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2 Niveau GROWING UP IN interwar Hildesheim, Lotte Schohl did not think consciously or critically about her neighborhood. “Neighborhood was something completely normal. You lived on a street where many people lived. You knew each of them, greeted them, chatted with them. As a child, I hardly thought seriously about it at all” (G/8a R/160). Here, Lotte reiterated the central myth of everyday life: neighborhood simply was. One accepted its reality as natural. Its boundaries, contents, and character were imposed on innocent Hildesheimers. Neighborliness did not change historically. It certainly did not change history. Above all, Lotte took no responsibility for its nature. Yet once she began to talk about neighborhood in general, she reminded herself of her own experiences in and around her home in Hildesheim. Lotte then slipped from collective into personal memories. She described how neighbors in Hildesheim knew each other, greeted, and even chatted with each other. Lotte’s neighborhood now seemed much more proactive, its denizens far less innocent. Her anecdotes implied that her neighbors constituted their own communities through specific customs and therefore their direct agency. My interview partners moved back and forth between these two layers of memory: collective memory as depicted in official histories (both national and local), in which Hildesheimers appear as pawns of circumstance and statesmen; and personal memories, in which neighbors shaped their own neighborhoods to suit their own purposes. The latter memories were dangerous because they challenged official narratives and disrupted the myths of normalcy (Benjamin 1968; Harootunian 2000; Ostovich 2002). This version of deep history threatens to subvert the assumption of imposed circumstances and revise that collective wisdom about everyday life (cf. Apter 1992: 21). For instance, Thekla Mestmacher was wont to describe Hildesheim as if it were small enough that one could feel like one knew, or at least recognized, everyone there. Because she always ran into people on the street that she knew, she felt the town was not very big after all, that it stood within the range of perception for an ordinary individual (noch so überschauen dadurch; G/13a R/250, G/16b R/280). Over the course of my stay in Hildesheim, I ran into her several 45 46 Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times times on the street, at which point she would reiterate her assertion: “You see, Mr. Bergerson, Hildesheim is visible at a glance [doch überschaubar], as I said.” Günther Seidner used the expression übersichtlich to make the same point (G/81b R/60). Hans Teich concurred (1979: 64): “in old Hildesheim, a mid-sized town, everyone knew almost everyone else.” In reality, interwar Hildesheim was sufficiently large a town (of fifty to sixty thousand people) that one could not know everyone personally. Hildesheimers had to make selections. And the problem with choice is that it implies some degree of free will, some form of agency. Günther insisted that the children in his neighborhood played together regardless of confession or status in the community. Yet when I asked if he could recall any antisocial types in his childhood neighborhood, he responded: “On this street, actually no. It was up at the corner . . . that is where I first heard about a family. . . . There was a trial with stepfather and daughter somehow—but this lay outside of our area.” In this anecdote about sexual misconduct, the scope of Günther’s knowledge seemed outside his control. And then Günther slipped into a deeper, more dangerous history: Otherwise, all of the people on the whole street, we knew each other there, you greeted each other, and the kids played together, with the small reservation : if you were a convinced Catholic [or] Protestant, then perhaps just with a bit, a certain distance. (G/79b R/325, G/81b R/150) Günther revealed an open secret about neighborliness: Hildesheimers knew their neighbors selectively, flexibly, contingently. When playing on the street, Günther’s family limited the horizon of their experience by knowing, greeting , playing, and taking part in the lives of only certain neighbors. This horizon of ignorance produced a sense of integration within its imaginary bounds and alienation beyond those bounds, but denied its own role in this process. To function as a moral community, this kind of neighborhood had to presume its own normalcy. On the one hand, then, this idiosyncratic community reflected its residents ’ sense of self. Loyal Protestants, the Seidners kept a certain distance from Catholic neighbors. To lay claim to their own respectability, they...

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