Extraordinary Ordinariness

Simon Wendt ist Juniorprofessor für Amerikanistik an der Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Introduction: Studying Everyday Heroism in Western Societies Simon Wendt In April 1906, in the small town of Midway, Kentucky, a retired blacksmith named Rufus K. Combs saved Richard Godson, a local lawyer whom he utterly disliked. Despite their enmity, Combs jumped into a gas-filled vault to rescue Godson, who had fallen into the pit when inspecting a leaking gas tank. Americans would probably never have heard about Combs's courageous act if it had not been for the newly established Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, which honored Combs by granting him a silver medal and $1,500. Subsequently, newspapers across the country reported about this astonishing case of altruism. Journalists lauded Combs's unselfish bravery and noted approvingly that other Carnegie awardees had similarly risked their lives to save those of others. To the editors of the Washington Post, for instance, such noble acts represented "a pleasing record for the encouragement of our faith that the heroic impulse still greatly moves the hearts of men to courageous acts of self-sacrifice." In November 2014, more than 100 years after the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission paid tribute to Richard Combs, Tu?çe Albayrak, a young German woman of Turkish descent, tried to protect two teenage girls who had been harassed by three young men in front of a McDonald's restaurant in Offenbach, a town near Frankfurt. During a subsequent altercation, one of the young men punched Tu?çe, who fell on her head and died a few days later. After her death, many commentators lauded what they called Albayrak's civic courage, and some even called her a heroine. One of those comments appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a center-left newspaper from Bavaria. In December 2014, the paper published a long article on the case, in which the author stated: "What those people who dared to oppose the murderous system of Nazi Germany did, from the Communist workers who smuggled comrades out of the country, to the resistance of July 20-for that, the word civic courage is too weak a word anyway. Even if the term has so often been misused: it was something that one can call heroism. Tu?çe will now also be celebrated as a heroine and as an idol." These two examples occurred in different countries and in very different historical contexts. Yet in both cases, ordinary people's coura-geous behavior was regarded not only as praiseworthy, but as heroic. More importantly, their deeds were infused with particular meanings that reveal much about the societies in which they occurred. In the case of the United States, praise for ordinary citizens' heroism around 1900 reflected people's hope that the greedy selfishness that was believed to characterize American society had not yet destroyed altruistic self-sacrifice. In the case of Germany, the praise for Tu?çe Albayrak's "heroism" revolved around a particular understanding of democratic civic-mindedness, which many deem essential to post-1945 German identity and which is inextricably intertwined with anti-Fascism. This volume probes the complex history of such examples of everyday heroism (Alltagsheldentum in German). On a general level, everyday heroes and heroines can be defined as ordinary men, women, and children who are honored for actual or imagined feats that are considered heroic by their contemporaries or by succeeding generations. Scholars have devoted countless pages to war heroes, heroic leaders, and superheroes as well as to the blurring distinctions between heroes and celebrities, but they have said little about the meaning and impact of ordinary citizens' heroism. For this publication, the few scholars who have studied everyday heroism kindly agreed to elaborate on their previous research, while a number of other contributors probe hitherto unknown aspects of the topic. This book thus constitutes the first comparative effort to bridge the historiographical gap that continues to characterize scholarship on heroism. Comparing the United States, Germany, and Britain from a multidisciplinary perspective, it asks when and how everyday heroism emerged, how it changed, and how it was discussed and depicted in public discourse, mass media, film, and other forms of popular culture between 1800 and the early twenty-first century. It also draws attention to the various social, cultural, and political functions that this new hero type served, including the norms, values, and collective identities ordinary heroes were believed to embody. Focusing on this long-neglected phenomenon, the following essays shed fresh light not only on heroism, but also on the history of everyday life in Western societies. Defining heroism - let alone everyday heroism - constitutes a major challenge for those trying to study its history, and there are two main strategies that scholars can employ to tackle this vexing problem. One strategy would be to focus on the myriad functions that heroes and heroines serve in Western societies. In general, they tend to embody the norms, values, and beliefs of particular social groups. They also contribute to the formation of collective identities and become role models that people seek to emulate. As symbols of dominant norms and identities, they constitute central sources of authority and are used to legitimize social, political, cultural, and racial hierarchies. Yet, although heroism tends to be a stabilizing force in society, it is a social and cultural construction that is subject to constant debate, reevaluation, and revision. As people's norms and values change over time, so do heroes' attributes and the functions they serve. Relying solely on this strategy, however, can be frustrating, since it can be applied to a multitude of illustrious figures, whom contem-poraries might or might not regard as heroes or heroines. The second strategy, proposed by anthropologist Silke Meyer - who is among the very few scholars who have examined everyday heroism in Germany - could therefore be the more fruitful one. Meyer rightfully laments the arbitrari-ness of universal definitions of heroism and suggests that methodological insights from cultural anthropology might offer a solution. Rather than utilizing universally applicable concepts, cultural anthropologists take seriously the terms that are used by the ordinary people they study. When viewed from this perspective, people themselves define what heroism is, by employing such terms as "hero," "everyday hero," and "ordinary hero," or by labeling ordinary citizens' behavior as "heroic." For scholars of everyday heroism, such an approach not only makes it easier to identify what Western societies considered examples of "ordinary extraordinari-ness," but also allows us to trace the idea of the heroic and how it has changed over time. Ultimately, however, it will be necessary to use a combination of these two strategies to fully understand heroism and its multiple meanings and uses in Western societies. As suggested by cultural anthropology's usefulness in defining heroism, only multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches will lead to scholars developing a methodological toolbox that allows them to fully probe the complexities of everyday heroism. Media studies and communication studies probably provide some of the most important methodological insights. Already in their 1994 introduction to the edited volume American Heroes in a Media Age, Susan Drucker and Robert S. Cathcart emphasized that heroes and heroines are "communication phenomena," meaning that studying heroism primarily entails studying communication about those persons society deems heroic. In the same publication, Lance Strate pointed out that "different kinds of communication will result in different kinds of heroes," reminding us that the construction and impact of what he calls "oral," "typographic," and "electronic" heroes differ significantly and, therefore, require analyses that take into account these differences. While such a com...