Others underminegenre-related expectations by emulatingthe chronicle format
with its primary focus on facts and events.
In all cases, writing functions asaform of self-assertion that includes per-
formative elements, which Peter Sloterdijk, in his studyofautobiographyasa
method of organizingsocial experiences,calls nonsubjective subjectivity.¹⁰Ac-
cordingly,the workers’ refusalofintimacy neither proves that workers live
onlyin, and for,the collective,nor does their preoccupation with dailysurvival
suggest an undevelopedinner life. In fact,their unwillingness (or inability) to
perform the roles of“typical”worker and“simple”human being and to grant
accessto their“true”thoughts and feelingsprovidesavaluable entry point
into the complicateddynamics between, to use anthropologicalterms, nativein-
formant and participant observerthat must be considered an integralpart of the
proletarian dream. The samecan be said about the heavyreliance on literary
conventions. Generallyspeaking,workers’lifewritingscan be grouped into sto-
ries of victimization by birth and circumstance, stories of upward mobility
through determination and hard work, and stories of political mobilizationin
the context of the workers’movement.These narrative categories correspond
with three basic emotional scripts, individualresignation, self-advancement,
and class solidarity.The fact that similar scripts can be found in the socialist
novels of MinnaKautsky,August Otto-Walster,and others points to the close af-
finities betweenautobiographical, fictional, and scholarlytreatments of the
provocation of class politics and its role in changingconceptions of public
and privatelife.
The wide publicinterest in workers’lifewritingswas the resultofanumber
of interrelated factors:the growingpolitical influenceofSocialist Democracy
after the lapsingofthe Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890;the coordinated effortsby
government agencies, philanthropic groups,and theLutheran and Catholic
Churches in addressing the so-called social question; and the role of new aca-
demic disciplinessuch as sociology, ethnography, and cultural anthropology
in explaining the infamousmodern masses to middle-classreaders. On the
one hand, the workers’stories of widespread and unrelentingmisery confirmed
bourgeois fears ofrevolutionary uprisingsand provided compellingarguments
in favorofsocial reforms.Onthe other,the workers’belief in the exemplary in-
dividual and his ability to overcomesocial and economic inequality validated
the foundational scripts of self-discovery and self-advancement shared by liberal
democracy,bourgeois subjectivity,and the project of life reform.
Peter Sloterdijk,Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung.Autobiographien der Zwan-
zigerJahre(Munich: Hanser,1978), 8.
Re/WritingWorkers’Emotions 143