Chapter 3 Writing history as a designer 3.1 Everyday history As a type designer researching parts of the history of my profession – particularly since I practice in Germany and investigate type design and type making there – my eforts in this book are similar to Alltagsgeschichte, a historical method popular in Germany during the 1980s, especially outside the traditional “establishment” of museums, publishing houses, and universities.1 According to Stefan Jordan: Alltagsgeschichte bezeichnet … eine Konzeption von Geschichtswissenschaft, in deren Interesse die konkreten historischen Lebenssituation der Menschen stehen. Sie versucht damit, einerseits die Ergebnisse der Gesellschaftsgeschichte über soziale Kollektive (z.B. Klassen, Berufsgruppen) zu präzisieren und andererseits vor allem solche Menschen mit in den Blick zu nehmen, die aufgrund ihrer gesellschaftlichen Randständigkeit bei gesellschaftshistorischen Untersuchungen unberücksichtigt geblieben sind. Die Welt dieser Menschen soll aber nicht als kollektiv Struktur darge- stellt werden; vielmehr zielt die Alltagsgeschichte auf eine Rekonstruktion der Wahr- nehmungsweisen der Menschen.2 Alltagsgeschichte was part of a broader trend of historical researching in western Europe during the last third of the twentieth century. It was characterised by historians – especially those without academic training – examining the past of their classes or professions. Especially in retrospect, this can be seen as being part of an overarching interest at that time in “history from below.”3 Javier Gimeno-Martínez summarises: The “histoire d’en bas” [was] a term coined by French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales School. This interest in writing the history of the masses found an echo in the British “history from below” represented by E.P. Thompson, the German Alltagsgeschichte (“history of the everyday”) – developing in the mid-1970s – and the Italian microstoria.4 In Germany, many people engaged in Alltagsgeschichte focused on researching the lives of everyday people during National Socialism.5 My research centres on an earlier period of history, and I describe other diferences between the methods I used to research this book and classic Alltagsgeschichte on the following pages. Dirk van Laak writes that Alltagsgeschichte shared traits with various history-writing methods influenced by postmodernism. As with postmodern approaches to writing history, authors of Alltagsgeschichte-texts eschewed grand narratives in favour of the »oft unverbunden und widersprüchlich bleibende Geschichte«.6 They focused more on microhistory than macrohistory.7 Alf Lüdtke explains that »[Alltagsgeschichte richtete] sich gegen das Axiom der ›großen Männer‹ ebenso wie gegen das der 1 See Van Laak 2003, p. 14–18 2 See Jordan 2009, p. 159; cf. Lüdtke 1998/2007, p. 628 3 See Lüdtke 1994, p. 75 and Lüdtke 1998/2007, p. 628 4 See Gimeno-Martínez 2016, p. 150–151 5 See Lüdtke 1994, p. 75, Lüdtke 1998/2007, p. 629, and Van Laak 2003, p. 18 6 See Van Laak 2003, p. 56–57 7 See Schulze 1994, p. 8