ways contradictory,always ambiguous–was expectedtoreconcile these differ-
ences through the making of proletarian identifications.
Offering access to these complicated processes, the selection of historical
material is limited to members of the workingclass and thoseidentifying with
its struggles,includingworker poets and dramatists, socialist novelists and po-
lemicists, communist painters and dancers–and members of the labor aristoc-
racy and worker intelligentsia.Afew well-known figures such asFranzJung,
FranzWilhelm Seiwert,John Heartfield, andBertolt Brecht are included because
of their contributionto what this studycalls proletarian modernism,aformally
innovative,collectively based, and politicallycommitted art.However,the vast
majority of thewriters and critics are entirelyunknown or familiar onlytoa
few specialists. They publishedtheirnovels, pamphlets, poems, and tracts in
publishing houses founded by the major leftist parties and had their plays per-
formedduring the major anniversaries and celebrations of the workers’move-
ment.Likewise, the artists mentioned showed their work primarilyinsocialist
venueswhile maintainingaprecariousrelationshipto bourgeois institutions.
Their contributions are rescued from oblivion here not in order to give amore
completeaccount of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century German culture
or add them to an expanded canon of great andminor works,but to shed light
on the emotional practices thatradicalizedthe workingclassinthe name of the
proletariat.
Allresearch projects are defined through their inclusions and exclusions.
The choice ofatime framework roughly concurrent with Imperial andWeimar
Germanywas made in recognition of the power of the nation-state in defining
the conditions under,and against,which the proletariat could be imagined as
an emotional community–even as it never became one in the sociological or
anthropological sense. The transnationalnetworks of earlysocialism, the inter-
nationalist organizations of later communism, and socialists’individual routes
of exile within Europe andto the United States will be referencedto the degree
possibleand desirable. Occasional detours through theAustro-Hungarian Em-
pire servetoacknowledge the connections withinadistinctly Germanophone
workers’movementand cultureofSocial Democracy withastrongJewish pres-
ence.Forthe samereasons, in the second part,the productive exchangeofideas
betweenBerlin and Moscow and the Soviet domination of the Cominternare
mentioned to establish the conditions under which the ethos of international sol-
idarityreached its limits in confrontationwith the new constellations of social-
ism and nationalism.
Regrettably, what cannot be considered here are the comparative perspec-
tivesthat could follow the proletarian dreamto other countries and cultures
and trace the affinities between counterhegemonic and anticolonial movements,
8 Introduction