Histroy of Emotions

Do emotions have a history? And: Do emotions make history? These questions were at the focus of the Center for the History of Emotions (Director: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ute Frevert), which began its work in January 2008 and continued until the retirement of its director in 2024.

In close consultation with researchers from anthropology, sociology, musicology and scholars working on literature and art, as well as psychology and educational science, historians explored the emotional orders of the past. Their grounding principle was that emotions – feelings and their expression – are culturally shaped and socially learned. What somebody can and may feel (and show) in a particular situation or towards certain people or things is socially standardized and thus historically variable.
A central objective of the Research Center was to trace the changing norms and rules of feeling. Researchers examined various European and non-European societies with regard to their emotional practices, styles and lexicons, with case studies focusing on the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Particular attention was paid to institutions such as the family, law, religion, the military, the state, etc., which have and had a formative influence on the ordering of emotions.
A further interest was directed towards the power of emotions to shape history. Emotions, the Center posited it is assumed, motivate actions and control developments. They are and have been a preferred object of manipulation and instrumentalization, in political and economic contexts as well as in the private sector and in civil society.
Which feelings were appealed to when, by whom and to what end? To what extent did emotions contribute to the formation and dissolution of social groups and movements? Such (and other) questions guided a research area that historicized a central element of human development and analyzed it in its temporal and regional specificities. terms of its dependence on time and space.

Research period: 2008 – 2024

Further information on Ute Frevert as Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development is available on the page Emeriti of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.