sights into the intersectionality ofrace andgender but remain silent on the ques-
tion of class.With their culturalist presumptions, these discourses have so far
failed to adequatelyaddress the widespread anger,anxiety,and despair pro-
duced by growingsocial and economic inequality and,furthermore, been sur-
prisingly uninterested in the cultureofresentment fueling various populist,na-
tivist,and fundamentalist movementsworldwide.
The burgeoning interdisciplinary field known as the history of emotions has
drawnattention to the transformative role of cultureinestablishingwhat schol-
ars have called emotional communities,emotional regimes,and emotional prac-
tices–terms that willbeclarified in the third section of the introduction. Histor-
ians have shown how legal, medical, educational, literary,and philosophical
discourses are inseparable from theories of emotion; how definitions of public
and privatesphere and constructions of group identity are dependent on (gen-
dered) hierarchies of emotions; and how both the minor rituals of belonging
and the grand narrativesofnation are contingent upon the symbolic politics
of public emotions.Focusing on ideas about emotions, intellectual historians
have shed light on how theories of the passions, sentiments, affects, and drives
have profoundlyinfluenced modern definitions of subjectivity,individuality, and
identity.More recently, literaryscholars have shownthat aesthetic emotions
must be treated as an integral part of the historical constellation of Enlighten-
ment thought,idealist aesthetics, and bourgeois emancipation.Allofthese con-
nections are important not onlytodominant culture(whether feudal or capital-
ist,aristocratic or bourgeois) but alsotosocial movementsthatrely on the
literary, visual, and performing arts in theirstruggles for representation in the
literal and figurative sense.
Political emotions–how they are defined, evaluated, interpreted, andrep-
resented–open up new perspectivesonGerman working-class cultureand help
to rediscover the main works,genres,forms, styles,and debates–but without
the underlying assumptions informingmuch of the scholarship producedduring
the 1970sand 1980s. These include the equation of working-class culture with
socialist culture, the privileging of political categories over competingmodels
of explanation, and the treatment of symbolicpracticesasextensions of work-
ing-class reality and Marxist theory.Resisting the search (then and now) for
models of political committed art usable in the present,the symbolic forms
and aesthetic registers chosen togenerate emotions in line with thegoals of
the workers’movement in fact bear witness to the considerable debt owed to
bourgeois cultureand the cultureofreligion and bring out the strong continui-
ties between the culture of class and the culture of community.Historicizingpo-
litical emotions invariablymeans to emphasize the othernessofproletarian iden-
tifications andguard against the underlying assumptions that,incontemporary
Introduction 5