tion of realism asamoreappropriate form of engaging with social reality.The
inclusion inSüddeutscher Postillonof illustrations by the British arts-and-crafts
illustratorWalter Crane suggests that the socialist configurations of modernity
andmyth, includingthe stagingofasocialist posthistory through its feudalist
prehistory,must be regarded asawidespread European phenomenon. Confirm-
ing this point,the conditions under which outmoded modalities such as allegory
becameavailable to proletarian perspectivescontinued throughout the next dec-
ades and can be traced all thewayacross theAtlantic to the MexicanRevista
CROM,anillustrated magazine forradicalized workers and peasants, and to
theUS-AmericanNew Masses,the most influential organ of leftwing politics
and popularvisual culture duringthe years of the New Deal.¹⁰
Increasinglymarginalized within highculture, allegory in the late nine-
teenth century was eagerlyadopted in the context of industrial culture, commod-
ity culture, and socialist culture. Allegoricalrepresentations became an integral
part of everydaylife during the second half of the nineteenth century,with per-
sonifications of nation, folk, and community adorning buildings, machines, and
pieces of furniture and appearingineverything from historicalpageantsto na-
tionalist festivals.Allegoricalplays in the style oftableaux vivantsproved espe-
ciallypopularinthe workers’movement.Offering relief from the social problems
addressed in naturalist dramasand poems,mythicalfigures and allegorical
modes continued to flourish in the languages of turn-of-the-century symbolism
wheretheytook onamore stylized form. The restaging of modernity asmyth
found perfect expression in countless allegories of electricity and steam that
celebratedtechnological innovation and economic growth.¹¹In these visualiza-
tions of class society,the most heterogeneous discourses could bereconciled:
the promotion of science and technology,the veneration of classicalantiquity
and humanism, the cult of labor and industry,and themythification of Prussia
and the Reich.
On the Mexican connection, seeJohn Lear,Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor inRev-
olutionaryMexico,1908– 1940 (Austin:University ofTexas Press,2017), chapter4.Inadditionto
Libertas,the dragon-slayingproletarian of“IAmaProletarian”makesanalmost uncannyreturn
(though in reverse) in Santos Balmori’scoverforRevista Lux(March 1936); but now the enemyis
not capitalism but capitalism and fascism(229–231).
Foradiscussionofthis phenomenon, see Dirk Schaal,“Bild und Ikonographie der Elektri-
zität.Über denWahrnehmungs- und Bedeutungswandel einer Energieform seit dem Industriell-
en Zeitalter—Überlegungen für eine Ikonographie derWirtschaft,”inEnergie in der modernen
Gesellschaft,ed. Thomas Kroll(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht,2012), 33 – 55.For acompa-
rative perspective,see CindyWeinstein,TheLiteratureofLabor and the Labors of Literature:Al-
legory in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Fiction(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995).
The Proletarian Prometheus and Socialist Allegory 107