Grothe to accompanyhim to the station,hereplies:“Don’tyou want to staywith
me for one night?Ihave anice room out thereinLindenburg.”Grothe declines
but leavesopen the possibilityofashared future by citing from the well-known
folk song“Muß i’denn zum Städele hinaus”:“‘As for the staying–let’swait
until the fall. But when the grapesripen on the vine, then Ill return to’ you,
mydarling (Schatz)!’”(BR,226)The closing referenceto“storm cloudsgather-
ing”and the evocative imageof“rapid currents”(BR,227)against which the
coal bargesonthe Rhine travel upriversuggest thatthe strength of the revolu-
tionary proletariat willdepend cruciallyonmen’scontinuingability to transfer
their sexual energies to the homosocialproject of revolution.
Michael Rohrwasser, in the first studyonproletarian mass culture, has paid
special attentiontothe highlygendered stereotypes in the popularRote-Eine-
Mark series of novels published by the Malik publishing house.²⁰TheBurning
Ruhr,the first book in the series, containsmany examples of what Rohrwasser
calls thegendered opposition of“communist-young-strong-male”and“Social
Democrat-old-impotent-female.”As constellations, these stereotypical figures
give voice to attitudes and beliefs that,accordingtoRohrwasser,aim at the den-
igration of the privatesphere in favorofthe homosocial milieu of communism.
The moral binaries can beread as evidence of the considerable debt of 1920s
proletarian literature to nineteenth-century trashynovels. However,the aggres-
sive fantasiesprojected onto the sexualized woman point to new emotional trau-
mas and ideological divides.Infact,the juxtaposition of the eroticallyalluring
fascistwoman and the sisterlycommunist woman maybeclosertothe polemical
distinction, with the respective reversals,between the redrevolver bride and the
whitenurseidentified by Klaus Theweleit asarecurringmotif in theautobio-
graphical writingsofFreikorps men.²¹In his two-volume studyMaleFantasies
Michael Rohrwasser,SaubereMädel, starke Genossen. ProletarischeMassenliteratur?(Frank-
furt am Main: Roter Stern, 1975). Foracritical response, seeWolfgang Emmerich,“The Red-One-
Mark-Novel and theHeritage of OurTime:Notes on Michael Rohrwasser’sSaubereMädel—Starke
Genossen: Proletarische Massenliteratur?,”New German Critique10 (1977): 179 – 189.Compare
Paul Günter Krohnand Heinz Neugebauer,ed.,Für Euch ist dasWort. Die Gestalt des Arbeiters
in der proletarisch-revolutionären Literatur Deutschlands, 1918– 1933 (Berlin:Tribüne, 1962) and,
for an overview of Rote-Eine-Mark novels,see Hanno Möbius,ProgressiveMassenliteratur?Rev-
olutionäreArbeiterromane 1927– 1932 (Stuttgart: Klett,1977).
Klaus Theweleit,Male Fantasies,2vols., trans. ChrisTurner,Stephen Conway, and Erica Car-
ter(Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress,1987), especiallyvolume1.Theweleit evokesan-
other lurid Gisela Zenk sceneinTheBurningRuhrto note similaritiesbetween fascist and pro-
letarian texts,but onlytothen minimize the implications:“If the tendencieswe’vebeen
discussingseem relatively harmlessinproletarian novels as compared with fascist novels,
that’sbecause in proletarian novels the central concern is not the aggressive removal of
188 Chapter 9