| book details |

Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography

Edited by Volker Berghahn, Berghahn, Edited by Simone LÃ¤ssig

This book is currently unavailable. Enquire to check if we can source a used copy

| enquire |

| book description |

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling â€œlife-and-lettersâ€ biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, orâ€”more recentlyâ€”with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volumeâ€”all well known senior historiansâ€”offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old â€œstructure-versus-agencyâ€ question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone LÃ¤ssig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. RÃ¶hl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-KÃ¼hne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.