umphs and defeats to the largernarrative of class struggle. The readers,inturn,
wereabletodiscover the individuals behindwhat the conservative scholars (in-
troduced in chapter 1) imagined as the modernmasses, and what the Marxist
theorists(presented in chapter2) conceptualized as the proletariat.Through em-
pathetic identification, middle-classreaderswereinvited to accept the workers
as part of the people, the nation, or all of humanity.The role of the editor con-
sisted in negotiating the competing perspectivesofindividualism and communi-
tarianism andmanaging the languages of emotion that werebeing created at the
intersection of the personal and the political.Asall editors quicklyfound out,
however,unmediated emotionsrarely functioned asaconduitto better under-
standing.Instead, emotional irruptions onlyhighlighted the mutual projections
that caused Levensteinto muse about expressivity andauthenticity and that
prompted Lotztoexperiment with various speaking positions. The (unequal) dia-
logic nature of this process becomes glaringlyapparent whenever the worker-
writersrefuse to perform therole of the exploited and oppressed or perform it
all toowell; especiallyinstructive are those moments when they assumethe
mask of bourgeois interiority,includingits sentimentalregisters, and when
they draw on Marxist theoriesto explain theirpersonal choices.
Part of underlying struggles over discursive authority that Levensteinavoid-
ed inTheWorkerQuestion,Lotz’semotional response to Levenstein inOutofthe
Depthdrawsattention to the non-identity of the worker asauthor and the worker
as protagonist of his own life story,with anysurfeit of emotion reserved for the
former. This problematic has lessto do with his difficulties of developing a
strongsense of self than his acuteawareness ofadouble consciousness, with
the first explainedthrough the actual deprivations and difficulties of working-
class livesand the second related to the editor’sdemands forapublic perform-
ance of working-class identity.The focus onautobiographical writingasadialog-
ic and performative processguarantees that the workers are not silenced again
and theirvoices reducedto the two discursive modalitiesavailable at the time:
that of social reform, with its innatetension betweengenuine empathyand
moral superiority,and that of bourgeois slumming, with its exoticizing and path-
ologizingtendencies.Anexample of the latter can be found in the introductory
comments by Hans Ostwald,aprolific chronicler of disenfranchised groups,who
praised therecollections of his ownworker-writer,amigrant worker,for the
“shockingauthenticity”of his“breathtaking accounts”from the“purgatory of
working-class life.”¹⁷
Hans Ostwald, prefaceto Ernst Schuchart,Sechs Monate Arbeitshaus. Erlebnisse eines wan-
dernden Arbeiters(Berlin: Hermann Seemann,1907), n. p.
Re/WritingWorkers’Emotions 147