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 [...]. 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. C