The Emotional Side of Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany (Theory and Example)

Abstract

Fora long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.