As it turned out in 1918/19, youth also meantlife after war and empire and,
most relevantto this study, life in revolutionary times. Socialist and communist
educatorsrespondedtothese challenges with increased activism, from organiz-
ing children’ssummercamps and starting workers’youth groupsto promoting
proletarian children’sliterature. In the socialist lifeworld, the defining conflict
wasrarelywith the parentalgeneration and focused instead on the ruling
class and its institutions. All initiatives had twogoals in common, to compensate
children for the fate of beingborn into the nextgeneration of their class (to para-
phraseBenjamin)and to introduce them toadifferent kind of living,being,and
feeling as proletarians.This included dealing with the problem ofMinderwertig-
keitsgefühl(feelingofinferiority)and building up theirGemeinschaftsgefühl(feel-
ing of community) throughacombination of educational,recreational, and cul-
tural initiatives.³Socialist and communist children’sactivists agreed that the
injuries sustainedinwhatBenjamin, in the epigraph above, calls“the school
of poverty and suffering”required the building of counterpublics and the telling
of counternarratives.⁴Aligningpedagogyand politics subsequentlymeant mak-
ing working-class childrenaware of the realities of class society–and drawing
heavilyonpsychological theoriesto develop their class consciousness.To com-
pensate for the pervasive feelings of shame, anxiety,insecurity,and hopeless-
ness so widespread among working-classyouth, socialist activists focused on
strengthening children’ssense of community and belonging.This included intro-
duced themto models ofradical democracy far removed from the oppressive
moralityofinstitutionalized Christianity and theauthoritarian structure of the
bourgeoisKlassenschule–that is,aschool system created to preserveclass hier-
archies.The new approaches toteaching and learning spearheaded by reform
pedagogies proved crucialto all initiativesthattreated education as socialization
into themodern cultureofdemocracy and citizenship. But they proved especial-
ly relevant,evenintheirrelianceonbourgeois models, for the initiation of the
nextgeneration of socialists into the political culture of SPD and KPD(or their
Austrian counterparts).This chapter examines the growingattention to emotion-
al education among socialist writers and activists and traces its relevanceto the
making of proletarian identifications in the parallel projects of socialist peda-
In the scholarlyliterature,Minderwertigkeitsgefühlhas been translatedas“feelingofinferior-
ity”and“interiority feeling;”both aretobedistinguished frominferiority complex, giventhe
latter’ssuggestion of psychological disorder.
Walter Benjamin,“ACommunist Pedagogy,”inSelectedWritings,1927– 1930 ,ed. MichaelWil-
liamJenningsHowardEiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone(Cambridge,MA: Bel-
knapPress of HarvardUniversity Press,2005), 273 – 274. In the samevolume, seeBenjamin’sre-
flections on“Program foraProletarian Children’sTheater,” 201 – 206.
The Emotional Education of the ProletarianChild 271