Just as the public fascination with workers’life writingslasted little more
thanadecade, the scholarlyinterest in workers’lifewritingsremained short-
lived. The discovery of this forgottenbodyofworkduringthe 1970sand 1980s
was closelylinkedto the reconceptualization of proletarian cultureasanopposi-
tional cultureand the political investment in its continued possibilitiesbyacrit-
icalGermanistik(i.e., the academic study of German literature).¹¹These contribu-
tions, in turn, werepart ofabroader attempt to at once movebeyond the high-
culturemodel then stilldominant in traditionalliterarystudies and to develop
an alternative to the economic determinism of orthodoxMarxism. The findings
from that period can be used here to further clarify the problems ofreading
workers’life writingsatonce as historical documents, literarytexts,and archives
of emotions. Published as part of an ambitioushistory of German socialist liter-
ature, GDR scholar Ursula Münchow’sstudy on workers’life writingsrather pre-
dictablyfocused on theircontribution, however flawed,to aMarxist-Leninist in-
terpretation of history.¹²In West Germany,scholars usedtheserepublished works
to test some of the arguments developed in the context of Critical Theory and the
New Left.BerndWitte argued against theautomatic equation of workers’life
writingswith socialist literature and pointed to the stronginfluenceoftheBil-
See the two dissertations on thetopic, PetraFrerichs,BürgerlicheAutobiographie und prole-
tarische Selbstdarstellung.Einevergleichende Darstellung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung per-
sönlichkeitstheoretischer und literaturwissenschaftlich-didaktischer Fragestellungen(Frankfurt am
Main: Haagund Herchen, 1980) and MichaelVogtmeier,Die proletarischeAutobiographie 1903–
- StudienzurGattungs-und Funktionsgeschichte derAutobiographie(Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1984).Forthe largercontext,see Otfried Scholz,Arbeiterselbstbild und Arbeiter-
fremdbildzurZeit der industriellen Revolution. EinBeitrag zurSozialgeschichte des Arbeiters in
der deutschen Erzähl-und Memoirenliteratur um die Mitte des 19.Jahrhunderts(Berlin: Colloqui-
um, 1980). On methodological questions,see WolfgangJacobeit,“Vo lkskunde und Arbeiterkul-
tur,”inDie andereKultur.Volkskunde, Sozialwissenschaften und Arbeiterkultur.Ein Tagungsber-
icht,ed. Helmut Fielhauer and Olaf Bockhorn (Vienna: Europaverlag,1982),11–25.And for a
critical assessment of the fascination withworkers’life writings in the history/historiography
of the workingclass,see Ralf Roth,“Te mpi passati: Die kurzeKonjunktur der Arbeiteralltagsge-
schichte. Eine Reminiszenz,”inHistorie und Leben. Der Historiker alsWissenschaftler und Zeit-
genosse.FestschriftfürLothar Gall zum70.Geburtstag,ed. DieterHein, Klaus Hildebrand, and
Andreas Schulz (Munich:R. Oldenbourg,2006), 161–173.
Ursula Münchow,Frühe deutsche Arbeiterautobiographien(Berlin: Akademie, 1973), 66–67.
The earliest scholarlytreatment of thetopic appeared during the Third Reich, Cecilia A.
Trunz,DieAutobiographien von deutschen Industriearbeitern(FreiburgimBreisgau: Buchdruck-
ereiHerder, 1934), 110–135.Aselectionofworkersautobiographies has been translate’ dinto
English in AlfredKelly,The GermanWorker:Working-ClassAutobiographies fromthe Age of In-
dustrialization(Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987).Foracomparative perspective,
see MaryJo Maynes,Taking the HardRoad: Life CourseinFrench and GermanWorkers’Autobiog-
raphies in the EraofIndustrialization(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
144 Chapter 7