ist writingsthat established the world historical mission of the workingclass
(chapters1and 2).Subsequent chapters follow the performance of proletarian
identifications from the first workers’choral societies (chapter 4) to theWei-
mar-era speaking choruses (chapter 12)tothe communist approachestoagitprop
(chapter 13). The discourses of emotion are addressed explicitlythrough an ex-
aminationofemotional socialism (chapter 3) and its resonances in the socialist
celebrity phenomenon (chapter 6) and in the brief popularity of workers’life
writings(chapter 7). Emotions also stand at the center of the socialist appropri-
ation of classical allegory andmythology(chapter 5) and of bourgeois discourses
of cultureand education (chapter 8). The proletarian novels about failed revolu-
tionary situations afterWorld WarIare particularlyrevealing because they pro-
vide therapeutic solutions through revisionist fantasies and experimentwith for-
mal and emotional alternativestoconventional modes of character identification
(chapters9and 10). The ways in which the cultureofemotions extendsto peda-
gogicaland psychological categories can be seen in the didactic function of pro-
letarian children’sliterature and the sexual liberation promised by the Sex-Pol
movement (chapters 15 and 16). Finally, the communist turn to socialist realism
in the literary debatesabout tendencyand partiality(chapter14)and the experi-
ments withmodernisttechniquesinthe context of photography and film (chap-
ters17 and 18) point to intenselyemotional struggles over the meaning of the
proletarian dream and its changingsignificanceunder the influenceofStalinism
and in confrontation with National Socialism.
The individual chapters cover the historical period that sawthe transforma-
tion of an estates-based society intoaclass-based society,that continued
through the parallel processes of industrialization, modernization, massifica-
tion, and urbanization, and that culminated in the double defeat in 1933 of
the first German democracy and the largest organized workingclass worldwide.
Just as the fightagainst social and economic inequality and for democratic forms
of governmentduring theWilhelmineyears is inconceivable without Social De-
mocracy,the collapse of empire and monarchyafterWorld WarIis inseparable
from the profound impact of the October Revolution onWeimar cultureand so-
ciety.Under these conditions,working-class culturedeveloped into an alternative
or oppositional publicsphere between two historicalmoments, the struggle for
national unification and democratization from 1848 to 1871 and the nationaliza-
tion of labor andracialization of community after 1933.The rise of the Social
Democratic Party as the first modernmass political party in Imperial Germany,
the proliferation of working-class culturalassociations and socialist,communist,
and anarcho-syndicalist groups around the turn of the century, and the divisions
between, andwithin, SPD and KPDduring theWeimar Republic established the
proletarian dream as both an essential part of Marxist critiques of capitalism and
10 Introduction