Sprechchor“by showing thetension between positive and negative forces that
bringsforth the commitment to socialism through the experience of contempo-
rary man–that is, the sufferingand struggle of the proletariat.”¹¹Originally
calledErlösung(Redemption),We!mayhavefailed to deliveronthe promise
of socialist revolution, but the yearning for spiritual renewal survivedand
thrivedinNational Socialist terms.Onlyone year later,in1933, the official
Kampftag(dayofstruggle) of the workingclasswas renamed“dayofcelebration
of nationallabor,”the figure of the revolutionary worker claimed for theracial
community,and the proletarian subject of theSprechchorintegratedinto the
völkischdream world of theThingspiel,the Naziversion of cultic ritual performed
in speciallydesigned outdoor amphitheaters duringthe early1930s and dis-
cussed in detail in the secondvolume.
There is stillawidespreadtendency in literary and historical scholarshipto
equate the term“community”with reactionary andvölkischideologies and,for
that reason, attribute prefascist tendencies to all references to community in
Weimar-era texts and practices.Infact,the performances of“we”in theSprech-
chorbuilt on the complex and contradictory meanings of one of the most impor-
tant conceptsinthe social imaginary of nineteenth-centuryGerman thought,
that of community.Through ritualistic acts and cultic forms, the productions ref-
erenced precapitalistforms of sociability and redirected their emotional residues
towardpostcapitalist models of community.Though presented asaradical alter-
native to bothbourgeois class society and modern mass society,this imagined
socialist community never brokefree of the heterogeneous influences that ac-
count for the term’sproblematic compatibility with the political alternativesto
society proposed in the name of the people.Ferdinand Tönnies’sfamous distinc-
tion between the organic ties present in“community”and the formalrelations
existing in“society”and his corresponding juxtaposition betweenauthentic Ger-
man cultureand European civilization captured the widespread anxieties in Im-
perial Germany caused by capitalist modernization andrapid urbanization. Dur-
ing theWeimaryears, the discourse of community,especiallyinthe form of
romantic anticapitalism, continuedto generate emotionallychargedbinaries
for the conservative revolution that extended from the prewar“reflections of a
nonpolitical man”by Thomas Mann to theracialtheories of Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg. Even for socialist theorists from de Manto Gramsci, the notion
of community,often in conjunction with solidarity,remainedthecentral category
for imagininganother kind of society andadifferent form of politics,apoint
confirmed by Gramsci’sinsistenceonthe importance of folk culturetothe rev-
Anon, Review ofWir!,ArchiefHendrik de Man,170.
228 Chapter12