form, Hoernle advocated buildingclass consciousness by encouragingchildren’s
participation in massrallies and propaganda campaigns–if need be, against the
will of theirapolitical mothers. The ultimategoal was the integration of children
and adolescents intoaunited front of the revolutionary workingclass.For
Hoernle, class-conscious,working-class parents had onlyone responsibility:
“To recruit and educate our childrenfor our class, to fill them withproletarian sol-
idarity,communist sense of community,and revolutionaryfighting energy–this is
the first andforemost taskthat the revolutionaryproletariat now owestheir chil-
dren.”¹⁴Hoernle was wellaware that“the struggle for the soul of the proletarian
child”was bound to encounter considerable obstacles in individual character
traits and personal needs and desires.Nonetheless, for him, class pride offered
the best emotional defense against the dailyhumiliations experienced by all pro-
letarians in capitalist society.Inline with official KPD directives, developing
class pridemeant aboveall developing an attitude of militancy:
What should we do then?Should we, the fightingclass,gowithouttellingour children why
we arefighting, whythey toomust become fighters? Canamother refrain fromtelling her
starvingchild whyheisstarving? Can we sit in shameful silencewhen our children ask us,
“Whyare youfighting?Mother,why areyou goingtothe demonstration?Brother,why are
youunemployed?”Should we pretendto be impartial when children report the lies and
smears of their bourgeois friends?Should we tell them that they aretoo young to under-
standwhen they read the lies and defamations in the newspapers and ask usabout
them?No! We will tell our children:Be proud ofyour striking, protestingparents, siblings,
and friends,who arethrowninto prison and struck down in street battles.Beproud when
someone callsyouaSpartacist child. Do not be afraid to be calledacommunist and act like
acommunist.¹⁵The unbridgeable gapbetween the romanticized views of childhood in bourgeois
cultureand the great hardships suffered by the children of the workingclasswas
used by various educational initiativesand debates across the leftist spectrum to
both uncover the deceptions of dominantideologyand provethe superiority of
Marxist analyses. However,their emphasis on class-based analyses and collec-
tive solutions could not account for the fact that psychological injuries and de-
formations werealways suffered individually. Redefining the process of class so-
cializationconsequentlyrequired special attentionto the emotional aspects of
EdwinHoernle,Die Arbeiterklasse und ihreKinder.Ein ernstesWort an die Arbeitereltern(Ber-
lin: Sieber,1921), 12.Lutz vonWerder and ReinhartWolff republishedHoernle’sGrundlagen der
proletarischen Erziehung(1929) in 1969asacontributionto then ongoingdiscussionsabout so-
cialist education and political emancipation.
Hoernle,Die Arbeiterklasse und ihreKinder,15–16.
276 Chapter15