Andrew Stuart Bergerson Livres

Germans are often accused of failing to take responsibility for Nazi crimes, but what precisely should ordinary people do differently? Indeed, scholars have yet to outline viable alternatives for how any of us should respond to terror and genocide. And because of the way they compartmentalize everyday life, our discipline-bound analyses often disguise more than they illuminate. Written by a historian, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, The Happy Burden of History takes an integrative approach to the problem of responsible selfhood. Exploring the lives and letters of ordinary and intellectual Germans who faced the ethical challenges of the Third Reich, it focuses on five typical tools for cultivating the modern self: myths, lies, non-conformity, irony, and modeling. The authors carefully dissect the ways in which ordinary and intellectual Germans excused their violent claims to mastery with a sense of ‘sovereign impunity.’ They then recuperate the same strategies of selfhood for our contemporary world, but in ways that are self-critical and humble. The book shows how viewing this problem from within everyday life can empower and encourage us to bear the burden of historical responsibility ‑ and be happy doing so.

Describes how the townspeople of Hildesheim went about their lives and reacted to events during the Nazi era, arguing that ordinary Germans made Germany and Europe more fascist, more racist, and more modern.

During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect. Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigates Alltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work “on the ground.”

Nationalsozialismus in alltäglichen Interaktionen ist eine aufschlussreiche und detaillierte Untersuchung des Alltagslebens im Hildesheim der 1920er und 1930er Jahre. Aus sowohl historischer als auch ethnologischer Perspektive untersucht Andrew Stuart Bergerson die alltäglichen Interaktionen von Freunden und Nachbarn und zeigt, wie damals „ganz gewöhnliche“ Hildesheimer ihre unmittelbare Lebenswelt erlebt und gestaltet haben. Bergersons Forschung arbeitet die Existenz einer zivilen Gesellschaft in den 1920er Jahren sowie einer antisemitischen und faschistischen „Volkgemeinschaft“ in den 1930ern heraus. Mit seinen Zeitzeugeninterviews zeigt Bergerson, wie Hildesheimer ihre ehemaligen Nachbarn und Freunde in „Arier“ und „Juden“ verwandelten. Dabei entdeckt der Autor in den Strukturen von informellen sozialen Beziehungen eine Eigendynamik, die sich zwar auf die nationalsozialistische Ideologie und Terrorherrschaft stützte, aber dennoch relativ unabhängig von diesen entwickelte. Auch diese Dynamik trieb die „nationalsozialistische Revolution“ im Alltag voran und schuf die zwischenmenschlichen Voraussetzungen für Massengräuel, ohne die „Normalität“ dieses Alltags zu stören.