and annotatedanthologies madesocialist,communist,and anarchist texts again
availableto interested readers and contributed toagrowinginterest in local and
regional history that included the interrelated historiesofindustry,labor,and
technology.Thesedevelopments even extended to thevoices of contemporary
workers,asevident in the founding of theWerkkreisLiteraturder Arbeitswelt
(Working Group on Literature of theWorkingWorld) and the revival of workers’
film and photographymodeled onWeimar-era initiatives. The key terms em-
ployed in this process of critical reclamation–opposition, resistance, and sub-
version–not onlyspeak to the underlying search for aesthetic modalities and
collective imaginaries that could provevaluableto then-contemporary forms
of protest,but they alsoattestto apainfulawareness of therapid disappearance
of traditional industries,labor parties, and forms ofresistance and, with them,
theoretical models for understanding power and change.Aware of these contem-
porary perspectives, GermanistWolfgangEmmerich described the new research
as acritical intervention into the political cultureofthe Federal Republic:
against the loss of historicalawareness in the workers’movement and the polit-
icalapathyofthe workers but alsoagainst the fetishization of the proletariat by
the student movement.¹⁸
Engaginginabroader critique ofGermanistikas adiscipline in the double
sense of the word, Emmerich, togetherwith FrankTrommler,BerndWitte,and
others, subsequentlyintroduced the designations“worker”and“socialist”into
existing literaryhistories and, in the process,radicallyexpandedconventional
definitions of canon, period, andgenre and established terms of literary analy-
sis. In theyears that followed,Trommler’scomprehensive history and Simone
Barck’slexicon of socialist literature as well as HeinzLudwigArnold’stwo-
part primer and Gerald Stieg andBerndWitte’sshortstudyguide on workers’lit-
erature identifiedkey authors and works,examined prevailing forms and
themes, and evaluated literarymovementsinrelation to the structures of class
society,the institutions of dominant culture, and the connection to socialist
and communist parties.¹⁹Since then,more specialized studies have covered top-
Wolfgang Emmerich,Proletarische Lebensläufe.Autobiographische DokumentezurEntste-
hung derzweiten Kultur in Deutschland,2vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1980),1: 9–35.
Forreferences in chronological order,see Gerald Stieg and BerndWitte,Abriß einer Ge-
schichte der deutschen Arbeiterliteratur(Stuttgart: Klett,1973); FrankTrommler,Sozialistische Lit-
eratur in Deutschland.Ein historischer Überblick(Stuttgart: Kröner,1976); Martin H.Ludwig,Ar-
beiterliteratur in Deutschland(Stuttgart:Metzler,1976); HeinzLudwigArnold,Handbuch zur
deutschen Arbeiterliteratur,2vols. (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1977); and Simone Barck et
al., eds.,Lexikon sozialistischer Literatur.IhreGeschichte in Deutschlandbis 1945(Stuttgart: Met-
zler,1994).
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 349