Linked Data Explorerhttp://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/499598685
Domesticating time : family and memory in the German middle class, 1840-1939
This dissertation examines the vernacular family culture practiced in Germany from the mid-nineteenth-century to the early twentieth century. It argues that the middle-class used family in the everyday to master time through domesticating it, with the ultimate goal of stopping the march of modern time and its threats of instability. The undifferentiated and repetitious nature of bourgeois family memory as a genre sought to create a comforting sameness, a timeless stability. Rather than despairing over modernity, bourgeois families insulated themselves through memory practices. Rituals generated a sense of rooted security in their regularity, texts presented a romanticized family comedy, and walls heirlooms and portraits cocooned homes with feelings of belonging.
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- "This dissertation examines the vernacular family culture practiced in Germany from the mid-nineteenth-century to the early twentieth century. It argues that the middle-class used family in the everyday to master time through domesticating it, with the ultimate goal of stopping the march of modern time and its threats of instability. The undifferentiated and repetitious nature of bourgeois family memory as a genre sought to create a comforting sameness, a timeless stability. Rather than despairing over modernity, bourgeois families insulated themselves through memory practices. Rituals generated a sense of rooted security in their regularity, texts presented a romanticized family comedy, and walls heirlooms and portraits cocooned homes with feelings of belonging."@en
- "The dissertation also argues that family memory practices constituted a vernacular expression of historical consciousness that forces historians to question the separation between "history" and "memory." Authors of family memory texts thought in historical ways, they made family members into historical actors, and committed themselves to historical accuracy. Family memory practices changed around 1900, orienting themselves towards genealogy and a masculine definition of history. This trend reduced the role of women in family memory creation, and reflected changing definitions of family and nation. After 1848, devotion to family had become an indispensable attribute of the ideal German personality, but by the twentieth-century German nationalism was defined by biology. For that reason genealogy became a means to achieve national health, and the discourses surrounding it at the turn of the century would be repeated in the National Socialist regime of the 1930s."@en
- "The dissertation expands the historiography of memory by shedding light on vernacular, as opposed to public memory. In doing so, it challenges the conceptual walls placed between "history" and "memory" and calls for a more nuanced interpretation of their relationship. By injecting the history of memory into that of the family, it sheds light on an essential and neglected aspect of the bourgeois emotional universe. Furthermore, it enhances our understanding of the family by uncovering the ways in which family has been used to order daily life."@en
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- "Domesticating time : family and memory in the German middle class, 1840-1939"@en