Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century, by Leif Jerram

Abstract

As Leif Jerram rightly points out in this book, the past is a ‘messy’ place. When macro-historical events and narratives—policies, broad social and cultural processes and movements and so on—are viewed under a micro(history)scope, they are often shown to have played out not in a neat, linear trajectory but in uneven, incomplete, patchwork and contingent ways. As historians, he seems to suggest, we need to get our hands messier. Largely a synthesis of often very current research, Jerram’s work surveys European urban life in the previous century. It is divided into chapters covering different themes and categories: politics; women; culture; sexuality. A further chapter deviates both from the thematic structure and the viewing of history from the ‘bottom up’; it examines urban planning as ‘the genius of the twentieth century’. Above all, Jerram’s mission (and it does feel like one) is to redress what he sees as historians’ insistence on seeing history as happening at the level of great—and rather impersonal—events and movements, rather than at ground level, in the streets, in the home and to, as well as by, ‘ordinary’ people. He argues that, in our rush to ask ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the past, we have neglected to ask ‘where’; that is, we have ignored that the past took place, literally. He suggests that we need to supplement more conventional historical accounts with a focus on physically locating the past, in the urban streets, squares, dance- and music-halls, bars and nightclubs and on the bodies of the people who inhabited and passed through them. The city is not only the or a key unit of experience—i.e. the ‘level’ at which great global or national events and movements are actually experienced: by focusing our lens on the city, we see both how people used and shaped their environments as well as how they experienced and shaped the policies, practices and ideas that they encountered there, or that were imposed upon them. As he says, there is a ‘two-way link between “high politics” and “street politics”’.