Ordinary People, Self-Energising, and Room for Manoeuvering: Examples from 20th Century Europe

Lüdtke, Alf

doi:10.1057/9781137442772_2

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…For some, that entailed eking out the kind of 'room for manoeuvring' identified by Alf Lüdtke as operating in Nazi Germany, as in other 'mass dictatorships': variance in practice and 'modes of conduct' underwritten by individual 'situative' responses and subjective agency within 'social and historical processes [that are] malleable and not predetermined'. 64 Some bar owners and patrons exhibited a dogged persistence in maintaining bars' pre-standing political functions as well as resourceful 'manoeuvring' around the strictures places on bars. This was the case, for example, with Caffè Sciaretta in Rome, which was investigated in September 1932 on the suspicion that it continued to host 'habitually meetings of individuals all held to be antifascists' including known 'communists' and ex-republican party members (although initial investigations failed to throw up evidence of illicit political gathering, or even discussion, the political police took the opportunity to fine the locale for being open 15 minutes past the legislated closing time).…”

Section: Bars Alcohol and Political Violence In Fascism's Accession T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Spaces: Bars, Alcohol and the Spatial Framing of Everyday Political Practice and Interaction in Fascist Italy

Ferris

2022

European History Quarterly

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Whilst the ‘everyday’ is, of course, a temporal designator, connected to the chronology of human experience, in reality, ‘everyday life’ historians have often used a spatial frame to seek to understand past historical actors’ everyday lives, experiences and practices. Focusing on Fascist Italy and using the example of ‘bars’ and the practices of consumption, political (and other) sociability, transaction and exchanges enacted within these spaces, this article explores some of the possibilities opened up by using a spatial frame to examine everyday practices and lived experiences in a dictatorial context. Thinking about ‘everyday life’ and the lived experience of dictatorship through a spatial lens not only requires a shift in terms of the venues that we investigate, away from classic seats and sites of formal projections of power and towards those spaces – like bars – in which the ‘unofficial relations of power’ were articulated and negotiated. It also prompts us to ‘play with scales’, as Jacques Revel put it, to examine the unit of the individual body, the street, or the city not just to identify microscopic historical practices, but to understand how macroscopic structures, processes and power relations operated at the level of the everyday and vice versa, highlighting dynamic, reciprocal relationships – between institutions and individuals, state and society, centre and periphery, and among historical actors themselves – and to examine the processes of movement between these scales of experience. In this way, through the examination of interactions and practices enacted in Italian bars, the article will explore a novel facet of the ‘lived experience’ of these dictatorships and demonstrate the value in understanding dictatorships as being constructed neither exclusively ‘from above’ or ‘from below’ but both between and across these units of analysis.

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Section: Bars Alcohol and Political Violence In Fascism's Accession T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Spaces: Bars, Alcohol and the Spatial Framing of Everyday Political Practice and Interaction in Fascist Italy

Ferris

2022

European History Quarterly

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“…They are negotiations developed on the quotidian level, which need to be analysed at ground level, at 'the level of experience', given that only in this way will the necessary connections between the 'micro' and the 'macro' be established (Bergerson, 2017;Lüdtke, 1995, p. 14;Steege, Bergerson, Healy, & Swett, 2008). The proposals of the Alltagsgeschichte have turned out to be highly and successfully applicable to the study of questions such as the attitudes and behaviours of the ordinary people, especially in dictatorial settings (Lüdtke, 2016). However, they have scarcely been employed to explore the processes of nationalisation, and it is at this point where the convergence with 'everyday nationalism' becomes necessary.…”

Section: From Banal To Everyday Nationalism: Bringing Back Ordinary Spaniardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…654-657). On the other hand, more than evaluating the role of individuals in terms of acceptance or resistance, it is necessary to investigate the 'ways of making do' of subjects and to recognise their capacity to 'reappropriate' nationality and to create autonomous spaces and their capacity for self-distancing, which could challenge the will of the state to make the nation uniform and, at the same time, contribute to the (co)production 'from below' of official discourses and policies (De Certeau, 1984, XV;Lüdtke, 2016;Mäilander Koslov et al, 2009, p. 562).…”

Section: From Banal To Everyday Nationalism: Bringing Back Ordinary Spaniardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nationalisation, banal nationalism and everyday nationhood in a dictatorship: The Franco regime in Spain

Burgos

2021

Nations and Nationalism

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This article explores the nature of the process of nationalisation and the construction of nationality in Franco's Spain. Despite that nationalism constituted the principle axis of the narratives and the policies of the Francoist State, there has been scant research into the reach, the channels, and the role of Spaniards in the process of nationalisation.From a starting point of a complex conception of the Francoist national project, this essay seeks to reframe its analysis in light of the theoretical contributions of 'banal nationalism' and 'everyday nationalism'. As such, on the one hand, I intend to make clear the heterogeneity and the dynamism of Francoist nationalism and, on the other, to include individuals within the scene and further, and in particular, to take into account the role of daily experiences and the capacity for agency on the part of Spaniards on the ground, as participants and constructors of the national community.

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“…24 Such experiencescomplex, multiple and non-linearwill naturally offer us fragmentary and inconsistent accounts. 25 However, this does not mean that they lose any validity for our analyses.…”

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confidence: 92%

‘Everyday Life’ and the History of Dictatorship in Southern Europe

Ferris

Burgos

2022

European History Quarterly

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Dictatorships are of course put into effect from 'on high', by the dictators themselves and the loyal individuals who support and enable them. However, in addition to being decreed and imposed 'from above', dictatorships are also effectively enacted 'from below', in the local spaces and everyday cultures inhabited and performed day-by-day by the people who live through them. Local representatives of the dictatorial stateparty officials, civil servants, police officers, and so onand those with semi-official positions of trustfor example, doctors, midwives, university professors, teachers and journalistsare charged with putting into practice the intended aims of the dictator, but in the process of doing so must absorb and interpret these aims, leading to their potential distortion or modification. Crucially, dictatorships are experienced subjectively by the individuals who live within their borders, who also, through their agency, actions, practices and attitudes, have some capacityalbeit heavily circumscribed in many waysto contribute to the makingand potentially to the unmaking of dictatorship. The basic 'unit of experience' of dictatorship, therefore, is locally and subjectively bound. 1 This kind of understanding of how dictatorships have functioned in practice and of the need to uncover what can be called the 'actually-existing dictatorship' through the examination of the subjectivities and practices that made up their lived experience was pioneered by West German Alltagsgeschichte historians of Nazi Germany in the 1980s

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Ordinary People, Self-Energising, and Room for Manoeuvering: Examples from 20th Century Europe

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

Everyday Spaces: Bars, Alcohol and the Spatial Framing of Everyday Political Practice and Interaction in Fascist Italy

Everyday Spaces: Bars, Alcohol and the Spatial Framing of Everyday Political Practice and Interaction in Fascist Italy

Nationalisation, banal nationalism and everyday nationhood in a dictatorship: The Franco regime in Spain

‘Everyday Life’ and the History of Dictatorship in Southern Europe

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