ABSTRACT
In doing the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state. Inquiry into the history of everyday life points up the extent to which most "average people" actually clung to the Nazi regime in their concern to survive. The orientation, which takes its conceptual cues from the social thought of Arnold Gehlen, reflects the continuity of that older conceptualization of social history viewed as "structural history", where stress was placed on the "structure" of social forms and configurations. The reconstructions in the history of everyday life involve more than situations recurrent in the daily struggle for survival. By contrast, Alltagsgeschichte – conceived as the history of everyday behavior and experience – does not try to raise fundamental secular change to a level detached from human agents, occurring behind their backs, as it were.
