Everyday life in Nazi Germany

At a conference in 2007 in his honour at the University of Michigan, Alf Lüdtke commented that there are many different ways to research the history of everyday life: its practitioners are still more united by the questions they ask than by how they seek their answers. Its pluralism, and its marginality, has allowed Alltagsgeschichte to serve as a conduit for epistemological innovation into modern German history from other fields, such as the linguistic, postmodern, cultural and spatial turns. Yet the characteristically eigensinnig lack of consensus can make it challenging for individual scholars to explain precisely what they mean by Alltagsgeschichte to their readers. In this issue, German History is pleased to bring together an international panel of distinguished historians who are either practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte or whose scholarship has been significantly influenced by it: Elissa Mailänder Koslov (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen), Gideon Reuveni (University of Melbourne), Paul Steege (Villanova University), and Dennis Sweeney (University of Alberta). Since the 1960s, historians of everyday life have investigated many different periods of German history, but none so much as the Nazi era. It seems fitting then to focus this Forum on the brown elephant in the room. The contributors have been asked to think about how the history of everyday life has altered our interpretations of the Third Reich in particular and modern German history more broadly. But rather than starting with a framing question from the moderator, we begin instead with the sceptical doubts of a panellist. It would hardly be a Forum on Alltagsgeschichte without unruly acts of reappropriation. Andrew Stuart Bergerson (University of Missouri–Kansas City) moderates the discussion.