The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Ed. by Alf Lüdtke. Transl. by William Templer. [Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History.] Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995. xiii, 318 pp. $49.50; £37.30. (Paper: $18.95; £15.95.)

Alf Lüdtke’s volume on everyday life brings to the English-speaking audience a range of writings published earlier in German. Alltagsgeschichte, or the study of everyday life, emerged in Germany in the mid-1970s and by the 1980s there was a virtual flood of literature on the theme both inside and outside academia. In the context of the German social sciences, Alltagsgeschichte was an oppositional movement in the same way as people’s history was in the nineteenth century. ln many ways the emergence of Alltagsgeschichte in Germany in the 1980s did for the social sciences what the discovery of the common people did almost two centuries ago. By celebrating the common people Herder and his contemporaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century valorized tradition against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason. By shifting the historian’s gaze to the realm of the everyday, Lüdtke and others critique teleological frameworks which focus on broader structures and processes of change. But just as people’s history was appropriated in different ways within different historiographical traditions, there is a heterogeneity of perspectives on everyday life. Many of the themes on which studies of everyday life focus – family, gender, sexuality, religion and community – became an important part of the social history agenda in the 1960s. In a sense much of what Alltagsgeschichte did in Germany was already being done within the world of Anglo-American social history by Thompson and others who saw class as an experience rather than as a structure and viewed history from the bottom up. If Thompson sought to recover the experiences of those who lived through the Industrial Revolution, studies of everyday life in Germany have similarly made visible the everyday historical realities under the Third Reich, the inner workings of the regime, and the popular feelings and sentiments which implicated the people in the exercise of Nazi power. Yet it would be wrong to read in these essays simple rearticulations of Thompsonian ideas. The term ‘‘everyday’’ here acquires a heuristic value, it is elevated from a descriptive to a conceptual category, categories like ‘‘experience’’ are problematized; and post-modernist insights are used to deepen the concerns of English social history. The emphasis of Alltagsgeschichte historians, like many contemporary critics of modernist frames, is on a ‘‘decentred’’ analysis, suggesting that it is possible for contradictory moments to coexist with, without necessarily being linked to, each other. Lüdtke and other contributors to this volume question conventional notions of what constitutes a ‘‘centre’’ without ignoring the interlinkage between the particular and the general, between specific situations and broader processes of change. Works on everyday life are often imprisoned within a set of conceptual dichotomies. In a general sense the everyday has been seen as a realm away from the public arena and the world of formal politics; as a sphere which embodies the repetitive and the non-eventful in contrast to the dynamism of the non-everyday. The essays in this volume seek to question some of these polarities. Lüdtke shows the fluidity of distinctions between the public and private, the personal and political; when the personal is