Why Understanding the Nazi Past Did Not Become the Topic of a Book Written By Everett Ch. Hughes

Chicago sociologist Everett Ch. Hughes (1897-1983) spent a semester in postwar Germany as the first visiting professor in an exchange program between his university and the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1948. As an ardent field worker he wrote field-notes about his experiences, his conversations with ordinary Germans, his observations about his students and the professors he met which he planned to make into a book after his return. He submitted a book proposal and a sample chapter to the University of Chicago Press but the editor rejected it because he thought that there would no public for such a report. Hughes did not approach another press and published only two short papers on the whole topic, one of them became relatively well known: “Good people and dirty work” appeared in Social Problems in 1962.

My paper will first give an overview of Hughes’ unpublished book and then point to his “oral publication” of the idea of good people and dirty work, a concept which influenced besides others Hughes’ student Erving Goffman. In addition I will indicate later usage of this concept by Hughes himself.

In concluding I will put Hughes’ failed book project in the larger context of the remarkable lack of sociological publications about Nazism and argue that one should not blame sociologists for their neglect but also point to attitudes on the side of gatekeepers like publishers and the public at large.