The Proletarian Dream Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863-1933

labor under capitalism (fig.11.5and 11.6). In bothcontexts, the creative tension
between figuration and abstraction is put in the service of workers’education
and political agitation. InVienna and, later,inthe Netherlands, Arntz continued
the original project of the Cologne Progressivesinthe realm of visual education,
with the dream of proletarian culture preserved in pictorial statistics as ideology
critique.The promise ofrepresentation, understood in the artistic and political
sense, is onceagain giventothe people–withaclear understandingofthe
key role playedbyform and technique in facilitating new experiences of com-
munity.

In lieu ofaconclusion,itmight make sense to enlist Neurath in defining
how the proletarian modernism of the Cologne Progressive could be situated
within the largereducational, scientific, and political initiativesthatmade up
working-class cultureduringthe late 1920sand early1930s. At one point inLeb-
ensgestaltung und Klassenkampf(1928,The Art of Living and the ClassStruggle),
Neurath explicitly(and perhaps surprisingly)describes statistics as“atool in the
proletarian struggle! Acomponent of socialist economics,asourceofjoy for the

Fig..GerdArntz,“Arbeitslose/Unem-
ployed”(), woodcut, Neuer Berliner
Kunstverein.CopyrightArtists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYork c/o Pictoright
Amsterdam.

Fig..GerdArntz,“Arbeitslose/Unem-

ployed,”Isotype, in Otto Neurath,Gesellschaft

und Wirtschaft(Leipzig: Bibliographisches In-

stitut,),.

220 Chapter11

http://www.ebook3000.com