Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth-century Germany

Abstract

Until the mid-1970s the social history of the Third Reich was a terra incognita. Since then it has become an extensively explored but highly contested terrain. Everyday life in all its diversity and complexity has been thickly described and redescribed. We have innumerable studies of the changing nature of work and attitudes toward it, both official and unofficial. Working-class sociability on and off the shopfloor, the leisure activities of women and men, the changing face of village politics and office interactions, the experiences of those who joined Nazi organisations and those who distanced themselves from them have all been reconstructed. More recently the policies toward and experiences of women as well as the Nazis' preoccupation with gender issues have been investigated. While the initial body of work focused primarily on the period from 1933–1939, more recent studies concentrate on the war and immediate post-war era or span the years from the mid- and late 1920s to the mid-1930s. The social history of Nazi Germany has been written primarily by leftists, feminists, and proponents of Alltagsgeschichte or the history of everyday life – three contentious and controversial groups. From its inception, the social history of Nazi Germany, understood as history from below, the history of the inarticulate and marginalised, the history of that which was unpolitical or not traditionally considered political, aimed to be methodologically unconventional, theoretically unorthodox, and politically provocative.