apronounced cultureofresentment,with some workers wishing others to be
treated as badlyasthey had been. Drawingperhaps on his work with theAus-
trianKinderfreunde, he called this compensatoryfantasy“amoredangerous
enemyofsocialism todaythanall the actual capitalists in the world.”²¹
By addressing the problem of childhood and adolescenceinclass terms,so-
cialist educators not onlydismantled themyths of apolitical education upheld
by manybourgeois reformers but alsoconfronted persistent petty-bourgeois at-
titudes prevalentamong working-class parents.Takingvery different approaches
to this persistent problem, SPD-affiliated organizations promoted educational in-
itiativestofurther class allegiance, while KPD-affiliated organizations werepri-
marilyinterested in enforcingparty allegiance. Ingeneral, Social Democrats
avoided the overt politicization of childhood, emphasizing insteadthe develop-
mentofindividualpersonalitieswithinthehumanisticmodelsofsociability
found in class as community.Communists, by contrast, took an openlyinstru-
mental approach and treated children and adolescents as the first line of attack
in acoordinated political mobilizationofthe workingclass. Educational histor-
ians have examined these different conceptions of childhood through the polit-
ical schisms and rivalries in theWeimarleft.²²While these differencescannot be
ignored, they should not be read as direct expressions of opposing party pro-
grams.Awarenessofthe embeddednessofsocialist educational theory and prax-
is in the largerhumanistic discourses of childhood is equallyimportant whenit
comes to the discursive role assigned to emotions in these various contexts. So-
cialist and communist pedagogies shared the same overarchingconcerns with
the proletarian child’sinitiation into the community or the collective,with
bothterms still used interchangeably. Moreover,the building of imaginary com-
munitiesaround the figure of the child and themyth ofyouth involved compli-
cated processes of projection thatcannot be reconstructed through educational
manuals and treatises alone and that requirethe unique insightsgainedfrom the
emotional scenarios imagined by proletarian children’sliterature.
In recentyears,Sven Steinacker,HeikoMüller, and Sabine Andresen have
publishedcomprehensive studies on socialist and communist pedagogies in
the German context.Bycontrast, the proletarian children’sliterature of the
1920shas beenmore or less ignored since the historicalgroundwork done by
GDR scholars Ingmar Dreher,HansgeorgMeyer,HorstKunze, and HeinzWege-
OttoFelixKanitz,Das proletarische Kind in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft(Jena: Urania, 1925),
34.
Foranintroduction to the pedagogical concepts of SPD and KPD,see Sabine Andresen,So-
zialistischeKindheitskonzepte. Politische Einflüsseauf die Erziehung(Munich:Ernst Reinhardt,
2006), 34–119.
The EmotionalEducation of the ProletarianChild 279