rangeofcultural organisations such as workers’sport clubs,choirs,dramatic societies etc.
downto radio circles and esperanto[sic] leagues.⁴These differences in historical assessment confirm the extraordinary significance
attributed to making idealist aesthetics compatible with historical materialism
and enlisting bourgeois notions of cultureand education for thegoals of the so-
cialist movement. Some socialist critics at the time insistedthat anauthentic
working-class culturealreadyexisted in the present,while others predicted its
inevitable flourishing inaclassless society of the future. Manycontributors to
these debates expressed ambivalenceabout what earlier chapters have described
as conscious acts of culturalappropriation, that is, the transformation of ele-
ments of dominant culturefor the benefit of subordinateand marginalized
groups and in the interest ofresidual and emergent cultures. All of these possi-
bilities come with largertheoretical questions:Wasappropriationagesture of
empowerment or of accommodation?Did it function as an expression of cultural
aspiration oragesture of symbolic expropriation?Was refunctionalization part
of other processes of culturaldissemination andhybridization that gave rise to
an international democratic massculture, or did it belong to retrograde struggles
over culturalcapital that confirmed the validity of high-low divisionsand nation-
al differences?
Several scholars of the history of socialism have read the intense preoccupa-
tion with culture and education as evidence of the political failures of Social De-
mocracy.Hans-Josef Steinberghas called Social Democracyasocialism without
workers that,under the cover of exaggerated claims about its ethos of refine-
ment,provided openings for bothavulgarhistoricalmaterialism in line with
Darwinism and an eschatological pseudo-Marxismwith strong religious over-
tones.⁵Along similar lines, political scientistFranzWalter has described the as-
sociational culturebuilt around the promise ofrefinement asaplace of self-
chosen isolation, an alternativeuniverse that allowed those active in the SPD’s
organizations to“retreat from the chill of reality”into“the fantasy worldofso-
cialist anniversary dramas.”⁶There is littleto be gained from disputing the po-
Allan Merson,“The Struggle for Socialist Consciousness in Nazi Germany,”MarxismToday
(November 1973), 337.
On Social Democracy and the emancipation from theory,see Hans-Josef Steinberg,Sozialis-
mus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie: Zur Ideologieder Partei vor dem1. Weltkrieg(Bonn: Dietz,
1979), 146 – 150.
FranzWalter,“Aufder Suche nach dem Neuen Menschen.Sozialismus als Solidargemein-
schaft undKulturbewegung,”inMythen, Ikonen,Märtyrer:Sozialdemokratische Geschichten,
ed.FranzWalter andFelix Butzlaff (Berlin:Vorwärts,2013), 193and 194.
The SocialistProjectofCultureand Education 157