Working Class Culture in Germany: A Review Essay

Abstract

For all the broadening of research into the modern working class during the last ten years, little work has appeared on the working class within European culture. While scholars have made the commonsense discovery that workers had their own lives to lead as well as unions and parties to advance, few have explored the ways in which working-class people amused themselves or related to cultural institutions. The Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte has fortunately devoted most of its hefty 768 page volume for 1974 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft) to this subject. Almost half of its space comprises reviews (interesting topical ones, luckily enough), but seven of its nine articles concern cultural dimensions of German socialism between 1914 and 1933. Hanno Mbbius explores the One-Mark Novels, Christoph Rtilcker the literary coverage of Vorwarts, and Rolf Busch worker poets during World War One. Herbert Scherer discusses the socialist theater movement, Horst Ueberhorst workers' sports, Vernon L. Lidtke workers' songs and Ulrich Linse investigates the socialist student revolution of 1918-1919. Also included are articles by Wolfgang Schieder on the Trier Pilgrimage of 1844 and by Jens Flemming on farm workers' organizations. The significance of the seven articles for the development of German Social Democracy must be seen through the particular dynamics of the social history of culture. This field has emerged as a spin-off from work in other fields not just on culture itself but also on politics and society in general — and has suffered from the derivative nature of such interests. Too often historians have viewed the social structure of a cultural field only insofar as it related to one of these other lines of study, and the result has been some serious misconceptions and enormous gaps of knowledge. Little work of any depth has been done on audiences theatrical, literary, musical or on the institutional structures of the arts. Books abound on the press's reactions to events but what do we know about the internal workings of newspapers or the people who read them? Especially frustrating has been the indifference of cultural historians to the occupational bases and social roles of artists, for many studies leave one guessing just how these figures earned their living. Finally, the analytical tools used on many cultural topics are frequently laiden with heavy assumptions and value judgements which obscure more than they dissect. Culture has always been dear to historians' hearts, and they therefore have too often approached it with clumsily affectionate hands. The articles in the Archiv are successful primarily in the last respect: analytical distance. The authors share a revisionistic perspective of a Marxist sort which provides them a healthy skepticism toward the so powerful cultural tradition of the 19th century a tradition they show social democrats accepted pretty completely and communists found themselves powerless to change. Linse, Mbbius, and RUlcher particularly have arrived at skillful, unpolemical conceptual tools for discussing the attitudes of social democratic and communist writers toward the bourgeois-defined individualism of European culture. It is refreshing how little almost all the contributors indulge themselves in hand-wringing rhetoric or force rigid social categories upon their subjects. The articles are weakest, however, in their discussion of the professional bases of writers. These figures emerge from the book too often as faceless ideologues, for rarely does one find any more than brief citation of their occupations or career patterns. Even if information of that kind is scanty, bits and pieces can be added up to something substantial. Such analysis would have done more good