ty years later,historianVernon Lidtke offeredavery different account that em-
phasizedsocial conflict and segmentationrather than social cohesion and inte-
gration.Accordingly,hedescribed the labor movement“as an alternative culture
in which organized workers could fulfill theirneedsfor companionship, sociabil-
ity,recreation, learning,and aesthetic satisfaction; partake in the community
forming effectsofassociations, clubs,festivals,and songs; and cultivatewhat
he described as the coresocialist values of freedom, equality, and brother-
hood.”³³Treating the social-culturalmilieu of the worker’smovement as part
of aheterogeneous cultureheld togetherbyinternal contradictions, Lidtkecon-
cluded that“the socialist labor movement offered the vision and, in considerable
part,the actuality of an alternative cultureinthe midstofthe social realities of
Imperial Germany[...]analternative that appealed not onlytoworkers,but to
manyothers who took seriously its broad humanitarianism.”³⁴
Within their respective subfields but no longer part ofalargerpolitical or
intellectual project,scholars continue to introduce additional layers, new per-
spectives, and productive complications to the studyofworking-classculture
by focusing specificallyonquestions relatedto artistic medium, literarygenre,
and forms of culturalconsumption and byrevisiting culturalpractices through
various theories of visuality,spatiality,and performativity.³⁵However,asthe
summary of the debatesonworking-class cultureasanoppositional or alterna-
tive cultureillustrates, the research questions from the 1970sand 1980s do not
translate easilyinto contemporary perspectivesand concerns. Moreover,the ini-
tial identification of the proletarian dream with an emancipatory project has
beenrarelychallenged–not withregards to its traditionalgender politicsduring
theWilhelmineyears, its nationalist commitmentsduringWorld WarI,its au-
thoritariantendencies in theWeimar KPD,orits continuities in the cult of the
worker after 1933.Perhaps the contemporary configurations of politics and emo-
tion described in the book’sintroductionwill finallymake it possibletoliberate
the proletarian dream from mainstream condescension and leftist nostalgia and
VernonL. Lidtke,TheAlternativeCulture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany(Oxford: Ox-
fordUniversity Press, 1985),3. Agood discussion of the book can be found in chapter4of
Evans,Proletarians and Politics(72–92).
Lidtke,TheAlternativeCulture,201.
ExamplesincludeW. L. Guttsman,Art for theWorkers: Ideology and the Visual Arts inWeimar
Germany(Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1997); Hans-Joachim Schulz,German Social-
ist Literature1860–1914: Predicaments of Criticism(Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993); Ri-
chardBodek,Proletarian Performance inWeimar Berlin: Agitprop,Chorus,and Brecht(Columbia,
SC: Camden House, 1997); and Carol Poore,TheBonds of Labor:GermanJourneystothe Working
World, 1890– 1990 (Detroit:Wayne StateUniversity Press,2000).
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 355