has been interpreted as evidence of the conservative tastes of SPD party leaders
and theirenduringbelief in the classics, positions that will be considered in
greater detail through the bourgeois discourses of culture and education ana-
lyzed in chapter 8.Yetasanintegralpart of the campaign against emotional so-
cialism,the naturalism debate and the laterSchiller debate can alsoberead as
referendums on pessimism and optimism asvery different approaches to the role
of literary criticism inmanaging political emotions.
Respondingtothe serialization of twopopular novels in the SPD’spopular
weeklyDie NeueWelt,several speakers at the 1896 Gotha party convention had
attacked their depiction of contemporary social problems as too pessimistic, too
depressing, and too insultingtoSocial Democrats, giventhe official emphasis on
moral and spiritual uplift.The naturalist preoccupation with social milieu, the
influential thinkerFranz Mehring (1846–1919) argued, was conclusive evidence,
“that modernart hasadeeplypessimistic attitude whereas the modern proletar-
iat hasadeeplyoptimisticattitude.”²¹Ignoring the enormous significanceofGer-
hart Hauptmann’sDieWeber(1892,TheWeavers), about therevolt of the Silesian
Weavers,Karl Kautsky,too, lamented that therepresentativesofthe Youngest
Germany“prefer to find the proletariat in the neighborhood pub and the brothel
and paynoattention to the revolutionary proletariat.”²²Socialism,both Mehring
andKautsky concluded, required an unyielding optimistic worldview.Its emo-
tionalregimes demanded thatthe workers be protected from the corrosive qual-
ities ofmodern literatureand be exposed to the great humanist traditions that
alone could provide emotionalguidance and support.
The formative and controversialrole of emotions in the self-understanding of
earlySocial Democracy confirms classasarelational (rather thanstructural) cat-
egory.And far from settling the underlying conceptual issues, the historical
scholarship on working-classculture reveals the continued emotional invest-
ment in questions of class and class politics. This is because,asEric Hobsbawm
conceded in2011, even intellectuals“werelinked to the politics of the left not so
much through theoreticalreflection as an emotional commitment of their practi-
deutschen Sozialdemokratie der II.Internationale überMöglichkeiten und Grenzen einer sozialis-
tischen Literaturpolitik(Neuwied:Luchterhand, 1972), 84–105.
Franz Mehring,“Ku nst und Proletariat”(1896), rpt.intwo parts inWerkauswahl,3vols., ed.
Fritz Raddatz (Darmstadt:Luchterhand, 1975), 3: 17.The novels in question wereHans Land’sDer
neue Gott(1891) andWilhelmHegeler’sMutter Bertha(1893). The novels of Emile Zola and the
dramas by HenrikIbsen served as main exhibits in the argumentsagainst naturalism.
Karl Kautzky,“Der Alkoholismus und seineBekämpfung,”Die Neue Zeit9.2(1890), 86.The
reference isto Gerhart Hauptmann’sVorSonnenaufgang(1889).
Emotional Socialismand Sentimental Masculinity 73