party and the KPD asavanguard party of the Leninist type and articulate the
aspirational values of these competingmodels in recognizable emotional
terms.Astobeexpected, the symbioticrelationship between working-class cul-
ture andmasculinity,with the SPD offering primordial brotherhood and patriar-
chal father figures and with the KPD celebratingthe worker-functionary-engi-
neer as the ideal of the New Man, remained largely unaffected by these
ideological divides.
Promisingsocial harmonyand asense of belonging,“community”in these
contexts represented the more established, broader termand is closelytied to
older ideas about folk,race,and nation. As shown in chapter1, the nine-
teenth-century discourse of community was the product ofatwo-front battle
within the social imaginary against the specter of massification associated
with the workingclass and the divisions in class society produced by capitalism.
Accordingly, the conceptualization of communitarian culture involved terms
such as unity,stability,continuity,harmony, and,aboveall, forms of sociability
free of the competition, isolation,and estrangement experienced in moderncap-
italist societies. By contrast,the term“militant,”which translatedall relation-
ships into antagonistic terms,gained its legitimacy from those revolutionary mo-
ments – the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the German
Revolution of 1918/19–when long existing social problems exploded in violent
solutions.Asapolitical habitus, confrontation onlyneeded an initial decision to
place the imaginary proletariat in themidst of battle, surrounded by enemies on
all sides. In orderto maintain this momentum,however,militantculture re-
quired the acceptance ofauthority and hierarchy, with party discipline strictly
enforced in line with the vanguard principle. As seen in chapters9and 10,its
coollymasculinist attitude took inspiration from the battlefields of modern
war and industry and drew heavilyonthe iconographyofthe military tomain-
tain internal coherence and conveyexternal strength. Confirmingits Bolshevik
genealogy, this KPDKampfkulturhad little in common with older traditions of
militancy,such as GeorgesSorel’sreflections on violence and its eruption in
thegeneral strike or RosaLuxemburgswriting’ sonspontaneous mass action
and the massstrike asapoliticaltool.
Not surprisingly,the battle cry ofKampf,tobetranslated as conflict,fight,or
struggle, becamearecurringtheme in the various initiativesoverseen by the
KPD.In1925, Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988) established the party’snew mil-
itant stance when he declared that, in light of the inevitability of class struggle
under capitalism,“the emergingrevolutionary proletarian culture is, by necessi-
Marxist LiteraryTheoryand Communist MilitantCulture 259