Zwischen Familiensinn und Kriegsrausch. Institutionen aus ständischer Zeit als Generatoren moderner männlicher Gefühlslagen

Abstract

Between Sense of Family and Enthusiasm of War. Pre-Modern Institutions as Generators of Modern Masculine Sensitivity

The culture of remembrance of Berne's middle-class corporate associations illustrates that emotions influenced essential male spheres of sociability and action in the bourgeois modern age. The genesis and implementation of emotional codes depended significantly on institutional structures. Although male socialisation and ways of life took place in various contexts, institutions provided a solid framework for the men's emotional development by catalysing the origin, the consolidation, and the general prevalence of particular ways of feeling. Affective behaviour developed differently according to context. It can be assumed, however, that the analysed occurrences mutually influenced or even required each other (e. g. familial bondings vs. martial war fever).

The article suggests taking individual and collective emotional states into account as well as personal world views of historical protagonists. This would facilitate the understanding of their patterns of acting and deciding. Therefore, it is advisable not to focus only on discourse analysis and its emotional connotations, but also on practices in everyday life as well as on forms of ritualisation in the characteristic culture of festivities of this time. Structural data on demographic developments, on financial and welfare systems and on the social composition of the discussed corporations confirm the observations made.