From Structuralism to Culturalism: The Protracted German Reception ofThe Making of the English Working Classand its Actuality Reassessed from a Post-Cold War Perspective

Abstract

AbstractBased on the author’s experience as one of the German translators ofThe Making, this article lays out its protracted and contradictory reception in Germany. When E.P. Thompson’smagnum opuswas published fifty years ago, German scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain failed to take note of it for several years. The relatively muted reception in West Germany during the 1970s was marked by its dismissal as theory-lacking and “subjectivist”. Examining the contrasting contexts of postwar Britain, with its popular anti-fascist experience, and post-fascist West Germany helps to understand why Thompson’s “empirical idiom” of class history failed to strike a chord at the time with leading representatives of the new generation of “progressive” social historians in Germany and a broader reading public. It was only with the arrival ofAlltagsgeschichte, feminist history, and, more generally, the cultural turn in humanities thatThe Makingand its German translation became a canonical point of reference both in working-class history and the wider humanities. A brief epilogue discusses its lasting potential for a historical understanding of today’s processes of post-Cold War class formation and human rights struggles.