to the workingclass the role ofredeemer of futuregenerations. [...]This training
made the workingclass forgetboth its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both
are nourished by the imageofenslavedancestorsrather than of liberatedgrand-
children.”³⁴In rather predictable ways,his endorsement duringthe 1930s of an
empowering, liberating hatredends up projecting the failures of theWeimar left
back onto the contradictions of bourgeois humanism and GermanProtestantism
and findsemotional release onlyinthe desperate actionism and decisionism
shared at the time by leftwingand rightwing groups.
Histories ofmodern Germany describethe SPD as the“first true masspolit-
ical party in modern history.”³⁵As this chapter has shown, it also was the first
social movement torecognize the role of emotion in politics and use association-
al structures to at once organize emotional attachments and work through the
inevitable contradictions. Much of this emotional labor was focused on the pro-
duction of (the imageof) aunifiedworkingclass out of its actual differences and
divisions. Hereitwarrants repeatingthatthe socialist lifeworld was not the same
as the workingclass, giventhe continued influenceofthe Catholic and Protes-
tant Churches,the significance of local andregional networks and traditions,
and the enduringinfluenceofthe guild system. The focus on the industrial pro-
letariat in party programs and initiativesmeant that the perspectivesrepresented
by artisans, craftsmen, and skilled laborers, as well as members of the rural pro-
letariat wereneglected, if notignored. Despite inroads made by the proletarian
women’smovement,the culture of Social Democracy showed little interest in the
woman’squestion and problems of familylife. And despite growingnumbers of
femaleworkers,the workers’movementremained male-dominated and male-
Walter Benjamin,“On the Concept of History,”SelectedWritings,Vol.4:1938– 1940 ,ed. Ho-
wardEiland and MichaelW. Jennings(Cambridge:Harvard University Press,2006), 389–400.
Andrew Bonnell,The People’sStage in Imperial Germany:Social Democracy and Culture
1890 – 1914 (London:Tauris,2005), 1.Forhistorical overviews of Social Democracyand German
communism, see Gary Steenson,“NotOneMan! Not One Penny!”German Social Democracy,
1863 – 1914 (Pittsburgh:University of PittsburghPress, 1981);Wilhelm L. Guttsman,TheGerman
Social DemocraticParty,1875– 1933 (London: Allen&Unwin, 1981); and RichardSaage,ed.,Sol-
idargemeinschaftund Klassenkampf.PolitischeKonzeptionen der Sozialdemokratiezwischen den
Weltkriegen(Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1986).Formorerecentstudies,Eric D. Weitz,Creat-
ing German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State(Princeton: Prince-
tonUniversity Press,1997) and, with David E.Barclay, eds.,BetweenReform andRevolution: Ger-
man Socialismand Communism from 1840 to 1990(NewYork: Berghahn, 1998); Thomas
Welskopp,Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vomVormärz biszum
Sozialistengesetz(Bonn: Dietz,2000); Stefan Berger,Social Democracy and theWorking Class
in Nineteenth andTwentieth CenturyGermany(NewYork: Longman,2000); and Ralf Hoffrogge,
Sozialismus und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland:Von den Anfängen bis 1914(Stuttgart: Schmet-
terling,2011).
80 Chapter 3