Foraboutadecade, the history of the workingclass producedawealth of
academic and journalistictreatments, includinginthe formoflocal histories.
Brought back into publicawarenessthrough book publications and museum ex-
hibitions, theWeimar Republic provided heroic stories of labor strikes andrev-
olutionary actions as well as idyllic scenes of class solidarity and working-class
life. Throughout the 1970s, the search for historical and political precursors col-
ored the choice of subject matter andmethod of interpretation. InWest Germany,
the intense debates in journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues compen-
sated for the historical defeat of the workingclassin1933byestablishingWeimar
as the model ofaformallyinnovative and politically committed art henceforth
identifiedwith the names ofLukács,Brecht,Bloch, andBenjamin. In East Ger-
many, the idealization of therevolutionary workingclass and theWeimar KPD
served largely legitimizing purposes in the context of state socialism and official
heritageculture. Questioning (or affirming) the relevance of the Marxist critique
of capitalismand class society remained an important part of the scholarship
publishedbysmall leftwing publishing housesinthe West and well-funded
state archivesand academies in the East.Similar conditions made possible
the revisionist histories of the workers’movement written in the political milieu
of the partiesstill acting in their names, the SPD,SED,KPD,and DKP,plusthe
various leftwing splinter groups forming afterthe student movement.⁴
The existing scholarship on working-class culturecould be classified in con-
ventional ways and distinctions be made between East andWest German schol-
ars,West German andAnglo-Americanscholars, or social, labor,cultural, and
literaryhistorians.Such categorieswould track the ongoing transformations of
an emerging interdisciplinary field through its positions at the center and the
margins of humanitiesresearch moregenerallyand through its subsequent re-
sponses to the challenges posed by poststructuralism and various linguistic,vis-
ual, spatial, material,and emotional turns. In this particular case, however,the
internal logic of academic disciplines–the introduction of new areas of inquiry
or research questions, the establishment ofacorpus of works,and the call for
more differentiated accounts or different interpretations–involves strong theo-
retical and emotional attachments that find privileged expression inrelation to
(working-class) cultureand its utopian promises and emancipatory potentials.
Forthatreason alone,ahistoriographyofthe proletarian dream might be recon-
structed best through the international and interdisciplinary dialogues devel-
Forauseful historical overview,see HelgaGrebing,Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewe-
gung.Von derRevolution 1848 bis ins 21.Jahrhundert(Berlin:Vorwärts,2007), an earlierversion
was translated into English by EdithKörner asTheHistoryofthe German Labour Movement: A
Survey(London:Berg,1985).
AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream 341