The general statement that the need for sleep and the concrete process of sleeping can be seen as immutable, timeless anthropological constants seems at first glance to make any historical research about sleep pointless. However, there are many good reasons to choose sleep as a topic of historical research. The perception of sleeping, its status, its regime, and its practices are inextricably bound up with the structures of the society in which the sleeper lives.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, the conditions for sleeping fundamentally changed as a result of industrialization, altering the organization of labour and everyday life. This transformation of society brought with it essential changes in the perception and management of time, transforming the experience of day and night. Simultaneously, various experts began to scrutinize the phenomenon of sleep based on new methods and ideas and tried to incorporate the “secret” of sleeping into the “rationalized” world. From its inception, one of the main purposes of „sleep research“ has been to prepare the individual human being for the demands of the developing Industrial Society: Sleep disorders were a threat to happiness and healthiness, but also to the performance and productivity of individuals and society as a whole. Therefore, experts as well as the sleepers themselves have sought rules for “good”, “natural”, “necessary”, “efficient”, and “productive” sleep.

At the same time, sleep resisted any attempts to measure it, to control it, or even to understand it. On the contrary, sleep has always offered to the individual the possibility of disengaging from the surrounding society. Thus, the history of sleep not only helps us to analyze more precisely the processes of “economization” and “subjectivization” that characterize modern societies, it also reveals the recalcitrant and irrational moments within the history of Modernity, which is often still spun as a story of progress and successful rationalization. This interdisciplinary conference will address the methodological challenges of a “history of sleep” as well as discuss the cultural circumstances of sleep, the social and economic conditions that have shaped sleep and the individual sleeper in the context of the concrete historical situation.

The Conference is generously sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.