theaterrepertoireasthe director of the Maxim-Gorki Theater in EastBerlin.Jean
Weidt came from Paris to train new dance ensemblesatthe Volksbühne and the
Komische Oper.Notwithstanding these prestigious appointments, the performa-
tive registers of communist agitprop struggledto findrecognition in the new
workers’and peasants’state. In fact,whenFelixmüller, who taught at the Univer-
sity of Halle, repainted his 1920 portrait of OttoRühle in 1946,hesmoothed out
the irregularities on the face of this forgottenrepresentative of left communism.
Meanwhile, Querner, who after1933had limited his output to idyllic scenes of
everydaylife, was rediscovered asamajor proletarian painterduring the 1960s
in what must be considered the first of several wavesofnostalgia for commu-
nism, includingfor the confrontational ways of standing codified duringthe
1920sand early1930s. In the largercontext of this book, these revisionist tenden-
cies confirm the overdetermined function of embodied habitus as part of thevery
different models of proletarian culturepromoted by the Communists and the So-
cial Democratsduring theWeimaryears. As the next chapter argues, the under-
lyingdiscourse ofKampfkulturwas not limited to agitprop and its unique per-
formative forms and techniques but,infact,found its clearest articulation in
literarytheory and criticism. In delineating these connections made in the
name of militancy,the debates in the KPD’sLinkskurveoffer privileged access
to the underlying assumptions about proletarian literature asamethod of emo-
tional conditioning and the highlygendered proposals for increasingits effec-
tiveness in the class struggle.
254 Chapter 13