As i grew older i thought the best part of my life was over then Shirt
The recent ‘cultural turn’ can first of all be understood immanently, that is intra-academically. In its various manifestations, social history continued in the tradition of an oppositional approach against the historical mainstream. Small wonder that it has attracted attacks from every new wave of critical and revisionist historians as well as the revival of older (biographic, narrative) forms of historical writing. The concept of gender has in many countries been at the forefront of debates around structure and agency, macrosociological categories and deconstructivist criticism. Particularly in Germany, a fierce debate with aspects of a generation conflict divided the ‘history of society’ embodied in the Bielefeld school of Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Iggers 1975, Kocka 1986, Wehler 1987–1995) and the ‘history of everyday life’ (Alltagsgeschichte) represented by grassroots history workshops and a number of younger academics at the margin of the profession (Ludtke 1995).
As i grew older i thought the best part of my life was over then Shirt
The specificities of the social history the ‘Bielefeld School’ developed as their own style of historiography are strongly related to the intellectual situation of German historiography after the defeat of Nazism and German imperialism in 1945. The division of Germany and the political confrontation of the Cold War contributed to the survival of a (both politically and methodologically) conservative mainstream in West German historiography. As a result the international rise of new themes and methods of historical research had no or very limited effect on West German scholarship after 1945 (Berger, 2011). Neither the Annales School nor the American or British social history found many followers in both Germanies. Instead, orthodox Marxist–Leninist historiography (in East Germany) and a ‘Strukturgeschichte’ informed by the program of the Völkisch historiography of the interwar years were the main varieties of social history available in Germany till the early 1960s (Etzemüller, 2002).
