Frankfurt am Main towatchacast of two thousand perform de Man’sonlyplay.
Herbert Graf, who latergainednotoriety as SigmundFreud’sLittleHans,was in
charge of the production; OttmarGerster,who taught at theFolkwangschule in
Essen,wrote the musicalscore. TheFrankfurt-basedKulturkartell (cultural car-
tel),asocialist culturalorganization, had commissionedWe!to celebrate May
Dayinthe form of akultischeFeier(mass ritual) and, as was hoped,repeat
the phenomenal success of LoboFrank’sKreuzzug der Maschine(1930,Crusade
of the Machine) with its more than one thousand layactors.Cultic celebrations
like these promised to eliminate the fourth wall of the traditionalproscenium
stageand, in so doing,expand the boundaries of political theater beyond the
available choices(in the Aristoteliantradition) of imitation and identification.
As theauthor ofWe!said, the ultimategoalwastostage“aperformance of
the masses eager to announce theircollective willinthe fight for socialism
and, through this performance,to give their commitmentamore explicit and
compellingform.”⁶
Todayprimarilyknown as the collaboratist uncle of Paul de Man, Hendrik de
Man at the time was widelyrecognizedasanoriginal socialist thinker who
taught in workers’education associations and lecturedonsocial psychologyat
the UniversityofFrankfurt.His evolving critique of Marxist historicalmaterial-
ism and Social Democratic reformism found expression inadistinct,ifnot idi-
osyncratic cultural socialism basedonindividual ethical principles. During
the 1930s, he contributed to the statist labor policies and public works projects
promoted throughout Europe and the United States with his own proposal for a
New Deal inBelgium, the so-called 1933 Plan de Man. Notwithstanding his later
fascistaffiliations, his critical writingsfrom the 1920s, and his observations on
an emotionallybasedunderstanding of socialism in particular, are very much in-
formedbyhis active involvement in Social Democratic initiativesinFrankfurt.
One of the initiativesreceptive to de Man’sconcept of emotional socialism
was the above-mentionedKulturkartell, which was foundedinFrankfurt in
1925 to coordinate culturalevents among theUSPD,SPD,SAJ,ADGB, and
other left-leaning groups.Their shared belief in culture (and,byextension, edu-
cation)asapowerful sourceofclassmobilization enabled the representativesof
Kultursozialismus(cultural socialism) torealize aspects of anauthentic working-
class culturealreadyunder capitalist conditions.Intent on making culture the
third pillar of the proletarian lifeworld–the other two werethe party and the
union–the leader of theKulturkartell, Conrad Broßwitz (1881–1945), defined
Hendrik de Man,Wir! Ein sozialistischesFestspiel(Berlin: Arbeiterjugend-Verlag, 1932),2.
Henceforth citedinparentheses in the text.
226 Chapter 12