Abstract

During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect. Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigates Alltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work “on the ground.”

Leonard Schmieding is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global and Trans-Regional History at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Leipzig in 2011 with a dissertation on hip-hop culture in the German Democratic Republic that has since been published as “Das ist unsere Party:” HipHop in der DDR (2014). He has curated a number of public history programs in Germany and the United States, and is currently researching immigrant food cultures among Germans in San Francisco.

“As a whole, this volume offers an innovative contribution to the continuity problem of German history in the 20th century…The editors and their authors have succeeded in taking their readership onto an unconventional and intellectually often fascinating journey into German everyday life, and not only historically, which allows fascinating and fresh insights.” • Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft

“The studies collected in this fascinating ‘experiment in collaborative scholarship’ are richly empirical, brimming with compelling insights, and thought-provoking in their use of stories from everyday life to illuminate extremely important aspects of the German experience in the twentieth century and its decisive epochs. Overall, it constitutes a major contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship of modern Germany and Europe.” • Dennis Sweeney, University of Alberta

Andrew Stuart Bergerson is Professor of History and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the author of Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: the Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (2004); and The Happy Burden of History: From Sovereign Impunity to Historical Responsibility (2011) with K. Scott Baker, Clancy Martin, and Steve Ostovich. He is currently one of the project leaders for Trug und Schein: Ein Briefwechsel (www.trugundschein.org), an intermedial project in the public humanities.

Ruptures in the Everyday was jointly written by ATG26, a scholarly collective comprising the following authors:
Jonathan Bach, Andrew Stuart Bergerson (lead author), Susanne Beer, Mark E. Blum, Michaela Christ, Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, Mary Fulbrook, Eva Giloi, Thomas Gurr, Jason Johnson, Craig Koslofsky, Dani Kranz, Phil Leask, Wendy Lower, Elissa Mailänder, Josie McLellan, Alexandra Oeser, Steve Ostovich, Will Rall, Leonard Schmieding (lead author), Johannes Schwartz, Sara Ann Sewell, Paul Steege, Maximilian Strnad, Julia Timpe, Heléna Tóth