on Hobsbawm and Anderson that not onlyemphasize the workers’activecontri-
bution to this process but also give afirst indication of the structuraltensions
within the proletariat as an imagined class and an imaginingcommunity in
the making.
Since therediscovery of working-class cultureinthe 1970sand 1980s, histor-
ians and literaryscholars have produced numerous studies on the institutions
and practices that made up the socialist and communist lifeworlds of Imperial
Germanyand theWeimar Republic. Their findings (to be summarizedinthe af-
terword) have contributed toamore nuanced understanding of working-class
cultureasanoppositional or alternative cultureand introducednew critical per-
spectivesonissues of labor,gender,leisure and everydaylife. Scholars of Ger-
man literature, theater,art,and music continue to study certain aspects of social-
ist culture but usuallydosowithin the disciplinary logicsoftheir fields–thatis,
of enlarging the existing corpus of works,discovering newauthors and texts,
questioning prevailing interpretations, and introducing new theoretical models.
Throughout,the emphasis has been on the institutions of working-class culture,
the debates on socialist literature,and the definitions of Marxist aesthetics.Very
few scholars have examined individual works beyond their status as historical
documents. In part,the widespread preference for thematic readings has to do
with the derivative or conventional style of manyofthe works in question–
and the implicit assumptions thatclosereadingsshould bereserved for works
of artistic quality.Asaconsequence, manyinterpretations tend to privilegeap-
proaches that treat working-classcultureaslittle more than an extension of so-
cial reality or an expression of party politics. The studyofsocialist literature and
art furthermore remains inordinatelyconcerned with the question ofreception
or,moregenerally, political impact–therebydenying what the workers hoped
to gain through their appropriation of the bourgeois heritageand theirbelief
in the power of symbolic politics. By focusingonthe emotional function of cul-
tural practices, this book consciouslybrackets questions of originality or quality,
deliberatelyavoids aesthetic evaluations,and instead organizes its readings
around how writing workers dreamt about revolution, how they felt about the
movement,and how they came to terms with political defeat.Accordingly, any
questions of historical reception and political significanceare boundto remain
unanswerable beyond the circumstantial evidence provided by the sheer quan-
tity of books, journals, treatises,performances,celebrations, spectacles, and ex-
hibitions.
Fewscholars have studied the culture of emotionsinsocial movements, and
even fewer have considered the role of the aestheticinthe discourses of social-
ism and communism.TheProletarian Dreamargues that closer attention to the
relationship between political emotionsand aesthetic emotions offers new per-
Introduction 17