Various attempts have been made to bring to the attention of a wider historical audience the debates that have taken place among intellectual historians over the past decade. Such summaries may soon be in need of some updating. Insofar as many of these discussions have been inspired by developments among our colleagues in departments of literature, it is worth noting that those scholars likewise have engaged in heated exchanges. Since those debates seem to have resulted in a triumph of “history,” we may be looking forward to new modes of argument among intellectual and cultural historians as well. This essay will attempt to present a summary of the issues within poststructuralism that induced this turn to a “new historicism” in departments of literature, and it will conclude by offering some suggestions about the ways in which this tendency might be useful to the study of the German past.

As we enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.

There is an insatiable demand in the Federal Republic for accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Just about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the word Alltag in its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs, Volkshochschulen and youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” (Geschichtswerkstätten), inspired by the leftist-populism of the Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm, Alltagsgeschichte has not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses (die Vielen). Indeed, Alltagsgeschichte has challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of Strukturgeschichte within the German historical “guild” (Zunft) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research. Alltagsgeschichte originally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history (Strukturgeschichte) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

During the last generation the writing of social history has taken an ironic turn. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, it literally exploded across the scholarly landscape as the most dynamic and innovative form of historiography. Many competing conceptions including the French Annales school, the American quantitative social science history (QUASSH), the British Marxist history of society, and the emerging German Gesellschaftsgeschichte combined to overthrow the Rankean paradigm. These diverse programs, nevertheless, showed broad agreement in exploring the mute masses, expanding the scope of inquiry to new topics such as family and education, seeking a theoretical orientation, experimenting with fresh methods such as quantification or oral history, and supporting some form of progressive politics. This agenda was even reflected in T-shirt slogans such as “history from the bottom up,” showing a fat behind, or “bottoms-up history,” depicting raised beer steins. For many of the participants, there was an exciting sense of fresh departures and of camaraderie in an effort at once intellectually daring and politically committed.

This quotation fits the conference only if we agree that “still” connotes sitting, not silence. The “Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique” were voiced with only hints of controversy. All who might have disagreed were outside the room, though not necessarily excluded from the debate. Participants seemed to agree that old “fixities” had to be re-evaluated in the light of postmodern challenges. “Past and future” met in the guise of Young Turks and older veterans. Sessions of redefining and rethinking, as these were, hardly “ascend” to action, but neither were they content with “arrest” or “decline.” Eliot, the modernist, speaks to postmodern issues.