Microhistory
As John Salvatier put it ↗, reality has a surprising amount of detail.
In that spirit, looking at history through the eyes of everyday people offers a kind of fidelity that textbooks often miss.
To that end, here are a few books I enjoyed recently, fitting that bill:
A Woman In Berlin – Anonymous Author (1954)
The diary of a young woman, persevering during the final days and immediate aftermath of the Battle of Berlin. What a strong character that woman was, and an excellent writer, too.
Two takeaways that stayed with me:
- “Homo homini lupus” – as the author herself points out repeatedly. Powerful to read from firsthand experience how quickly moral boundaries can deteriorate utterly and completely in case of hunger, war or a general breakdown of institutional order.
- Extreme hardship seems to inspire profound insights, for those strong enough to endure it. The author often reflects on the events of her days, with many entries holding poignant life lessons. It was interesting to read, for example, how many banks were completely plundered and a relatively safer store of value proved to be the makeshift hiding places concocted by wily neighbours.
Two quotes driving home the points above for me:
Yesterday I experienced something comic: a cart stopped outside our house, with an old horse in front, nothing but skin and bones. Four-year-old Lutz Lehmann came walking up holding his mother’s hand, stopped beside the cart, and asked, in a dreamy voice, “Mutti, can we eat the horse?
Our radio’s been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru, or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age—they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. At the moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.
The World Of Yesterday – Stefan Zweig (1943)
What a wonderful book, entertaining to read and yet, such a sharp lens on history. Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, a first-hand cosmopolitan’s account of Imperial Vienna, the outbreak of WWI, the interwar years with its ripple effects of the Weimar Republic and the dark chapters that followed.
I particularly enjoyed his disgust at the idea of having to carry a passport for travel, something that nowadays we almost take as a first principle, as if mandated by nature:
Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.
Other lessons that stuck:
- How the Weimar Republic acted as a partial reset for wealth distribution, for example through some people holding dollars (sometimes by sheer happenstance) being able to buy whole apartment blocks for scraps.
- How the most momentous events in history sometimes feel like “just another day” on the ground while they unfold. Stefan Zweig describes a day on the beach in France the week WW1 broke out.
- How quickly prevailing order (the Habsburg monarchy and its stability) can break down and how differently people react to that rupture – especially the ones that weren’t exactly on top within that order.
Disclaimer: you will want to visit a Viennese coffee house after reading that book.
Berlin Diary – William L. Shirer (1941)
The only book on this list examining the larger-than-life events and figures leading up to WW2, William Shirer was a correspondent in Berlin from 1934 until 1941.
What makes it such a good read (apart from the writing style displaying decades of experience crafting sentences), is the fact that Shirer had up-close access to the newsworthy events and figures of the day. And yet, it’s a personal diary, without retrospective spin, filled with his personal speculations on the odds of peace, victory and defeat.
Lessons that stuck:
- How prepared Switzerland was compared to France, practically mobilising their whole male population very early in the war – for me a sign of a) how important strong leadership for a country is and b) how much war really is a competition of willpower, emanating from the top.
- How much of an advantage a diversified stream of information holds. On more than one account, Shirer is describing how fully and completely the general population was deprived of facts when sticking to domestic newspapers.
- How weary the population of Berlin was to go into yet another war, and how carefully and slowly the regime massaged them into doing it anyways.
I like this quote in particular, because it shows how much depth an author can add from an autobiographical perspective, versus just delivering a factual account of events. Here, he’s describing his travels to Vienna after its annexation:
Still, there is more to eat here than in Germany, and the dictatorship is much milder — the difference between Prussians and Austrians! Next to Paris I love this town, even now, more than any other in Europe, the Gemütlichkeit, charm, and intelligence of its people, the baroque of its architecture, the good taste, the love of art and life, the softness of the accent, the very mild quality of the whole atmosphere.
How to Be Victorian – Ruth Goodman (2015)
The title says it all: a look at life in Victorian England through the lens of the general population.
Things that stuck with me:
- The absurd working hours most people had to endure.
- The early age people started to work at.
- How remote the experience of deep hunger is for most people nowadays, when it was a daily occurrence for most people in the richest country on the planet just 200 years ago.
- How thrifty and skilled around the house people used to be, routinely fixing their shoes and clothes and planting their own food.
- How we’ve made a step backwards when it comes to our quality, longevity and comfort of clothing.
Next, I’ll be looking for more collections of letters — voices from people who weren’t writers by trade, but who lived history all the same.