identity discourse,recast emancipatorymovementsinindividual and, ultimately,
affirmative terms.Heretreating emotions asaheuristic devicerather than the
site ofauthenticity and truth protects against the pitfalls of social constructivism
and its secret double, essentialism, and directs critical attention to the social
imaginaries shared by socialist,populist,and nationalistmovements, beginning
with their almostritualistic evocationofcommunity,folk, and the people.
Studying the discourses of emotion emerging at the intersection of workers’
movement,workingclass, and socialism means being cognizant of the methodo-
logical challenges intrinsic to the studyofcollective subjectivities and imagina-
ries. Mass revolts,populist uprisings, and socialist revolutions remain inaccessi-
ble to conventional forms of inquiry that assume theautonomous bourgeois
individual as the normative model for political convictions and behaviors. The
politics of class cannot be explained through the traditionaltools of mass psy-
chologyeither,given its origins in decidedlybourgeois fears about the modern
masses. New ways of readingmustmove beyond the false alternativesofeither
denouncing thevolatility of the masses or celebrating theauthenticity of the
people and focus instead on historicallyand culturallyspecific ways in which
social movementsgiverise to collective imaginaries. These collective imagina-
ries, even if understood in the most materialistterms, always exceed the deter-
minations of class, labor,and capital and sometimesreach their most powerful
manifestations in marked opposition to Marxist theory and praxis. Here two
methodological solutions offer themselves, to examine the formative role of emo-
tions in social movementsfor their compensatory,anticipatory,liberatory,and
compulsory functions and, based on the remarkable textual productivity that
sustains such movements, to treat political emotions as culturalpractices,in
the sense thatthey are always alreadypart of images, stories,traditions,conven-
tions, and performances. Thisbook proposes thatone wayofuncovering these
intangible but powerful connections is through the historicalexample of German
working-class cultureand the cultureofsocialism and communism.⁵
I
Conceivedasthe first ofatwo-volume work(Vol.I:TheProletarian Dream, 1863–
1933 ,Vol. II:TheWorkers’States, 1933– 1989 ), the largerproject can be described
Anote on capitalization: Throughout this book,“socialist”and“communist”will be the pre-
ferredspelling;“Social Democratic”and“Communist”will be capitalizedwhenever they referto
specific political parties(SPD,KPD).
6 Introduction