whether the socialist cult of community offeredavalid alternative to bourgeois
individualism or merelycompensated for the oppressive conditions of workers’
lives. Especiallyduringthe 1980s, the crisis of the New Left and the rise of
new social movementspersuaded some scholars to claim nineteenth-century
working-class cultureasthe model for an oppositional or substitute public
sphere;afew speculated even howadifferent aesthetic theory–more material-
ist or moredialectical–might have savedthe proletarian dream from Social De-
mocracy and, ultimately, for Western Marxism.
Historical studies published since have shownthat, notwithstanding the
self-presentationofthe SPD as an inclusiveKulturpartei(cultural party), the
structure of the party hierarchyand its affiliatedorganizations institutionalized
the homosocial milieu of the workers’movement and perpetuated regional pa-
rochialisms and ethnicprejudices at the expenseofaliving internationalism.
The much-vaunted cultivation ofmoraland intellectual virtues, manyscholars
now concede,reflected aboveall the(petty) bourgeois tastes of the party leader-
ship and labor aristocracy and the preponderance of bourgeois academics and
worker-intellectuals in the party.²¹Last but not least,the SPD’sritualistic evoca-
tion of the classics has to be evaluated as part ofmore problematic continuities
between the“invention”of anationalliterature in theVormärzperiod, the strug-
gle for national unity and democratic rule, and the new symbolic politics in the
name of nation and empire–continuities that,atevery point,involvedthe work-
ers’movementand that, in the secondvolume, will have to be followed to the
years of National Socialism.
The Enlightenment project of cultureand education provided the legitimiz-
ing narrativesthat,institutionalized by schools, universities, libraries, and mu-
seums, established what it meant to be German and middle classduring the
long nineteenth century.The German cult of interiority,with its origins in Protes-
tantism, validatedthe inner life of the privateburgher over and against the civil
rights of the citizen. The tastes and sensibilities cultivatedduring theromantic
period developed inseparably from the lack of democratic freedoms in the Ger-
man states duringthe first half of the century. At the sametime, the belief in aes-
thetic cultivation asahuman right presupposedacritique of the structuralineq-
uities in feudal and, later,capitalist societies and laid the groundwork for
imaginingalternatives–if onlyinthe realm of aesthetic experience.Literary,
On the roleofintellectuals and academicsinthe culture of Social Democracy, see Stanley
Pierson,Marxist Intellectualsand theWorking-ClassMentality in Germany,1887– 1912 (Cam-
bridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press,1993).With aspecial emphasis on the so-calledworker
intellectuals,also see UlrichvonAlemann et al., eds.,Intellektuelleund Sozialdemokratie(Opla-
den:Leske+Budrich,2000).
The Socialist Project ofCultur eand Education 167