Page 18 - Changing Living Spaces

Satosthi Murayama

cized by social and agricultural historians because the concept seemed
ideological and was hailed by the Nazis as representative of the ideal
German family (Jütte 1984; Opitz 1994).
Brunner not only developed the concept from Riehl’s journalistic es-
say, but also derived ideas from historical sources on rural farming:
‘Hausvaeterlietratur’, which contains almost all the elements of Living
Spaces. He introduces as the context Georgica curiosa oder Adeliges Land-
und Feldleben (an encyclopaedic textbook on all aspects of domestic and
agricultural life for nobles) by Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg (Brunner
1980, 104). However, LiSa differs from this kind of holistic understanding
of a closed territory subject to cultivation because it starts from the idea
that each element should have its own place and space: we do not want to
discuss a single habitat, but multiple habitats.
Secondly, while ‘the whole house’ delimits the habitats within a closed
terrain that changes structurally within a society, the habitats are con-
stantly changing in the interplay between nature and humans: ‘Economics
is literally doctrine of the oikos, of the house in the most comprehensive
sense, of the “whole house”, to speak with Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who de-
scribed these social entities, now only partially alive in peasant life, at the
moment of its disintegration or, nevertheless, its resignation.’3 The term
‘the whole house’ encompasses almost all the elements of Living Spaces,
but can only symbolize one aspect of the structural and conceptual histo-
ry of humanity and society.
The 1960s marked a milestone in historical research, because now not
only the family but also the environment became the subject of histori-
cal research. Historical demographic research took a new step. Sixty years
have passed since then. Brunner’s theory of the whole house was also a
precursor of this era. However, there were many mythical debates at the
time, such as the nineteenth-century view of the family, which was incor-
porated into the ‘curse’, i.e., the historical shift from the extended family
system to the nuclear family system. Many of these debates have been re-
hashed in later studies. On the other hand, family history research, which
once flourished, is no longer as present as it once was. As Claudia Opitz
noted, the interest of German historians shifted from structural and
conceptual history to the history of interests and sensibilities and to de-
fining a field in which progress was expected. In the mid-1990s, Opitz
3 Brunner (1980, 104, 109): Die Kategorie des ‘ganzen Hauses’ verschwindet [The
‘whole house’ category disappears]. See also Trossbach (1993) and Groebner
(1995).

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