ingstoadvancesociological perspectivesonsocial stratification over explicitly
Marxist definitionsofclass. Aside fromafew exceptions, the Marxist approaches
taken by British historians and the social history approachesfavored by German
historians producedstarklydifferent accounts of nineteenth centuryworking-
class culture. In theFederal Republic, the 1980s and 1990sweredominated by
detail-rich social histories inspired by the new critical social sciences,with
some scholars publishing comprehensive overviews of particular periods, as
did HeinrichAugust Winkler in his enormous three-volume history of theWeimar
Republic, and with others focusingonparticular regions,asdid KlausTenfelde
in his studies on provincialBavaria and theRuhr region.¹⁵As the best-known
representative of the Bielefeld School, JürgenKockacontributedvoluminous
studies on the history of wagelabor and class formation in the nineteenth
and earlytwentieth centuries.¹⁶The processofproletarization, usually defined
as downward mobility, allowedKocka and othersto studyclass formationsat
the intersection of work and life andto follow their ongoingtransformation in
new social structures and forms of sociability.Similar processes have been ex-
aminedthrough the changingnatureoffamily,neighborhood, and urban life
and extended to the tastes and attitudes that exist outside the workingworld.
One perhaps unintended consequenceofthis abundance of case studies has
beenagrowingdifficulty of demarcatingthe conceptual terrain identified with
the workingclass.
The new social history promoted by the Bielefeld School since the 1970shas
relied heavilyonmodernization theory to arrive at amoredynamic understand-
ing of modernclass society and usedthe rich studyofsocial movements to sup-
port or disprovesome of the arguments made in conjunction with the debate
aboutaGermanSonderweg(unique path) of historicaldevelopment.Bycontrast,
the project ofAlltagsgeschichte(history of everydaylife) initiatedbyAlf Lüdtke
has drawnattention to the lifeworld of the workingclass, making everything,
from daily diets and furnishingstogroup sports and annual festivals,asubject
Forreferences,see HeinrichAugust Winkler,Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in derWeimarer
Republik,3vols: Vol. 1:Vonder Revolution zur Stabilisierung,1918 bis 19 24 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984);
Vol. 2:Der Schein der Normalität, 1924 bis 1930(Berlin: Dietz, 1985);Vol. 3:DerWegindie Ka-
tastrophe,1930 bis 1933(Berlin: Dietz, 1987).Fortwo local studies,see KlausTenfelde,Proletari-
sche Provinz. Radikalisierung und Widerstand in Penzberg/Oberbayern 1900– 1945 (Munich: Old-
enbourg, 1982) andSozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19.Jahrhundert(Bonn:
VerlagNeue Gesellschaft,1981).
See JürgenKocka,Lohnarbeit und Klassenbildung:Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutsch-
land 1800– 1875 (Berlin: Dietz, 1983);Arbeitsverhältnisseund Arbeiterexistenzen: Grundlagen der
Klassenbildung im 19.Jahrhundert(Bonn: Dietz, 1990); andKlassengesellschaftimKrieg:Deut-
sche Sozialgeschichte 1914– 1918 ,sec. ed.(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht,2011).
346 Afterword