deskilling of craftsmen and artisans and the movement of rural laborers from the
country to the city.³⁰Cultural anthropologistWolfgangKaschuba also offered a
critique of normative accounts of class when he drew attention to the so-called
under-bourgeois classes and what he calledArbeiteralltagskultur,aworkers’cul-
ture of everydaylife distinguishedthrough“its own meeting places and spaces of
communication, with specific forms of sociability and living conditions,with its
own imageofsociety and set of values.”³¹
The personal and political investmentsthat made this kind of culturalhis-
torical researchabattlefield for largertheories of cultureand politics aremost
apparent in the debates on working-class cultureasanalternative culture, oppo-
sitional culture, or subculture and, in closing,can be used to returnto the orig-
inal questions about political emotions laid out in the introduction. After all, the
preoccupation with the otherness of working-class culture did not begin and end
with the hallucination ofamass soul in nineteenth-century mass discourse and
the dream of socialist community shared byVormärzutopiansocialistsand Wei-
mar-era cultural socialists. Morecontemporary version of emotional socialism
survivedinscholarlydebates that,from the perspective of today, seem equally
blind to the presuppositions of their times.Very often, theresulting debates in-
volved arguments over appropriate names and definitions. In an earlycontribu-
tion, sociologist Guenther Roth introducedthe notion of subculturetopresent
Social Democracy duringthe Wilhelmineyears as a“studyinworking-class iso-
lation and national integration.”³²Because of its inward-lookinggroup identity
and hostile stancetoward mainstream culture, Social Democracy accordingto
Roth, who used theterm synonymouslywith workingclass, ultimatelyfailed
to challengeexisting hierarchies and,through the compensatoryfunction of
its lifeworld, helped to stabilize social structures and political institutions.Twen-
ErhardLucas,Arbeiterradikalismus.ZweiFormen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiter-
bewegung(Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1976).
WolfgangKaschuba,Lebenswelt und Kulturder unterbürgerlichen Schichten im 19.und
20.Jahrhundert(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990), 31.ForanEast German perspective,see Wolfgang
Jacobeit andUteMohrmann,eds.,Kultur und Lebensweise des Proletariats:Kulturhistorischeund
volkskundliche Studien undMaterialien(Berlin: Akademie, 1973). ForanAustrian perspective,see
HelmutFielhauer and OlafBockhorn, eds.,Die andereKultur:Volkskunde, Sozialwissenschaften
und Arbeiterkultur:Ein Tagungsbericht(Vienna: Europaverlag,1982).
Guenther Roth,TheSocial Democrats in Imperial Germany:AStudy inWorking Class Isolation
and National Integration,prefaceReinhardBendix (Totowa, NJ:Bedminster,1963).Agood dis-
cussion of Roth can be found in Evans,The GermanWorking Class,15–53.For acomparative
studythroughthe perspective of German labor migration, see HartmutKeil andJohn B.Jentz,
eds.,GermanWorkers in Chicago:ADocumentaryHistoryofWorking-Class Culturefrom1 850
to WorldWar I(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988);
354 Afterword