least,the studyofnew massmedia and their impact on the traditional arts al-
lowedanew generation of film and media scholars to reassess working-class cul-
ture inrelation to the culture industry and, with special attentionto the workers’
photographyand workers’radio movements, further expand the fieldsofinquiry
towardatrulymaterialist approach to the studyofculturalproduction and con-
sumption in the technological age.²⁷
Giventhe widespread tendencyfor presentist approaches,the scholarship
on socialist literature frequentlyreproduced unchallenged assumptions that
equated the“worker”automaticallywith revolutionary causes and reduced the
“proletariat”to itsradicalizing effects. In developing more complex models,
some scholars proposedreconceptualizing German working-classcultureby
moving beyond national boundaries, for instance in the form of comparative
studies, or by focusingonthe Wilhelmineyears as the most crucial period of
class formation. Building on Lenin’stheory of two cultures,Emmerich intro-
duced the relational term of a“second culture”to identify the socialist elements
that in all societies arise seemingly naturallyfrom the workingand living condi-
tions of the people and that are always mobilizedagainst dominant bourgeois
culture.²⁸Against the privileging of the skilled industrial workers and their re-
formist positions, the social historianKarl Heinz Roth uncovered thevoices of
the“other”worker’smovement consistingofunskilled workers and presented
them as the trulyrevolutionary movement.²⁹Addingto the understandingof
class culture as fluid and contested, labor historian ErhardLucas studied the his-
torical narrativesofproletarization asatwo-prongedprocess that involved the
and Rainer Rosenberg, eds.,Literatur und proletarische Kultur:Beiträgezur Kulturgeschichte der
deutschen Arbeiterklasse im 19.Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie, 1983), especiallyDietrich
Mühlberg,“Literatur in der Arbeiterklassenkultur:Bemerkungen zu Ansätzenkulturhistorischer
Forschung”(17–44); and, by the sameauthor,Proletariat: Kultur und Lebensweise im 19.Jahrhun-
dert(Vienna: Böhlau, 1986).Forvery personal recollections on East German scholarship on
working-class culture, seeHorst Groschopp,“Aufder Suche nach dem historischenSubjekt
für sozialistischeKultur.Erinnerungenandie Arbeiterkulturforschunginder DDR,”Kulturation,
OnlineJournalfürKultur, Wissenschaft und Politik29.7 (2006), 15 pp.
Forthe Weimar period, examplesincludeJoachim Büthe,Der Arbeiter-Fotograf.Dokumente
und Beiträgezur Arbeiterfotografie, 1926– 1932 (Cologne: Prometh, 1978)and BruceMurray,Film
and the German Left in theWeimar Republic: From“Caligari”to“KuhleWampe”(Austin: Univer-
sity ofTexas Press, 1990).
Emmerich,Proletarische Lebensläufe:Autobiographische DokumentezurEntstehung der
zweiten KulturinDeutschland,1:30–35.
SeeKarl Heinz Roth,Die“andere”Arbeiterbewegung und die Entwicklung der kapitalistischen
Repression von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart: EinBeitrag zumNeuverständnis der Klassengeschichte in
Deutschland(Munich:Trikont,1974); and Dieter Kramer,Theorienzurhistorischen Arbeiterkultur
(Marburg: VerlagArbeiterbewegungund Gesellschaftswissenschaft,1987).
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 353