The Proletarian Dream Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863-1933

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municative,orcompensatoryfunctionsand, without further qualification, be
praised for itsradicalizing impact on the workingclass or dismissed asasubsti-
tute for politicalradicalism.Performative and associational practicesshedlight
not onlyonthe strong connection between musical cultureand political eman-
cipation but also on the normative definitions that,time and again, equate work-
ing-class identity with traditional masculinity.The samecan be concluded about
the ways in which choral singing, through its heavy debtto folk and regional cul-
ture, reproduces traditionalforms of sociability,community,and public life in
dialogue with decidedlymodernforms of populism and popularity.
Conceivedasanalternative to bourgeois musical cultureand its class-based
institutions, workers’choral societies werefounded, quite literally, to give avoice
to the workingclassand advancethe goals of the socialist movement.Theyex-
erted their greatest influenceduring theyears of the Anti-Socialist Laws and
reached their highestnumbers duringthe Weimar Republic.Performingduring
the annual MayDay celebrations, appearingatparty events and public parades,
and belongingto the local networks ofvoluntary associations and civic organi-
zations, these choral societies playedakey role in the establishment of what has
been described as an oppositional or alternative publicsphere.With names such
as“Hope,”“Dawn,”Unity,”“Freedom,”and“Fraternity,”the choral societies
duringthe 1870sprovidedasafe space for the expression of socialist ideas out-
side the traditionalchannels of labor activism and party politics. They fulfilled
all these various social,cultural, and political functions by drawingonthe
rich nineteenth century traditions that establishedmusic asadriving forcein
the making of Germannational identity in the context of highculture andrepro-
duced these connections in the practices of popular culture.⁴
Combining old tunes with new texts,workers’songsopenlyattacked the in-
stitutions of classsociety,railedagainst exploitative labor conditions,and ex-
pressed the depths of working-class suffering.Intheir fight against class oppres-
sion, they emphasized the importance of freedom,justice, and equalityand
promoted the values of unity and solidarity.Theirlyrics acknowledgedthe work-
ers’hopelessness and despair but,through appeals to historicalprecursors,also
modeled new forms of emotionalresilience. Essentialto the imagination of the
proletariat as an emotional community,choral singingofferedaperformative
solutionto individual experiencesofdefeat and promised musicalrelief in mo-
ments of doubt and resignation. By displacing present struggles into precapital-
ist times and by conjuring blissful,idyllic socialist futures,workers’songsalso


On this point,see CeliaApplegateand Pamela Potter,eds.,Music and German National Iden-
tity(Chicago:University of Chicago Press,2002).


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