Chapter3draws on the memoirs of famous socialist leaders to arguefor the
centralrole of emotional attachments in the making of proletarian identifica-
tions. Chapter5examines socialist allegory as an example of culturalappropri-
ation whereinasubordinatesocial group adopts (and adapts) artistic forms and
styles fromadominantone, in this casethrough the detour of Greekmythology
and Schiller’stheory of the pathetic. Shifting the siteofinquiry to thatmysteri-
ous entity called the worker’ssoul, workers’life writingsoffer powerful tem-
plates and models for the kind of emotional workrequired of individual workers
gainingclass consciousness and joiningthe workers’movement.Psychological
interiority is presented as an important enablingcondition in classmobilization,
not least because of its implicit claims on bourgeois subjectivity.AsRüdiger
Campe andJulia Weber have recentlyargued, the distinction between interiority
and exteriority and the cultivation of interiority asInnerlichkeit(inwardness)
since the late eighteenthcentury must be traced backtoits equation in German
romanticism with both high culture andahighsocial position.Accordingly,
Campe andWeber use the term“interiorization”to analyze the discursive strat-
egies that established the distinctions between interiority and exteriority and
made them an integralpart of new political demands and promises of social mo-
bility.Through their binary structure,exteriority and interiority defined the boun-
daries between public and privatelife and madethe close connection between
interiority,subjectivity,and political emancipation one of the enablingcondi-
tions of liberaldemocracyand the nation-state. In accordancewith its elevated
status in bourgeois culture, literature, includingautobiography, was designated
as the ideal medium forathus defined process of interiorization and itsrelated
discourses of psychologization and individualization.¹⁶
If autobiographical writing playedakey role in the making of bourgeois sub-
jectivity,how can socialist claims to individual agencybeenlistedinacritique of
class society?Morespecifically, how did the editors of workers’life writingsre-
functionalize distinctlybourgeois modalities in their role as mediators across the
class divide?Apreliminary answer can be found in the extensive exchanges be-
tween worker-writers and their editors and the emotional nature of these ex-
changes. In most cases, the editors functioned as confidantes for first-timeau-
thors and as translators of the working-class experience toalargelymiddle-
class readership. The first-person singular allowed the worker-writer to imagine
his struggles as part ofadistinct class biographyand connect his individual tri-
SeeRüdiger Campe andJulia Weber,eds.,Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in
Premodern,Modern, and ContemporaryThought(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), especiallythe intro-
duction.
146 Chapter 7