ics rangingfromWilhelmine workers’choral societiesto theWeimarSprechchor
movement that confirm these groups’heavy debts to bourgeois cultureand folk
culturebut,inthe lifeworld dominated by the KPD, also show the stronginflu-
ence of developments in the Soviet Union. Throughout the heavy emphasis on
literarytheories and debates has offered further evidence of the inordinatesig-
nificance attributedto criticism asa(surrogate) public sphere at the time.
More problematically, these research interests point to the continued overvalua-
tion of ideas (rather than emotions) in the assessment of workers’literatureand
socialist literature today.
The heated arguments over the best definitionofArbeiterliteratur(workers’
literature)–namely,asliterature by,for,orabout workers,orasliterature
about labor conditions and the workers’movement–became an integralpart
of the entire process of rediscovery andreevaluation. The sameholds true for
the conceptual tension between“socialist literature”and“working-classlitera-
ture”and manyscholars’continuedreliance on an idealistaesthetic complete
with unquestioned assumptionsaboutappropriateforms,genres,and styles.
Sometimes this revisionist process extended to movements excluded from the
dominant leftwingnarrativeofclassmobilization,aswas the casefor the left
radicalismstudied byWalterFähnders.²⁰At othertimes, thegoal was to move
beyond conventional poetological categories andgenre distinctions and torad-
icallyrethink the social function of literature,aprocess that provedmost suc-
cessful in the close attention to modernist forms and the openingtoward new
mass media. Arguing along these lines,BerndWitte (under the influenceofTre-
tyakov) proposedto redefine workers’ literatureasafunctional literature, name-
ly“the attempt of developingaclass literature through which the proletariat
gainsasense of self and asserts itself against the culturalhegemonyofthe bour-
geoisie.”²¹
Abrief comparisonto the research conducted in East Germanyduring the
same time period helps to further clarify the political significance of the schol-
arlydiscovery of working-classcultureinWest Germany, Great Britain, and the
United States.Obviously, the steadyflow of monographs,editions, and antholo-
gies published inBerlin (East) and Leipzig,ahistorical center of Social Democ-
SeeWalterFähnders and Martin Rector,Linksradikalismus und Literatur.Untersuchungen zur
Geschichte der sozialistischen Literatur in derWeimarer Republik,2vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1974)
andAnarchismus und Literatur: Ein vergessenesKapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichtezwischen
1890 und 1910(Stuttgart: Metzler,1987). Bothauthors also served as editorsofLiteratur im Klas-
senkampf.Zur proletarisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie, 1919–1921: Eine Dokumentation
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,1974).
Stieg andWitte,Abriß einer Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterliteratur,12.
350 Afterword