of scholarlyinterest and theoretical value.Alltagsgeschichteplayedanimportant
role in the establishment ofanew public history through its interest in local
knowledgesand affinityfor oral histories. The popular history workshops with
their emphasis on history from below and the musealization of the ageofindus-
trialization (e.g., European Route of Industrial Heritage)are inconceivable with-
out these shifts in perspective.Byvalidating individualvoices and everydaycon-
cerns, Alltagsgeschichteposed afundamental challengetoboththe master
narratives of class and the structural categories favored by social historians.
Against the privileging of labor as the basis of classidentities and the assump-
tion ofalinearprocess of class socialization, Lüdtkeintroduced the notion of
Eigensinn(usuallytranslated as obstinacy)“to make visible the diverse and con-
tradictory and, aboveall, not-connected forms of individual behavior behind the
myth of the‘proletariat.’”¹⁷
II
Historians continue to publish innovative research on the German workingclass,
and often do so in dialogue with the theoretical interventions made by feminist
theory,new historicism, postcolonial studies, and so forth. By contrast, working-
class culture and the culture of socialism have more or less disappeared from
German culturalstudies in the Anglo-Americancontext,and even more so, in
Germanywheretraditionalphilology, literaryhistory,and philosophical, formal-
ist,and theoretical approaches predominate. The fact that the monographs writ-
ten in the name ofahighlypoliticizedkritische Germanistikhave left almostno
traces in current research questions confirms the essentiallyconservative nature
of the university as an institution and atteststo the discipline’shegemonic func-
tion and, closelyrelated,to its almostobligatory crises of legitimacy. Anglo-
AmericanGermanstudies have followedaslightlydifferent pattern that has re-
sulted in cultural studies adaptations of ideologycritique in the tradition of the
Frankfurt School and under the influenceoftheories of hegemony, resistance,
and subversion developed by British culturalstudies.With similarlyproblematic
consequences, the transformation of the humanities in response to various social
movements and largerculturaldevelopments hasresulted in the proliferation of
simultaneouslyessentialist and constructivist discourses of identity andarelat-
Alf Lüdtke,Eigen-Sinn:Fabrikalltag,Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vomKaiserreich bis in
denFaschismus(Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1993), 13.For acritical response, see Detlev Peukert,“Ar-
beiteralltag: Mode oder Methode?,”inArbeiteralltag in Stadt und Land. NeueWege der Ge-
schichtsschreibung,ed. HeikoHaumann (Berlin: Argument,1982),8–39.
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 347