dream and its forms of culturalcontact and symbolic communication. The
names of first readers on the flyleavesand their extensive notes on the margins
give afirst indication of the powerful identifications formedinthe act of writing
andreading,ofpublishing and collectingand continued in thewavesofscholar-
ship on working-class culture and the cultureofsocialism and communism since
the 1970s.²⁷
Twovery contemporary developments have provided the original impetus
for the largerproject,the renewed urgency surrounding questions of social
and economic inequality andrelated questions about the nature of new populist
movements and the futureofliberal democracies. The growinghistoricaldis-
tance,marked by the prefix“post,”from the formative period ofmodern capital-
ism and class society thatgave rise to the workers’movement hasmade acritical
reassessment of German working-class cultureboth possible and necessary.As
this introduction has argued, it is preciselythrough the profound otherness un-
To give afew examples, the socialist pulp novels housed in public libraries inTexas and the
Midwest follow the wavesofpost-1848 immigration of German socialists but also laythe ground
for the contribution of German working-class communities in NewYork, Chicago,and elsewhere
to the strugglesofAmerican organized labor.Meanwhile the uncut pages inasocialist utopian
novel from the 1880s and theVienna tram ticket used asabookmark ina1920s treatise on so-
cialist education point to moretroublinghistories of reading and non-reading.Abook from the
library of theTouristenverein Naturfreunde in Philadelphiaappears likeamissive from an al-
most forgotten American labor movement that providedanew home for recent European immi-
grants.Bycontrast,the survival ofabook fromthe IsraelitischeKultusgemeindeinVienna or the
City Library in Schwerin in an American university researchlibrary draws attention to the routes
of flight that made possible the survival of ideas far removedfromtheir original sites of articu-
lation and circulation. Similarly, the library stamp fromasmall collegelibrary in the Midwest
pasted over that of theJewish community in Breslau, theex librisfrom the personal archives
of exiled sociologist Paul Honigsheim now housed at Michigan StateUniversity,and the imprint
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party ofCzechoslovakia next to the barcode of the
research library of BrighamYoungUniversity bear witness to the brutal suppression of SPD,
KPD,and labor unions after the Nazi ascentto power. On the other side of theAtlantic, the per-
sonal archivesofleadingWeimar-era leftist activists and scholars held in the InternationalIn-
stituteofSocial History (IISH) in Amsterdam attest to the enduranceofinternationalist commit-
ments even under the difficultconditions of exile after 1933.The former German Library in
Leipzig (now part of the German National Library) still has extensive holdings that reflect the
city’shistorical roleasacenter of theworkers’culture movement and its postwar enlistment
in the reclamation of the socialist heritage through the public rituals of legitimacyinthe German
Democratic Republic(GDR). Impressive collections can be found in large researchlibraries such
as theBerlin StateLibrary and morespecializedarchivessuch as theFritz Hüser Institutein
Dortmund;both highlightthe regional character of theworkers’movement,concentrated in
the German capital and theRuhr region, and attest to the significanceofSocial Democracyto
the self-understanding of theFederal Republic of Germany(FRG).
Introduction 29