Chapter 4
On WorkersSinging in OneVoice
Nothingbrings the hearts and minds ofalarge groupofpeopletogether moredeeplyand
strongly [than when] they,filled by one and the same feelingand thinking, give voiceto
their overflowinghearts in univocal songs.ManfredWittichThere are few culturalpractices thatattest to the emotional basis of proletarian
identifications as powerfullyasthe act of singinginunison and, in the process,
findingavoice and claiminganame–whether as worker,workingman, or pro-
letarian. And there few traditions that show the close connection between polit-
ical and musical practicesasclearlyasthe workers’choral societies that formed
duringthe second half of the nineteenth century and became an integralpart of
German working-class life, includingonthe long routes of exile and immigration
that often ended in the Americas.
In the following chapter,the crucial role of workers’songsinthe making of
proletarian identifications willbereconstructed through the relationshipto older
folk and bourgeois musicaltraditions.Especiallythe workers’choice of songs
and ways of singing, includingthe univocal plainsong hailed by the socialist
writer ManfredWittich (1851–1902) as an expression of class unity,can be
used productively as both an entry point into the musicalcultureofthe working
class andafirst indication of the conceptual difficulties ingaining access to its
underlying emotional energies.¹Anycriticalreconstruction of the musicalartic-
ulationofpolitical and aesthetic emotions, after all, needs to take into account
two complicatingfactors, the connection between choral singingand working-
class masculinity and, closelyrelated, the competition between two models of
sociability,the workers’choral movement and the Social Democratic Party.
Thevery different assessments in the scholarship of choral societies as either
apowerful tool of class formationoranapolitical formofsocial recreation sug-
gests that the derogatory comments alreadybycontemporariesabout“anew
sacrament of social communality (Gottesdienst socialer Gemütlichkeit)”²cannot
ManfredWittich, quoted in IngeLammel, ed.,Arbeiterlied—Arbeitergesang.HundertJahreAr-
beitermusikkultur in Deutschland(Berlin:Hentrich&Hentrich,2002), 119–120.
Ferdinand Gregorovius,quoted inJames Garratt,Music, Cultureand SocialReform in the Age
of Wagner(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2010),200. Gregorovius wasanineteenth-
century German historian.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110550863-008