Alf Luedtke

Alf Lüdtke (born 18 October 1943 in Dresden) (also Alf Luedtke) is a historian and a leading German representative of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte in German). He says his main fields of interest and research include work as a social practice, the connection of production and destruction through "work", forms of taking part and acquiescing in European dictatorships in the 20th century, and remembering and memorialising forms of dealing with war and genocide in the modern era.

Together with Hans Medick, Alf Lüdtke can be considered a founder of Alltagsgeschichte, a form of microhistory that was particularly prevalent amongst German historians during the 1980s.

Lüdtke studied history along with sociology and philosophy in Tübingen (1965-1972, MA 1974). In 1980 he obtained his doctorate at the University of Konstanz. Lüdtke's dissertation Gemeinwohl, Polizei und Festungspraxis analysed governmental violence practices of Prussia in the early 19th century. One of his articles, "The Role of State Violence in the Period of Transition to Industrial Capitalism: The Example of Prussia from 1815 to 1848", was published in Social History in 1979. His article describes the idea that state violence under the feudal system was necessary to create a control amongst the Prussian working class in order to prepare them for the different structure of capitalist society. Lüdtke was interested in how the growth of state and the growth of capitalism related to each other.

In 1988 he attained his habilitation in the fields Modern History (Neuere Geschichte) and Contemporary History (Zeitgeschichte) at the faculty of the humanities and social science of the University of Hannover, where he subsequently taught history from 1989 to 1999. In 1995 he was appointed extraordinary professor in Hannover and in 1999 professor at the University of Erfurt. In Erfurt, Lüdtke is honorary professor for historical anthropology since 2008. Since 1975 Lüdtke worked at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. In 1999 Alf Lüdtke and Hans Medick founded the Arbeitsstelle für Historische Anthropologie of the Max Planck Institute for History at the University of Erfurt.

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