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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses diaries and other ego-documents to carve out everyday experiences of comfort in Wilhelmine Germany. Treating comfort from an environmental perspective, this inquiry gives insight into motivational structures fueling the unfolding modern consumer society around 1900.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focusses on everyday experiences of comfort in Wilhelmine Germany. Using diaries and other ego-documents, I trace how people reflected on the sensory and emotional experience of their everyday domestic environments. Focusing a period of rapid and profound change in the urban built environment, I aim to show how notions of Komfort, which had been adopted from the English Language in the early 19th century, and the older concept of Behaglichkeit shaped experiences and expectations of domesticity.

Even if comfort is routinely defined as “satisfaction with the relationship between one’s body and its immediate physical environment” (following John Crowley’s 2001 study The Invention of Comfort), comfort has rarely been considered from a decidedly environmental perspective. This perspective not implies considering the more obvious environmental effects of a comfortable lifestyle (such as escalating energy use or waste production by households), but also what one could call its environmental affects: it treats humans themselves as biological organisms, which strive to fulfil certain vital needs from their environments in order to thrive, becoming agents of human niche construction in the process (Odling-Smee / Laland / Feldman 2003). In this light, an inquiry into historical experiences of comfort during the height of industrialization in Germany promises to give us critical insights into motivational structures fueling the unfolding modern consumer society. At the same time, carving out these mundane experiences from ego documents comes with methodological challenges, which I also address in this paper.