negotiations of Power” analyzed the links between local everydayness and broader global or transnational contexts that underpin her study of coffee consumption in twentieth-century Germany. GERALD SIDER’s paper, “Anthropology, History, and the Problem of Everyday Life,” examined the place of power, violence, and everyday life in his study of the economies of race and labor in Maxton, North Carolina. As commentator on this panel, ALF LÜDTKE suggested that we expand the term “field” to include “archive,” and posed questions that probed the relationship between the routinized and the spectacular in everyday life.
Friday afternoon’s closing panel, on “Eigensinn, Selfhood and Subjectivity,” included papers by ANDREW BERGERSON, MARTI LYBECK, and JAN PALMOWSKI. Bergerson’s co-authored analysis of “The German Sisyphus” posited an alternative understanding of Eigensinn as a notion of modern selfhood that crucially involves self-deception and ironic enactment, especially in the context of remembering the Nazi past. Marti Lybeck’s paper, “Sex Talk: Power and Honor among Women Civil Servants in Weimar Germany,” explored the realm of informal communication, particularly sexual gossip, as it shaped honor, exertion of power, and subjectivities in the gendered workplace. Jan Palmowski’s paper on “Power and Community in the GDR: Eigen-Sinn and Private Transcript,” took the example of citizens’ agency vis à vis the state in the Mecklenburg town of Dabel in order to probe the private transcripts fashioned in the course of individual and local actions and the ways in which they constituted power. EVE ROSENHAFT’s comment compared and contrasted the different notions of Eigensinn at play in the three papers, noting the shared interest of the panelists in the terms of selfhood and subjectivity and the consensus that Eigensinn, refigured in terms of performance, does not always encompass subversion.
The topic of Saturday morning’s panel, “Violence, Temporality, and Transformations of the Everyday,” was taken up by MANUELA ACHILLES, PETER LOEWENBERG, and SCOTT SPECTOR. Achilles’s paper, “Power, Violence, and the State in Weimar Germany,” probed the explosive emotions unleashed by nationalist murders, both on the part of pro-republican citizens and on that of the state in response to the “masses.” Loewenberg’s paper, “9-10 November in Modern German History: Anniversary Reversal and Undoing,” not only addressed the significance of this anniversary in German history, but also the agency that underpinned the events of November 9, 1938, Reichskristallnacht, in particular. Spector’s contribution, “Against ‘Assimilation.’ Lived German Jewishness 1867-1938,” offered insightful methodological reflection on the categories of identity and subjectivity among German Jews amidst the politics of assimilation, with specific reference to case studies of Gershom Scholem and Jakob Wassermann. Although MICHAEL GEYER was unable to attend the conference due to illness, his paper, “Die eigensinnigen Toten,” which examined the revival of a funeral culture and funerary rituals surrounding Americans killed in the Iraq war, was included in the discussion. DAVID CREW’s comment on this panel noted the papers’ shared interest in the politics of emotion, interiority, and subjectivity and their embeddedness in violence (or threats of violence).
On Saturday afternoon, the participants turned their attention to an analysis of the “Everyday under States of Exception.” Ph.D.-candidate ANNE BERG’s paper, “Nazi Hegemony, Film, and Everyday Life in Hamburg,” probed the usefulness of everyday life history to her ongoing study of cinema in Hamburg during the Second World War, in which the relationship between the everyday and the exceptional were central. In his paper, “Weimar as Text: Franz Goell’s Autobiographies,” PETER FRITZSCHE offered compelling insights into the fragmented and fractured self of “graphomaniac” Franz Goell, whose everyday life was recorded in three genres of autobiographical texts: the diary, household account books, and a memoir. HEIKKI LEMPA’s analysis of “Dietetics as Political Autonomy” noted the importance of dietetics in shaping notions of Lebensordnung among the German educated middle classes from 1790-1890, but also suggested that dietetics fostered its own eigensinnig understandings of bodily autonomy. The state of exception analyzed in ROBERTA PERGHER’s paper was that of Italian fascism and the Eigensinn of settlers who sought to extend Italian rule to its borderlands and colonies, and in so doing sidestepped, ignored, or circumvented many of the state’s rules and expectations. ULRIKE WECKEL compared and contrasted the different sites of Eigensinn reflected in this panel, ranging from the middle-class body to the cinema in wartime to settler cultures in fascist Italy and the diaries of a meticulous observer of both politics and the self in Weimar Germany.
The last set of presentations on Saturday afternoon explored “Power, Policing, and the Everyday” in realms “beyond the state.” ANNEMARIE SAMMARTINO’s paper, “Taking Marzahn Seriously: Reflections on Community in the Plattenbau,” pursued the possibilities for and obstacles to everyday experiences of community among residents of Marzahn’s Plattenbauen in the former GDR. Ph.D.-candidate ALICE WEINREB’s paper, “The Powers of Hunger: the Role of the ‘Hunger Years’ in Negotiating Past and Future in Germany, 1945-49,” explicated the conflicted meanings of hunger in the years of reconstruction and analyzed how the framework of collective hunger informed notions of community, nation, and the everyday into the 1950s. In a paper entitled “Looking for Russian Murderers in Berlin,” PAUL STEEGE presented the results of “an ordinary criminal case” from December 1941, analyzing the testimony of German witnesses for their perceptions of foreign laborers and Russian POWs as a means to probe the differences between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, between ordinary and extraordinary violence amidst war. DOROTHEE WIERLING approached the question of Russians in Germany from a different angle in her paper, “Germans from Russia – Russians in Germany.” She assessed their “double existence” of both belonging and being “other,” and compared the experiences of different generations of Russian immigrants on the basis of oral interviews. ANDREW BERGERSON’s comments took stock of the individual and collective claims to victimhood, whether of postwar hunger, impersonal housing projects, conscripted foreign workers, or ethnic German immigrants from Russia, noting also the importance of space, distance, and movement/migrations in the papers for this panel.
The closing session of the conference offered an opportunity for the participants to reflect on the recurrent themes of our discussion, including the possibilities and limits of Alltagsgeschichte: If everyday perspectives shape many different histories now, how subversive or creative is it today? How has everyday life history reinforced or helped to dissolve the boundaries between and among social, cultural and political history? In the face of an increasingly transnational field, can Alltagsgeschichte be conceived as a transnational inquiry despite its close attention to specific empirical settings? How do the fragmented and fractured stories of everyday life change the kinds of narratives historians compose? Do they provide mere details or compel a rewriting of our narratives? What is the relationship between key concepts of Alltagsgeschichte and the history of emotions or the notions of subjectivity and agency? We hope to have the chance to pursue these questions and others at a follow-up conference, which would take place in Europe in 2008, with an eye to the publication of a volume of essays.
The symposium also prompted the creation of an inventive and attractive website (http://eihs-online.net/luedtke), which provided an overview of Alf Lüdtke’s intellectual biography and served as a gateway to the conference papers and other information for participants. Thanks to the design skills of Ph.D.-candidate PETER LAWLESS, the website also now serves as an archive for the symposium, which will be particularly useful in the event of a follow-up conference and/or the compilation of a volume of essays on the basis of these conference papers.
On a sad note, the symposium was marked by the death of DAPHNE BERDAHL, anthropologist of Germany from the University of Minnesota and close colleague and friend of Alf and Helga Lüdtke and many other symposium participants. Daphne had been part of the symposium since its inception and corresponded with us about it until weeks before her death of cancer on October 5, 2007.
Kurzübersicht:
Opening session/Eisenberg Institute Friday Workshop:
Alf Lüdtke: Reflections on Methods and Meanings of Everyday Life History
Carola Dietze, German Historical Institute
Kathleen Canning, University of Michigan
David Crew, University of Texas
David William Cohen, University of Michigan
Geoff Eley, University of Michigan
Notes from the Field: Reading Power and/in the Everyday
Chair: Kathleen Canning
Maureen Healy, Oregon State/Lewis & Clark
“In Search of Little Stories: Confessions of a Lost Alltags-Historian”
Harry Liebersohn, University of Illinois
“Extraordinary Reports on Everyday Life: Reflections from the Ethnographic Field”
Katherine Pence, Baruch College
“Consumer Politics and Everyday Negotiations of Power”
Gerald Sider, CUNY Graduate Center
“Anthropology, History, and the Problem of Everyday Life”
Respondent: Alf Lüdtke, University of Erfurt
Eigensinn, Selfhood, and Subjectivity
Chair: Geoff Eley
Andrew Bergerson, University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO
“The German Sisyphus”
Marti Lybeck, University of Michigan
“Sex Talk: Power and Honor among Women Civil Servants in Weimar Germany”
Jan Palmowski, Kings College, London:
“Power and Community: Eigen-Sinn and Private Transcripts”
Respondent: Eve Rosenhaft, University of Liverpool
Violence, Temporality, and Transformations of the Everyday
Chair: Scott Spector
Manuela Achilles, University of Virginia
“Violence, Power, and the State in Weimar Germany”
Peter Loewenberg, UCLA
“9-10 November in Modern German History: Anniversary Reversal and Undoing”
Scott Spector, University of Michigan
“Against ‘Assimilation’: Lived German-Jewishness 1867-1938”
Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
“Die eigensinnigen Toten”
Respondent: David Crew
Analyzing the Everyday under States of Exception
Anne Berg, University of Michigan
“Nazi Hegemony, Film, and Everyday Life in Hamburg”
Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
“Weimar as Text: Franz Goell’s Autobiographies”
Heikki Lempa, Moravian College
“Dietetics and the Autonomy of the Body in Nineteenth Century Germany”
Roberta Pergher, University of Michigan
“Emissaries of the Nation: Settlers’ Eigensinn in the Construction of a Fascist Empire”
Respondent: Ulrike Weckel
Beyond the State: Power, Policing and the Everyday?
Chair: Carola Dietze
Annemarie Sammartino, Oberlin College
“Taking Marzahn Seriously: Reflections on Community in the Plattenbau”
Alice Weinreb, University of Michigan
“The Powers of Hunger: the Role of the ‘Hunger Years’ in Negotiating Past and Future in Germany, 1945-49”
Paul Steege, Villanova University
“Looking for Russian Murderers in Berlin: An “Ordinary” Criminal Case
Dorothee Wierling, Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg
“Germans from Russia—Russians in Germany: The Problem of the ‘Russlandsdeutsche’”
Respondent: Andrew Bergerson
Final Round-Up:
Chair: Helmut Puff, University of Michigan
Alf Lüdtke, Universität Erfurt
Jan Palmowski, Kings College, London
Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
Dorothee Wierling, Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg