Chapter 5
The Proletarian Prometheus and Socialist
Allegory
Onlythroughthe death of the old
have new lineagesachieved victory.
He [i.e., Prometheus] confrontsviolence
with the sharp arrowofknowledge.
With the weighty hammer of logic
he drivesawedge into everything.
Followingeternallaws,
he must be victorious in this fight,
and thus he will liberate himself,
the Prometheus of our time.EduardFuchs,“Der Prometheus unserer Zeit”One of themore puzzling aspectsoflate nineteenth-century socialist culture is
the infatuation with classicalantiquity asmediated byWeimar classicismand
Germanromanticism. In the making of proletarian identifications, thegods
and demigods rediscovered duringthat eracameto performaunique role that
speakstoenduringinfluences as well as transformativepotentials.Emboldened
by these discursive possibilities, in EduardFuchs’sversion of the Prometheus
myth, the famousrebel against thegods returns as the personification of key so-
cialist beliefs: that buildingabetter future requiresaradical break with the past;
that the workingclass possesses the means and skills to liberate itself; and that
History follows an inherent logic towardthe emancipation of all of humankind.¹
First published in 1892intheSüddeutschePostillon,the Fuchspoemwaslater
reprinted in an anthology, programmaticallytitled Ausdem Klassenkampf
(1894,From the Class Struggle), whose title attests to the unique status of Prom-
etheusinthe socialist imaginary as“the patron saint of the proletariat.”²The
EduardFuchs,“Der Prometheus unserer Zeit,”Süddeutscher Postillon9(1892).The poem was
reprinted in 1894 inAusdem Klassenkampf.Soziale Gedichte4, ed. Karl Kaiser,Ernst Klaar,and
Klaus Völkerling(Berlin: Akademie, 1978)and is quoted from that edition.
George Derwent Thomson,Aeschylus andAthens:AStudy in the Social Origins of Drama(Lon-
don: Lawrence&Wishart,1941), 317. The British utopian socialistJohn Goodwyn Barmby,who
claimedto have introduced theterm“communism”intothe English language, foundedajournal
titledThePromethean, or Communitarian(later:Communist)Apostle.The enduring appeal of the
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110550863-009