ALTHOUGH JOHANNES SCHERR (1817–86) is one of the forgotten authors of the German nineteenth century, he was in his lifetime a bestselling writer whose remarkable popularity earned him a reputation unequaled among his contemporaries. There are tentative signs of his rediscovery by scholars. Scherr was one of many exponents of a kind of historical writing that thrived in the German nineteenth century, attracting large numbers of readers who sought an alternative to histories that emphasized the deeds of rulers and military leaders. This alternative kind of history is called Kulturgeschichte, the history of culture, and its most famous exponent was Jacob Burckhardt, the celebrated author of Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860). Yet Burckhardt was but the most luminous star in a galaxy of historians writing about culture. What motivated such authors to choose culture over politics, and why were so many readers attracted to the alternative they offered? These were the questions that I set out to answer, and in my search for the answers I was sustained by my own sense of the value of the cultural alternative in historical writing. To write about culture rather than politics (or wars), I reasoned, was to evoke a whole context in which people normally excluded from history books—workers and women— became visible as the creators of value and the agents of continuity and change. Nineteenth-century readers must have felt liberated by histories that were about them and not merely about the captains and kings, I surmised.

Cultural history is today not usually perceived in the emancipatory and socially inclusive sense it held for authors and readers in the nineteenth century. More often it is taken to mean the history of accomplishments in the fine arts and literature. This is what the American historian Roy Wagner has memorably called the “opera house” sense of culture— culture as something that “cultivated” persons have. In his book What Is Cultural History? Peter Burke reinforces this conception when he speaks of a “classic” period of cultural history between 1850 and 1950, classic also “in the sense of the time when cultural historians concentrated on the history of the classics, a ‘canon’ of masterpieces of art, literature, philosophy and science.”