werewritten duringhis imprisonment for high treason.¹In light of the compen-
satory and anticipatory function of much leftwing literarycriticism, including
the romantic notion of the writer asavessel of the collective will to revolution,
it might thereforebebest to focus not on what such comments implyabout lit-
erary practices in the past and present,but on what theyreveal about emotional
attachments to social movementsand political utopias. The implicit and explicit
assumptions about the power of emotionsare especiallynoticeable in the seem-
ingly endless debates about proletarian literature, what it is and what it can and
should be.
During theWilhelmine andWeimaryears, the search for suitable formalreg-
isters and appropriate thematic choices–in short, asocialistversion of norma-
tive aesthetics–served two distinct purposes:to forge proletarian identifications
through the mutual instrumentalization of aesthetic and political emotions and,
in the name of tendencyorpartiality (with its changingdefinitions), to enlist lit-
erature in the fight foraclassless society.The enduringbelief in the unique abil-
ity of literature to capturemodern life in all of its complexities is evidence of the
unwillingness of most criticsto seriously consider the challenges of new media
technologies and forms of cultural consumption. The resistancetowhatWalter
Benjamin calls the ageofmechanical reproduction attests to their anxieties
that the workingclass might be lost to decidedlynonliterarydiversions–anxi-
eties than can onlybeunderstood once literary theory is untangled from litera-
ture and both treated as separate discourses concernedwith narratives, charac-
ters,identifications, and attachments but for different reasons.
Earlier commentators on the heated debates in the leadingSPD and KPD
publications have either noted the enduringinfluenceofbourgeois culture, in-
cludingits veneration of the classics,orpointed to theradical experiments mod-
eled on developments in the SovietUnion. Most scholarlystudies on the subject
treat literary criticism asaprescriptive or evaluative discourse–one in which lit-
erary practicesare described, assessed, and examined and the proper connec-
tion between literaryform and Marxist theory established. By contrast,this chap-
ter takes advantage of the almost compulsive speakingabout literature to shed
light on the two emotional cultures imagined in the name of the proletariat dur-
ing theWeimaryears. Roughlyidentified with the Social Democrats and Comm-
unists, these twomodels conceivedofthe proletariat either asacommunity sus-
tained through unity and harmonyorasacollective forgedinresistance and
conflict.Given the extensive discussion of Social Democratic performances of
community in chapter 12,the main part of this chapter focuses on the Commu-
ErnstToller,“Splitter,”Kulturwille1.1(1924):16.
256 Chapter14