beyond the fundamental truth of Christianity,“Loveyour neighbor asyourself,”and allows
himto adopt the maxim“Lo ve your neighbor morethanyourself.”An organization filled
with this spirit,but onlythis spirit,isthe ultimategoal of the proletariat.²⁹There is plentyofevidence that Social Democrats recognized emotions asapow-
erful sourceofproletarian identifications and socialist commitments.Nonethe-
less, they often did so with great ambivalence,aware that emotions could
never be separated from representations and,byextension, the ideological for-
mations thatgaverise to them in the first place. During theWeimar Republic,
this meant simultaneouslydrawing on and downplaying the Christian language
of suffering and redemption.It meant distinguishing socialist models of collec-
tive organization and classsolidarity from the hallucination of themodern mass-
es as the absolute other of bourgeois society–in other words, as uncontrollable
and unpredictable.Aboveall, after the cataclysms of war and revolution, dealing
with the legacies of emotional socialism meant drawingaclear line between the
prewar Social Democrats–creatures entirelyofthe nineteenth century–and the
youngergenerations of activists politicized through the October Revolution. On
the one hand, the desire for emotional renewal continued to find expression
in calls forasocialist morality that anticipatedaclassless society through its spi-
ritual values.It was with thatgoal thatjournalist GeorgLedebour (1850–1947) at
the 1922 USPD party convention implored fellow socialiststhat,“we cannot limit
ourselvestothe economic and political struggle but must carry outarevolution
within ourselvesthat allows the people to leave behind the ageofexploitation,
whose final phase we are now experiencing,and turn themselvesinto the ideal
people of the future.”³⁰On the other hand, the need to develop more effective
strategies of massmobilization, whether through the community building activ-
ities favored by the cultural socialists or the agitprop methods promoted by the
Communists, injectedadecidedlypragmatic tone into the continuingdebates
about proletarian identifications. KPD chief ideologue ClaraZetkin (1857–1933)
acknowledgedthe depth of suffering among the workers, conceding that,
“they are notjust intent on filling theirbellies; no, the best among them are
searchingfor release from deepestspiritualtorment.”But aboveall, she was
eager to instrumentalize these emotional needs in the largerfight against capi-
talism and fascism;her recommendation:“Wemust compel every proletarian
EmilBarth,Ausder Werkstatt der deutschen Revolution(Berlin: A.Hoffmann, 1919),6.
GeorgLedebour,Speech duringUSPD party congress in Leipzig,1922, quoted by Emig,Ver-
edelung,12.
78 Chapter 3