as part cultural history,part culturaltheory,and partaseries of casestudies. The
eighteen chapters in this book have been selected and arranged to perform
symptomatic readings–not as part ofahermeneutics of suspicion but inacrit-
ical project ofreconstruction: themain goal, after all, is toregain access toafor-
gotten (and vanquished) collective imaginary through its rich and diverse sym-
bolic expressions. Giventhe dearth of comprehensive overviews on German
working-class cultureand critical studies on class asacategory of culturalhis-
tory,arelatedand equallyimportantgoal is to make these materialsavailable in
their sheer abundanceand remarkable variety–either for the first time or with
new questions and in new contexts.
This process of rediscovery and reassessment must start with therecognition
of the utter foreignness of thevoices and visions from the proletarian dream:
their surprising distance from the world of the factory and thetenement,their
effusive paeans to the beauty of nature and the power of love, and their impos-
sible quest for harmony, unity,and community.These proletarianvoices find
their tone and rhythm in conscious opposition to dominantcultureand society
but,not infrequently, also connect to otherexpressions of oppositionand sub-
version. They represent marginalsensibilities and ephemeral phenomena and
are part ofapoetics and politics of emotion that,across the historicaldivides,
sometimesrequirespecial skills at deciphering.They are inseparable from the
detours,dead ends, and sidelines ofalargerhistory from below and, for thatrea-
son, so important toadifferentgenealogyofworking-class culturebasedonpo-
litical emotions. In otherwords, these collective imaginaries open upanew per-
spective on the history of classstruggles,social movements, and counterpublic
spheres preciselythrough that which exists because, despite, and beyond social
reality and political ideology.
All of these perspectivesare broughtto bear on the culturaland emotional
practices that produced proletarian identifications duringaformative period in
the history of the workers’movement–specifically, from the founding of the pre-
cursor of the Social Democratic Party to the banning of SPD and KPDduring the
first months of the Third Reich. The conceptual slippages between social and po-
litical formations–workingclass, workers’movement,and socialist and commu-
nist parties–have been an integralpart of their respective histories and histor-
iographies but cannot be resolvedthrough criticalreadingsinformed exclusively
by Marxist terminologies. As distinct but interrelated analytical categories, class,
movement,and ideologyresonateinthe competingdefinitions of working-class
culture, proletarian culture, and socialist cultureavailable at the time and in-
clude the subproletarian, plebeian, and subaltern perspectivesthat shed light
on the nonsynchronicities through which culture–always overdetermined, al-
Introduction 7