such as the following:How did the emotional energies of choral singingpromote
identification with the political demands of the worker,laborer,orworkingman?
How were workers’emotionswritten and revised for the needs of bourgeois read-
ers?How did socialist leaders and ordinary workers experience socialism as an
emotional community?How could proletarian children overcomefeelingsofin-
feriority?How did communist agitprop modelanew physical and,byextension,
political stance?Andhow werethe promises of sexual liberation as political lib-
eration enlistedinthe cause of class struggle? Focusing on the emotional quality
of specific artistic forms and styles mightgenerateyetanother set of questions:
Whatwasthe role of pathos, melodrama, and sentimentality in the conception
of the workers’movement as an emotional community?Whatwerethe contribu-
tions of allegory,montage, and mass spectacleto the emotionalregimesofclass
struggle? And in what ways did specific modernist techniques cultivateadis-
tinctlyproletariangestus and habitus?Channeled through the focus on individ-
ual emotions, these questions could alsoberedirected in the following way: How
did cultural practices transform individual experiences of hopelessness and de-
spair into collective expressions of anger and pride? How did lovefor the social-
ist leader sustain the dream of revolution and redemption?And how couldrage
or fear be turned into tools of political agitation and emotional conditioning in
support of communism?
II
Critical attentionto political emotions and the politics of emotion maybepartic-
ularlyrelevant to the present conjuncture, but it is equallyimportant toahistor-
ical reassessment of the largest and most organized socialist party of the late
nineteenth century.Fromthe earlyyears of Social Democracyto the laterdivi-
sions between SPD andKPD, the designation“workingclass”not onlygave
rise to an entire lifeworldmade up of associations, festivities, rituals, and sym-
bols; heldtogether by distinct sensibilities, dispositions, and mentalities; and
propelled forward by oftenheated debates about culture, politics, and society.
Later described as alternative or oppositional, this“other”cultureprovided a
metalanguage, includingalanguageofemotions, through which to join together
the identities of“worker”and“socialist”and conjure up theirshared dreams of
sociability,community,and collectivity–reason enough in the next section to
clarify key termssuch as proletarian, culture, and emotion and situate them
within the largerdebatesinculturalstudies.
No concept seems better suitedto draw attention to the surprising similari-
ties between new populist and earlysocialist movements than that of political
Introduction 13