ed preoccupation with symbolic politics as the main site of contestation and af-
firmationinaglobalized world dominatedbynew social media and thevery dif-
ferent collective imaginaries organized through them.
Notwithstanding the almost habitual invocation of class as part of the con-
ceptual trinity ofgender,race, and class, serious engagementwith questions of
class remainsrare even in the current theoretization of intersectionality and po-
sitionality,the discussions about culturalhybridity andmulticulturalism, and
the mappingofatransnational Germanliterature through the lens of multilin-
gual literaciesand cosmopolitan sensibilities. Similarly, the productive insights
gained at the intersection of German studieswith genderstudies, postcolonial
studies, and criticalrace studies have yettobeapplied to the culturalarticula-
tion of classdifferences in the historicallydeveloped structures of social and
economic inequality and the discourses of folk, community,and nation. And
with special relevanceto the studyofemotions in social movements, it would
be difficult to imagineagreater divide separating the breadth and depth of po-
litical and aesthetic emotions mobilized in the name of the proletariat–ranging
from suffering,indignation, and pathos torage,hatred, and pride–and the
much more limiting equation of the human condition with the positions of vic-
tim and perpetrator and with the experience of trauma and loss in contemporary
identity discourses.
Despite the seemingly insurmountable distance separatingthese identity
discourses from the earlyMarxist studies on working-class culture, both lines
of inquiry can be traced back to the emergence of the New Left in the mid-
1960s and the socialmovementsofthe 1970s. Aproductofthese developments,
therediscovery of workers’literature and socialist literaturesubsequentlytook
place as part ofalargercritique of bourgeois culture and society:the critique
of the cultureindustry and the insistence on the utopianfunction of art; the
emergence ofaformallyadvanced and politicallyengaged aesthetics associated
with the names of Brecht andBenjamin; the turn to mass cultureand popular
cultureaspotential sites of resistanceand subversion; and the critical self-reflec-
tion of the humanities and their historicalrole in the defenseofhighcultureand
the invention of nationalliterature.InWest Germany,the leftists’claims on a
radicallydemocratic tradition of cultureassociatedwith socialism and the work-
ing classnot onlyplaced them in opposition to bourgeois high culturebut also to
Marxist-Leninist interpretations of class and culture developed in East Germany
and fullyinline with the policies of the workers ’and peasants’state.
In theFederal Republic, the reclamation and, perhaps,reinvention ofafor-
gotten working-classculture resulted in the discovery of rich historiesand tradi-
tions purgedfrom the archives, museums, and librariesduring the Third Reich.
Often published by small leftist publishers, numerous reprints,new editions,
348 Afterword