Hometown Hamburg

‘Hometown Hamburg’ explores the problem of social order in modern German urban history. It argues that institutionalized normative structures are the bedrock of temporal continuity in German history. In an era of various linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ historians have lost the theoretical and analytical ability to explain events over the long term. Their accounts and explanations of human activity and historical processes usually rest on an unexamined behaviourist psychological model where simple instrumental self-interest drives individual decision-making. As a result they reduce communal social action to individual preferences conditioned by external contingent events. Such an epistemological viewpoint has prevented historians from taking seriously the notion and reality of a ‘bürgerliche’ social order, not in the sense of a bourgeois-dominated class system, but in terms of what the historian Mack Walker has defined as a “hometown” conception of communal solidarity. Belief in the value of a bürgerliche social order has provided the institutionalized basis for the remarkable continuity of German and Hamburg handicraft over time. Its norms and values have been shared by forces from all strata of society, who, like artisans, were committed to a ‘rooted’ notion of local community that in Walker’s terminology preserved the ‘webs and walls’ of occupational estate cohesion and parity in the face of ‘outsiders’ (Standeslose) or ‘disturbers’ (Störer). The corporate politics of both occupational estate and the bürgerliche social order in which it was embedded played a key role in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, and may yet endanger democracy in Germany once again. The division of Hamburg and Germany into irreconcilable social and moral…