Extraordinary Ordinariness

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 communication perspective is crucial to enhancing our understanding of how information about everyday heroism was interpreted and disseminated in different media, historians of everyday life caution us not to forget that heroism is more than merely discourse. In fact, as John Price has pointed out in his comprehensive study of everyday heroism in Victorian Britain, media accounts that celebrate the exploits of ordinary citizens provide important glimpses into the lives of people who tended to leave no written sources for scholars to consider. Psychologists can also add much to our understanding of ordinary people's heroism. By focusing on questions such as why some people risk their lives to save those of others, or what role gender plays in their decision to do so, psychological research not only directs our attention to those individuals who are hailed as heroes and heroines, but also suggests new ways of understanding the interrelationship between their motivation to act "heroically" and the norms and values that society sees confirmed or strengthened in those ac-tions. This volume's contributors - who include historians, literary schol-ars, media scholars, film scholars, sociologists, cultural anthropo-logists, and Americanists - utilize these and other methodological ap-proaches to provide crucial insights into ordinary people's heroism in the past and the present.
While the various case studies that are assembled here do not constitute a definitive history of everyday heroism in Western societies, they suggest at least partial answers to the questions this volume seeks to answer. With regard to its origins, the idea that ordinary citizens were capable of heroic behavior appears to have emerged around 1800, at least in the case of Britain, and became more widespread and accepted over the course of the nineteenth century. A cursory look at press coverage of everyday heroism in the American print media after 1865 suggests that the development in the United States closely mirrored that in Britain, reflecting a general democratization of heroism in the nineteenth century. Significantly, only pro-social behavior elevated ordinary people to heroic status and, thus, clearly distinguished everyday heroism from entrenched traditions of warrior heroism. Especially those kinds of rescues that were daring, and in which people risked their lives to save those of others were called "everyday heroism" in the nineteenth century, although even simply enduring the tribulations of everyday life could be enough to earn the label of hero or heroine. In general, it appears that use of the designations "everyday hero" or "ordinary hero" underwent an increasingly inflationary growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, ultimately, came to encompass a wide range of pro-social behavior by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the mass media - followed by radio and film in the twentieth century, and the internet in the twenty-first - became the main "hero makers," praising ordinary citizens' exploits and familiarizing readers with their heroic deeds. However, philanthropic organizations, local communities, as well as national govern-ments also recognized civilians' feats as heroic, and did much to spread the idea that common people's actions could be as praiseworthy as those of valiant soldiers. In light of the fact that so many different groups and people helped disseminate stories about everyday heroes, it is not sur-prising that such stories served a number of different functions at different points in time. For the mass media - and that holds true for the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century - the thrilling stories drawn from everyday life became a journalistic technique of storytelling that helped sell newspapers and magazines. For middle-class organizations and the state, by contrast, the idolization of everyday heroism around 1900 was primarily intended as a means of social control, since they presented working-class people thus honored as virtuous citizens who neither intended to challenge social inequality nor questioned the authority of the state. If heroes tend to be a stabilizing force in society, this appears to have been particularly true for everyday heroes. In general, ordinary heroes and heroines were especially in vogue during times of perceived crises, when societies seemed to lack the type of social solidarity that was believed to have characterized them in the past. Perhaps even more so than in the case of traditional hero types such as military heroes and political leader heroes, everyday heroes tended to become both reflections of people's anxieties about a perceived lack of unity, as well as a sign of hope that not all was lost, since incidents of heroic rescues were interpreted as evidence that the nation's citizens still cared for one another. In fact, praise for and the popularity of everyday heroes and heroines at particular moments in time appear to have been inextricably intertwined with longings for a sense of community. If heroic civilians generally reflected dominant social and political norms, they were also frequently utilized to strengthen traditions of gender difference - at least in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While women could attain heroic status, their heroism was depicted as gender specific and became a means to highlight accepted notions of femininity that revolved around passivity and submissiveness. The example of the German Democratic Republic, whose ordinary "heroes of labor" were mostly male, suggests that such forms of gender discrimination continued well into the twentieth century.
If the following essays allow us to draw at least a few generalized con-clusions, each case study offers additional insights into the complexities of everyday heroism in Western societies. The first three chapters shed light on various aspects of its history in Britain. In "'Our Heroes of To-day': The Royal Humane Society and the Creation of Heroes in Victorian Britain," Craig Barclay discusses an organization that became crucial to the dissemination of the idea of everyday heroism in Britain in the nineteenth century. Founded in 1774 by private citizens and supported by the British Crown, it primarily honored ordinary citizens who had rescued others in life-threatening situations, mostly on rivers and at sea. Initially, the Royal Humane Society awarded most of its medals to the upper echelons of the British nation but, over the course of nineteenth century, an increasing number of working-class citizens were also recognized as heroes. Since medals of distinction had traditionally been bestowed only upon the country's nobility, the organization's recognition of the bravery of the lower rungs of society by awarding medals resulted in considerable social status for their wearers. In general, however, the Society's upper middle-class leaders, as well as Victorian writers who used its awardees to pen riveting stories about ordinary heroism in everyday life, intended their work to encourage working-class citizens to adopt and refrain from challenging middle-class norms and values. In addition, the organization perpetuated class distinctions by reserving most of its silver medals for members of the upper class, while laborers not only tended to receive primarily bronze medals but also needed eyewitnesses of social standing to corroborate their accounts. Thus, although the Royal Humane Society sought to stimulate pro-social behavior and contributed to a public dis-course that valued such behavior, its work can also be interpreted as a form of social control that sought to ensure society's stability in the face of class tensions and social unrest.
In the second chapter, "Everyday Heroism for the Victorian Industrial Classes: The British Workman and The British Workwoman (1855-1880)," Christiane Hadamitzky and Barbara Korte provide additional evidence that Britain's upper classes considered the idea of everyday heroism a discursive means of social control during the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on two popular educational monthlies that were created by middle-class editors, but aimed to reach a working-class readership, Hadamitzky and Korte show that while these publications reflect an increasing democratization of heroism, they were also intended to foster class harmony by constructing exemplars of moral and social responsibility who shunned political agitation intent on challenging economic and political inequality. As part of this attempt to prevent social unrest, The British Workman and The British Workwoman honored the same types of heroic rescues that the Royal Humane Society deemed praiseworthy, but they also introduced the new category of "moral heroism," which was used especially for describing women's brave and selfless efforts to protect the domestic sphere and to encourage their men to lead a morally unblemished life. The two magazines thus also sought to influence working-class people's ideas about gender by stressing middle-class notions of femininity that revolved around women's "silent," "restrained," and largely passive "heroic love," while generally neglecting war heroes, sports heroes, and famous labor activists, since such traditional heroic figures were believed to incite working-class men toward violent upheaval. In many ways, the type of everyday heroism lauded by these two periodicals reflected a sense of social crisis among middle-class citizens rather than a genuine belief in the ubiquity of heroic qualities in all strata of society.
The following chapter, John Price's "Everyday Heroism in Britain, 1850-1939," shows that such efforts to honor ordinary citizens for what people deemed heroic behavior were far from exceptional in the British Isles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, "everyday heroism" was a widely used term - generally connoting daring rescues undertaken by civilians in everyday life - with numerous organizations, communities, as well as the state recognizing such exploits, rewarding rescuers, and commemorating their deeds. Reflecting a gradually growing democrati-zation of heroism in the nineteenth century, news media widely reported about everyday heroes and heroines. In addition to inspiring poets, writers, and artists, these people also became the subjects of intellectual debates about what heroism actually stood for. Price identifies three specific contexts in which ordinary citizens' life-risking behavior was praised as heroic and the different purposes each served. In what he calls the "establishment context," it was primarily the state that championed a version of heroism revolving around civilian pro-social bravery that was intended to strengthen citizens' allegiance to the nation and the British Crown. In the "organizational context," philanthropic organizations such as the Society for the Protection of Life from Fire also heaped praise on intrepid rescuers and publicized their stories because such public recognition was believed to help make people aware of, and possibly teach them how to prevent, the many perils with which modern British society was confronted around 1900. Finally, progressively-minded individuals and organizations who operated in a "radical context" deemed civilian heroism important because its public recognition might help improve working class people's lives and provide exemplars of morally upright and respectable behavior that laborers could emulate - not only to improve their lives as individuals, but also to foster a more deeply-felt class consciousness within the context of economic inequality. Price argues that this group of reformers, writers, and artists was radical because they proposed alter-natives to those state-sanctioned and educational hero-making efforts that did not challenge traditional notions of heroism because they were in-tended to promote social and political stability. The "radicals," by contrast, called into question such entrenched traditions by highlighting working class heroes' contributions to the welfare of the nation and by introducing pacifist ideas that were at odds with military heroism. Significantly, Price suggests that World War I, while generally believed to mark the decline of the ideal of heroism in Britain because of the conflict's shocking carnage, did not tarnish the idea of everyday heroism. In all three contexts described by Price, ordinary citizens' heroic exploits continued to be widely recognized in the interwar period.
In chapter four, "Volunteers and Professionals: Everyday Heroism and the Fire Service in Nineteenth-Century America," Wolfgang Hochbruck examines what can be regarded as the most visible civilian hero of the nineteenth century: the firefighter. Hochbruck sheds light on the gradual shift from volunteer to professional firefighting and on what this process reveals about the discourse of everyday heroism in the United States before and after the American Civil War. As was the case in Britain and other countries, U.S. firemen were widely admired for bravely facing the blaze while selflessly risking their lives to rescue men, women, and children from the flames. However, in the case of volunteer companies, their heroic status was undermined in the 1850s and 1860s by media reports about these firemen's unruly behavior and purported inefficiency. Hochbruck argues that this temporary fall from grace can be explained, at least in part, by the growing influence of working-class volunteers who tended to join fire companies because of their interest in male fraternity rather than in protecting their home communities. Ultimately, however, despite the fact that firefighting became less "everyday" due to its growing professionali-zation, the heroic image of both volunteer and professional firefighters endured, as can be seen in the immense popularity of lithographs that depicted firefighters and their heroic struggle against the flames in American cities in the 1850s and 1860s. Even the increasing use of tech-nology - such as steam pumpers - did not erode firefighters' heroic status in U.S. society, which remained intact throughout the twentieth century and experienced a new boost at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The fifth chapter, Janice Hume's "Narratives of Feminine Heroism: Gender Values and Memory in the American Press in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," examines the multifaceted ways in which journalists covered women's everyday heroism in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the intricate interrelationship of the memory of heroism and dominant gender norms in the American press. Hume explains that the emergence of mass media and new journalistic techniques in the post-1850 period fostered the increasing coverage of ordinary people and their "heroic" deeds. Although heroism thus became more egalitarian, those heroic figures that the press primarily wrote about were white men whom journalists portrayed as symbols of American nationalism. Yet, some women and their exploits did find their way onto the pages of U.S. newspapers and magazines, and journalists' stories about them reveal important connections between changing interpretations of femininity and the depictions of American heroines. Throughout the nineteenth century, mirroring the coverage in The British Workwoman, American publications such as the Lady's Book confined the label of heroism to those women who had selflessly and silently suffered hardships as faithful wives and mothers, notwithstanding the first stirrings of women's activism in the 1840s. By the mid-twentieth century, the heroic qualities attributed to women had changed considerably, albeit some continuities remained in place. In the 1950s, female heroism and wifehood or motherhood continued to be inextricably linked in the women's magazine Ladies' Home Journal, and only in the wake of second-wave feminism in the 1970s did the publication allow for a larger number of independent heroines that were noted because of their intellect outside the home. Nevertheless, heroic wives and mothers remained a staple of the magazine's gendered heroism discourse. In general, then, female heroes were rarely acknowledged publicly, and their heroism tended to be associated with the private sphere and female submissiveness. Only through obituaries did stories about women's "heroic" lives reach a wider audience, although the term "heroine" was rarely used to describe the deceased. As Hume shows, this form of commemoration reflected the same norms and values that were perpetuated by newspaper reports about living heroes and heroines. In the nineteenth century, the few women thus remembered were commended for qualities that tended to be associated with traditional notions of femininity, including patience, obedience, piety, and tenderness. Only in the early twentieth century did obituaries begin to list character traits normally associated with men, including their business acumen and wealth. In general, however, obituaries reflected and preserved entrenched gender dichotomies, reminding us that the media expresses dominant norms and values when reporting about ordinary heroes and heroines while simultaneously shaping and reinforcing them.
Chapter 6, Matthias Grotkopp's "Heroic Ordinariness after Cavell and Capra: Hollywood Cinema and Everyday Heroism in the Interwar Period and World War II," complicates our understanding of the interrelationship of the ordinary or the everyday and the idea of heroism in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Relying on Stanley Cavell's philosophy of moral perfectionism as a point of departure, Grotkopp defines everyday heroism as behavior that aims to create or uphold a certain moral ideal in everyday life. This ideal revolves around efforts to preserve both demo-cracy and a sense of community in Western societies, which, according to Grotkopp, are prone to subvert their own idea of egalitarian freedom. Grotkopp regards American director Frank Capra's films of the interwar period, in particular John Doe, which was released in 1941, as prime examples of the ways in which this notion of everyday heroism was interpreted in U.S. culture. In Capra's interwar films, ordinary citizens initially fall prey to corrupt elites who seek to use them for attaining their dubious goals but, then, ultimately reject their evil overtures. Grotkopp argues that their struggles can be read as lessons of Cavell's philosophy and the idea of everyday heroism in American society, but he also emphasizes that the dialectic of the ordinary and the heroic tends to be a conservative means to preserve the social status quo.
Chapters 7 and 8 turn to the history of everyday heroism in Germany in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In "Everyday Socialist Heroes and Hegemonic Masculinity in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1989," Sylka Scholz examines how post-World War II East Germany utilized so-called "heroes of labor" and other heroic, but otherwise ordinary figures to strengthen people's allegiance to the socialist nation, to legitimize its authority, and to present socialist role models that East Germans were expected to emulate. Given that most of these heroes were men, Scholz argues that the concept of hegemonic masculinity helps to understand how the idea of the socialist everyday hero served not only political ends, but also perpetuated entrenched gender inequalities, the emancipatory rhetoric of socialist elites notwithstanding. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany had largely discredited military heroes and heroic political leaders, seemingly ordinary heroic figures, especially workers, took on a particular significance in post-war East Germany in the second half of the 1940s - the attempt being made to portray them as epitomizing the egalitarian vision of socialism. Solely constructed by the state, this idea of ordinary socialist heroism also informed the country's film industry, which was encouraged to depict strong and resourceful men and women in everyday life. Despite the fact that the "heroes of labor" were no longer in vogue by the 1950s and had not necessarily enjoyed widespread popularity to begin with, the German Democratic Republic's leaders continued to give awards to those workers who had proved particularly resourceful until the regime's collapse in 1989. By the 1970s, the socialist hero in general and the socialist everyday hero in particular were in crisis, and despite the fact that the GDR's successful athletes briefly rekindled people's heroic imagination, East German authorities were unable to produce new heroic figures that would help them revive people's trust in and support for the socialist nation.
Silke Meyer's "Everyday Heroes in Germany: Perspectives from Cultural Anthropology" focuses on West Germany, pointing out that the terms "hero" and "heroism" are omnipresent in twenty-first-century German popular and everyday culture. Echoing Sylka Scholz's observation that World War II marked a fundamental break with long-standing traditions of military heroism, Meyer argues that the void that the absence of such traditional hero figures created was filled by various forms of what was regarded as civic heroism, including such behavior as helping fellow citizens in need of assistance and engaging in similar tasks deemed beneficial for society in general and local communities in particular. But not only such forms of pro-social behavior were regarded as heroic by German society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Simply being able to endure and cope with the daily struggles of everyday life elevated many to the status of hero or heroine. Interviews with German teenagers revealed that the label hero is applied rather loosely today, since interviewees named athletes as well as family members when asked to name heroes they admire. Their answers also complicate our understanding of the character traits people deem heroic, since especially male adolescents considered "coolness" a noteworthy attribute that they said was part of athletes' heroism. Paradoxically, then, everyday heroism could stand for seemingly conflicting qualities: pro-social behavior that benefits society, as well as an artificial pose that professes distance from and seeming indifference to society. Since ordinary heroes and heroines permeate contemporary German culture, they reflect a growing heroic pluralism and a certain ambivalence with regard to the norms and values they seem to represent. At the same time, such character traits as endurance, perseverance, loyalty, morality, and fair play tend to dominate in contemporary debates on, and media representations of, everyday heroism, suggesting that the pro-social elements of what people regard as heroic behavior continue to reign supreme in twenty-first-century Germany.