made great personal sacrificesbecause of their political commitments;these in-
cluded experiencesofcensorship and vilification, exile and inner emigration, in-
carceration and persecution, and sometimes even death in prisons,gulags, and
concentration camps. In other words, the fate of the texts and contexts created
under such conditionsisinseparable from the history ofauthoritarianism, anti-
semitism,racism,anticommunism, and totalitarianism. Several of the nine-
teenth-centuryradicals fled the German statesfor neighboringcountries in the
aftermath of the 1848 Revolutions; others immigratedto the United States be-
cause of the Anti-Socialist Laws. After 1933,almostall SPD and KPD politicians
and politicallycommitted writers and artists went into exile to the United States
or the Soviet Union. ManyCommunists returned to the GDR to less than welcom-
ing conditions;afew became anticommunists inUS-American exile.Astheir
publishedautobiographies,memoirs, diaries, and correspondences acknowl-
edge,alife committed to the proletarian dream oftenmeantalife under condi-
tions of precarity–includingfor members of the workers’intelligentsia and for
the vaunted organic intellectuals in Gramsci’ssense.
Despite deliberate effortsatsilencing and morepervasive modes of forget-
ting,the proletarian dream–written in the German language, but always reach-
ing beyond German borders–has been preserved in books, libraries, collections,
and archives. Printed on cheap paper,published in small editions, and distrib-
uted by underfundedpublishers, the numerous books, magazines, and newspa-
pers circulating within the socialist and communist lifeworlds have survivedasa
tribute andatestamentto the remarkable productivity of the proletarian imagi-
nary.There is no doubtthatthe ban of socialistauthors duringthe period of the
Anti-Socialist Laws, the Nazi book burningsof1933,the conflagration of German
cities in 1944/45, and the German-German contestoverworking-class culture
duringthe ColdWarhavecontributedto the ongoing marginalization of work-
ing-class perspectivesinpublicmemory,national history,and academic re-
search.Forthe cultural historian today, this long history of suppression and in-
differencecan beabelated blessing.Preciselybecause the proletarian archives
have been forgottenand ignored,asurprising number of books have survived,
some of them unopenedand unread for almostone hundred and fiftyyears.
In theUnited States,the centrifugal forces of exile and migration, but also the
internationalism of the workers’movement,haveleft traces in the provenance
of rare titles and their location in research libraries farawayfrom their places
of publication.Hiddenawayinstoragefacilities,moreand more works are
now being madeavailable through digitalrepositories; the project of the digital
humanities has giventhemasecond life. Alreadyacursory look atex libris,mar-
ginalia, and other ephemeraindicates in what ways the books’difficult journeys
from Europeto NorthAmerica function as an integralpart of the proletarian
28 Introduction