David F. Crew

Alltagsgeschichte : A New Social History “From Below”?

There is an insatiable demand in the Federal Republic for accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Just about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the word Alltag in its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs, Volkshochschulen and youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” ( Geschichtswerkstatten ), inspired by the leftist-populism of the Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm, Alltagsgeschichte has not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses ( die Vielen ). Indeed, Alltagsgeschichte has challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of Strukturgeschichte within the German historical “guild” ( Zunft ) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research. Alltagsgeschichte originally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history ( Strukturgeschichte ) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

This is the first book in English to examine the reception, in both the west and the east of Germany between 1945 and 1955, of the returning POWs released from Soviet captivity. With commendable clarity, it seeks to understand this reception within the context of the political, social, and cultural discourses prevalent at the time. For all the political and ideological differences between West and East Germany, both states attempted, in their own ways, to make propaganda of the returning soldiers. In the West, they were represented not as defeated soldiers returning from a genocidal war, but as victims of Soviet captivity whose courage transcended their suffering. In the East, they were represented as men enlightened by the antifascist ideals to which they had been exposed in captivity. In neither state was there an inclination to dwell on the unfortunate fact of the participation of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in a criminal war.