sociated with theWeimar left in the wider sense attracted much of the scholarly
attention as the proponents ofaformallyinnovative and politicallycommitted
art.Rereadingthe lesser socialist poems, plays,images, and songsproduced
over the course of almost seventyyears and concernedprimarilywith preserv-
ing,restoring,ordreamingabout community has brought into sharprelief the
emotional affinities between socialism and nationalism, especiallyinthe lan-
guages of revolution. Closelyrelated, the intersectingdiscourses of class, folk,
and nation have confirmed the significanceofcultural appropriation–over
the insistenceonoriginality and innovation askeycharacteristics of modern
art movements–in either adaptingthe promises of community to the conditions
of modern class society and massculture or providinglines of flight into distant
pasts and futures.
Second, the proletarian dream was from the beginning sustained byacult of
masculinity that originated in established patterns of homosocialsociability,
that remained beholden to capitalist models of manualand industrial labor,
and thatacquiredadecidedlymilitant tone afterWorld WarI.Thesegendered
divides are reproduced in the emotionallycharged terms that informthe distinc-
tion between mass discourse and classtheory,the critical evaluation of bour-
geois literarygenres and styles,the approaches to socialist pedagogyand sex ed-
ucation, and the forms of identification shared by proletarian novels and mass
spectacles. In more surprising ways,continuities in thegendered narratives of
class have brought attentionto thevery different emotional regimes that defined
masculinity in the late nineteenth century,includingthe cultureofmale senti-
mentality that found expression in emotional socialism. The homosociallife-
world created byWilhelmine Social Democracy,the sexism and misogynyof
the workers’movement in its various forms, and the promotion ofadecidedly
male ethosoforder and discipline shared by communism and National Social-
ism will remain central concerns in the secondvolume on the Third Reich and
the German Democratic Republic.
Third, the dependence of the proletarian dream on well-established aesthet-
ic registers and artistic traditions has revealed the continuingrelevance of En-
lightenment thought andWeimar classicism for the workers’movement.Thisin-
cludes the belief in the emancipatory power of the aesthetic, the enlistment of
aesthetic emotions as political emotions, the promotion of cultureasamodel
of nationalidentity,and the considerable debtsto earlier discourses of folk, com-
munity,and the people. The individual casestudies have shown how the bour-
geois heritageinformed all aspects of working-class culture, includingthe belief
inKulturandBildung;how bourgeois notions of interiority wereappropriatedfor
the habitus of community and collectivity;and how idealistaesthetics,including
its most normative categories, continued to inform the socialist approach to
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 337