Alf Ludtke – författare

This book focuses on the way in which people were treated by the police and military guards in nineteenth-century Prussia, in the general context of Prussian bureaucratic development. It shows how the daily routine of officialdom supported and promoted an image of the police state, which placed the emphasis on violent methods in dealing with the 'subjects' of those in authority. The main argument of the book discusses the methods and standards of everyday policing and the consequential creation of a classe dangereuse. The author also shows how military routines were adopted by civilian officials and policemen. Thus by the middle of the century a military type of policing had become widespread and generally unquestioned by high-ranking officials or ministers. The book therefore offers an understanding of the repressive side of the Prussian and German state since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, emerged during the 1980s as the most interesting new field among West German historians and, more recently, their East German colleagues. Partly in reaction to the modernization theory pervading West German social history in the 1970s, practitioners of alltagsgeschichte stressed the complexities of popular experience, paying particular attention, for instance, to the relationship of the German working class to Nazism. Now the first English translation of a key volume of essays (Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen) presents this approach and shows how it cuts across the boundaries of established disciplines. The result is a work of great methodological, theoretical, and historiographical significance as well as a substantive contribution to German studies. Introduced by Alf Ludtke, the volume includes two empirical essays, one by Lutz Niethammer on life courses of East Germans after 1945 and one by Ludtke on modes of accepting fascism among German workers.The remaining five essays are theoretical: Hans Medick writes on ethnological ways of knowledge as a challenge to social history; Peter Schottler, on mentalities, ideologies, and discourses and alltagsgeschichte; Dorothee Wierling, on gender relations and alltagsgeschichte; Wolfgang Kaschuba, on popular culture and workers' culture as symbolic orders; and Harald Dehne on the challenge alltagsgeschichte posed for Marxist-Leninist historiography in East Germany.

Oppression and violence are often cited as the pivotal aspects of modern dictatorships, but it is the collusion of large majorities that enable these regimes to function. The desire for a better life and a powerful national, if not imperial community provide the basis for the many forms of people's cooperation explored in this volume.

Die Polizei repräsentiert wie kaum eine andere Institution das staatliche Gewaltmonopol. Doch was ist damit konkret gemeint? Die historische Erkundung zeigt, dass auch in der neuesten Zeit „Polizei“, „Gewaltmonopol“ und „Staat“ sehr unterschiedlich verstanden werden. Entscheidend für das Profil staatlicher Autorität und Durchsetzungsmacht sind dabei weniger abstrakte Strukturen und gesichtslose Apparate, als die sozialen Praktiken der Akteure: der Polizei, anderer Institutionen, aber auch des Publikums. Umstritten bleiben zumal die Formen der Androhung und des Einsatzes polizeilicher Gewalt. Die Beiträge des Bandes widmen sich in exemplarischen Fallstudien unterschiedlichen Praktiken wie Deutungen des Polizierens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.