els, travelogues, pulp fiction, and popularscience bookswerewidelyread; the
classics, whether Marx or Goethe, remained on the shelves.¹⁸
What reallymattered was the sense of legitimacy with which the workers
claimed culture and education for themselvesand gained social capital from
speakingabout the largerproject of refinement in these terms.Inanearly
studyonSocial Democracy asaculturalmovement,BrigitteEmig documents
in great detail how the discourse ofVeredelung(refinement), with its promises
of uplift and betterment,providedacompellingnarrative thathelped togloss
over manyideological fissures,first under the oppressive conditions of the
Anti-Socialist Laws and, sometime later, during the transformation of the SPD
from a Klassenpartei (class-based party) into a Massenpartei (mass-based
party). Aided by the integrative rhetorics of folk, or people, shared by institu-
tions such as theVolkshochschule(people’scollege) andVolksbühne (theater
for the people), the ambitiousproject of“refining”the people thus gave rise
to various modes of collective learning in which cultureand education func-
tioned as coextensive modes of feeling and being in the world.¹⁹Manyinitiatives
drew on new pedagogies thatpromoted the crucial role of education in modern
democracies, while others benefitted from scientificstudies that confirmed the
significanceofassociational life to civil societies. Important influences included
the writingsofSwiss educational reformerJohann Heinrich Pestalozzi about the
public role of an educated humanityand the philosophicalreflections byJohann
Gottlieb Fichteonthe contribution of educationto overcoming political imma-
turity.Throughout,the socialist project ofrefinement,accordingtoEmig,was
Forstudies from the period, seeAugust H. Pfannkuche,Wasliest der deutsche Arbeiter?Auf
Grund einer Enquête beantwortet(Tübingen: Mohr,1900) and Ernst Schneller,DasBuch des Ar-
beiters 1930/31.Ein Verzeichnis empfehlenswerterBücherfürden proletarischen Leser(Berlin: In-
ternationaler Arbeiterverlag, 1931). On the reading habits of the workingclass,see Dieter Lange-
wiesche and Klaus Schönhoven,“Arbeiterbibliothekenund ArbeiterlektüreimWilhelminischen
Deutschland,”ArchivfürSozialgeschichte16 (1976): 135–204; Hans-Josef Steinberg,“Le sege-
wohnheitendeutscher Arbeiter,”inBeiträgezur Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewe-
gung,1848– 1918 ,ed. PetervonRüden (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1979),
261 – 280; andFranzJohannson, “Arbeiterlektüreund bibliothekarischeBemühungenvor
1900,”inLiteratur und proletarische Kultur.BeiträgezurKulturgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiter-
klasse im 19.Jahrhundert,ed. Dieter Mühlbergand Rainer Rosenberg (Berlin: Akademie, 1983),
310 – 332.
Brigitte Emig,DieVeredelung des Arbeiters. Sozialdemokratie als Kulturbewegung(Frankfurt
am Main: Campus,1980).Foranideology critical reading, see HildegardFeidel-Mertz,Zur Ideo-
logieder Arbeiterbildung(Frankfurt am Main: EuropäischeVerlagsanstalt, 1972). On competing
definitions within Social Democracy,see Christoph Hoeft,“Wi ssen ist Macht’—Arbeiterbildung
im Kaiserreich und in derWeimarer Republik,”inMythen, Ikonen, Märtyrer. Sozialdemokratische
Geschichten,ed. FranzWalterand Felix Butzlaff (Berlin:Vorwärts,2013), 164–171.
The Socialist Project ofCultur eand Education 165