Polymorphous Synchrony: German Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract

In West Germany during the 1950s, the social history of modernity was initiated by raising a series of questions probing the “internal structure” (inneres Gefüge) of industrial society. The predominant conception was of a self-contained era, shaped by a small number of structural elements. In such a perspective centered on static formations, little attention was given to internal ruptures and dynamic processes. This structuralist approach was in fact the linear continuation of a view of the social order which had been developed in the 1930s and '40s by Otto Brunner, one of its chief proponents, in his studies exploring, the way “land and power” were constituted during the early modern period.