The Proletarian Dream

Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany, 1863–1933

Sabine Hake

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110646962
• eBook ISBN: 9783110550207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment.

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures 2018

Part One: Imperial Germany

Chapter 1
The Threat of the Proletariat and the Discourse of the Masses

I call him a proletarian whose parents neglected him, did not bathe him, did not groom him, and neither raised him to be a good person nor encouraged him to attend church and school. He never masters his trade, marries without money and raises his brood in his image, ready to damage the property of other people and be a cancer sore on the community. Furthermore, I call proletarians the drunks and lechers who do not fit into the social order and keep Blue Monday more sacred than Sunday.

Friedrich Harkort

In the midnineteenth century, the specter of the working class gave rise to new academic disciplines deeply concerned with crowd behavior and mass action. The emerging mass discourse in psychology and sociology relied heavily on emotional categories to describe the social and psychological processes of mass formation and, consciously or unconsciously, to define the relationship of the bourgeois elites to the modern masses – which invariably meant the working classes. Taking advantage of the resulting surfeit of projections and displacements, the first chapter consequently introduces the subject of this study not through a Marxist definition of the proletariat, but from the outside, that is, the nineteenth-century writings that introduced mass discourse in the social sciences and established the antagonistic terms that revealed its historical origins in class discourse.

In the quotation above, the railroad magnate and liberal politician Friedrich Harkort (1793–1880), a key figure in the early industrialization of the Ruhr region, defines proletarians first and foremost through their shared condition of lack: of resources, skills, morals, and so forth.28 Where others might have responded with compassion and joined the fight for social justice, Harkort’s palpable sense of disgust expresses his belief in the natural order of inequality, but it also reveals his fear of the wrath of the oppressed. About half a century later, Julius Werner describes the same phenomenon with a strong sense of foreboding that implies acceptance of the inevitability of dramatic social and political changes. “It seems that the spiritual birthmark of inner resentment will not disappear from the forehead of the modern wage-earning class,” the Lutheran pastor concedes, concluding that, “Even as the manifestations of their wild, eruptive hatred have changed, the original sting (Stachel) is bound to remain.”29

Meaning “sting” or “prick,” the ambiguity of the German word captures perfectly the tension between guilt (about having injured the other) and fear (of being injured by the other) that informs most middle-class conceptions of the working class during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It would be easy to dismiss all of mass discourse as elitist and conservative by quoting the nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke who insisted that, “the masses must forever remain the masses. There would be no culture without kitchenmaids.”30 In fact, the writings of scholars who opposed the socialist movement offer privileged access to the personification of what has to remain unnamed, namely the destructive forces released by capitalist modernity. In other words, they bring forth the other – that is, the elusive, ubiquitous masses – against which the proletarian dream announces its emancipatory functions and prefigurative effects. Moreover, contempt for the new social underclass should not automatically be equated with antimodern, antiurban, and antidemocratic positions. As the second verse of the “Workers’ Marseillaise” confirms, contempt for the masses was alive and well in the socialist movement: “The enemy that we hate the most,/That surrounds us thick and black,/ It is the foolishness of the masses,/ That can only be broken with the sword of the spirit.”31

Nineteenth-century mass discourse is inseparable from the rise of the working class and the socialist movement. Nowhere is this connection clearer than in the work of Gustave Le Bon, the influential French anthropologist and sociologist. While his La psychologie des foules (1895, in English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) became a founding text of mass psychology, his follow-up book Psychologie du socialisme (1899, translated as The Psychology of Socialism) has been largely forgotten. Yet it is in the latter work that the general observations on crowd behavior find their clearest application in relation to the urgent social problems of his time. In fact, Le Bon’s description of socialism as a mass movement contains in nuce the main elements of mass discourse and, as an introduction to the topic, deserves to be quoted in full:

Socialism, whose dream is to substitute itself for the ancient faiths, proposes but a very low ideal, and to establish it appeals but to sentiments lower still. What, in effect, does it promise, more than merely our daily bread, and that at the price of hard labour? With what lever does it seek to raise the soul? With the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of multitudes? To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition, without dreaming that social inequalities are born of those natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change.32

Outside the socialist movement, two distinct ways of thinking about the proletariat can be distinguished: mass psychological studies that treat the masses as a new social phenomenon beyond class distinctions and sociological studies that see the proletariat as a new social formation within the class structure. While the former draw on the language of emotions in describing and evaluating mass phenomena, the latter aspire to scientific objectivity in offering structural analyses of modern society. In their relationship to the subject matter, both lines of inquiry are sometimes difficult to distinguish, with the masses treated as the origins of the working class and the proletariat seen as the vanguard of socialism. But given the ubiquity of the specter of socialism as the hidden reference point, the methodological differences separating mass psychology and modern sociology become ultimately less relevant than their shared preoccupations, if not obsessions.

The earliest empirical studies on radicalized workers played a key role in establishing sociology and anthropology as new academic disciplines during the mid-nineteenth century; mass psychology, to be discussed in the chapter’s second part, did the same for the more elusive connection between social sciences and cultural criticism. In the German context, the first scholarly excursions into what was often described as unknown territory took place during the 1860s, well before the publication of Le Bon’s book, and continued as an integral part of larger German (and Austrian) discussions about empire, nation, capitalism, and modernity. As will be shown, Lorenz von Stein’s study of social movements in France established a model for the social sciences that included comparative transnational perspectives and offered concrete recommendations for social reform. By contrast, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl advanced a uniquely German view of society as community that, based on ethnography (Volkskunde) as the study of peoples and nations, incorporated the proletariat into older narratives of belonging. Both lines of argumentation continued in the sociological studies by Werner Sombart and Theodor Geiger that sought to account for such elusive mass phenomena as the urban crowd in the context of early twentieth-century understandings of capitalism and modernity.

Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreich (1842, in English as The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850) by Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890) is the first scholarly account of the dangerous forces unleashed by the French Revolution and the July Revolution that introduces the proletariat as the herald of a different social order. A professor of political science, von Stein was forced to leave Germany during the restoration period and taught at the University of Vienna for almost thirty years. His book proved very influential at the time, not least through its focus on the emotional appeal of the socialist movement; scholars remain unsure about his influence on Marx. In the book, von Stein starts out by defining the proletariat as “the entire class of those who can claim neither education nor property as the basis of their standing in society and who nonetheless feel called upon not to remain without all the properties that constitute the worth of the individual in the first place.”33 Like Marx and Engels, he insists that workers and proletarians should not be used as synonymous, as only the latter possess critical awareness of their situation. He also shares their diagnosis of the withholding of recognition as a major source of working-class discontent.

Notwithstanding occasional references to the triumph of capital over labor in the age of industrialization that recall socialist treatises, von Stein’s basic approach to the proletariat remains grounded in a combination of empirical observation and sociopsychological analysis and derives its critical thrust from his urgent demand for social reform. Significantly, he identifies fluidity and ubiquity as the most unsettling qualities of this new social class or formation, qualities that for him reveal the limits of economic determinism and point to the importance of emotional factors in social(ist) identifications. There was widespread disappointment after the French Revolution that the First Republic’s commitment to equality had remained an abstract idea and that the realities of inequality had been preserved in the country’s social, economic, and legal structures. Under these circumstances, the workers’ deep sense of betrayal, combined with growing awareness of their numerical strength, had created a revolutionary situation. This is how von Stein describes the process:

The class of the propertyless has unified; they have gained awareness of their situation; they recognize that it is based on laws that exist outside the individual; they feel controlled through a power that they have fought in vain; they are excluded from participation in state government; they confront the impossibility for the majority of their members to ascend to a higher class. In response, they have become an estate (Stand), and this estate, literally the embodiment of all the demands originating in the principle of equality without satisfying them, is the French proletariat.34

A number of propositions and assumptions give rise to what can be called a paradigmatic scene of proletarian identification. For von Stein, class mobilization begins with an experience of exclusion from representation in the political sense. The cognitive and emotional processes associated with verbs such as “recognize” and “feel” set into a motion a learning process that provides the disempowered with the appropriate skills to “fight” and “confront.” Aware of the false promises made in the name of “equality,” the propertyless eventually come to understand their condition of lack. Without access to the rewards of individualism, they choose to join the “unified” many that embody the abstract principles of emancipation but, as the particular and universal class, also possess the political tools to make those principles a historical reality.

While von Stein used the postrevolutionary situation in France to predict similar developments in neighboring European countries, other authors responded to the threat of revolution with specialized treatises that offered practical solutions in the name of economic progress and political stability. Thus, in a work with the lengthy title Ueber das dermalige Missverhältniss der Vermögenslosen oder Proletairs zu den Vermögen besitzenden Klassen der Societät in Betreff ihres Auskommens, sowohl in materieller, als intellektueller Hinsicht, aus dem Standpunkt des Rechts betrachtet (1835, About the Current Disparity between the Propertyless or Proletarians and the Propertied Classes … ), Franz von Baader (1761–1841), a mining engineer turned social reformer, proposed to solve the problem of proletarianization through greater legal reforms and public policies that increased social mobility. In Unsere Gegenwart und Zukunft (1846, Our Present and Future), the National Liberal politician Friedrich Karl Biedermann (1812 – 1891) located the origins of the proletariat in the phenomenon of pauperism and argued for extensive reforms as the best defense against what he termed theoretical and applied socialism. Along similar lines, the Prussian reformer Herrmann Graf zu Dohna (1802–1872), in Die freien Arbeiter im preußischen Staat (1847, The Free Workers in the Prussian State), called on the state to mitigate the suffering of the workers, whereas the Austrian jurist Johann von Perthaler (1816–1862), in Ein Standpunkt zur Vermittlung socialer Mißstände im Fabriksbetriebe (1843, A Proposal for the Mitigation of the Deplorable State of Affairs in the Factories) suggested improvements in the factory system.

Indicative of the permeable boundaries separating the social imaginary in political theory from its appearance in literary fiction, their arguments would soon be reproduced in countless nineteenth-century social novels and social dramas about the modern factory as the source of human misery and class strife. By the same token, the descriptions of the infamous masses in city novels and social dramas attest to the wide familiarity of literary writers and critics with the prevailing tropes of mass discourse in the scholarship. These easily reconstructible patterns of influence confirm the mutual dependency of scholarly and literary practices on the emotional regimes organized through the specter of the proletariat in mass discourse. Of course, the same can be concluded about von Stein’s comments, and those of many other bourgeois scholars, on the sheer energy of the revolutionary working class and its resonances in artistic and literary representations of the Paris Commune.

The importance of von Stein’s description of the proletariat as a new social formation becomes even clearer through a comparison to the backward-looking approach taken by his contemporary Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–1897), one of the founders of German ethnography. His belief in the Volk as a political, social, and cultural defense against modern society played a key role in the establishment of Volkskunde as an academic discipline and prepared the ground for the proliferation of völkisch thought throughout the early twentieth century. In his multivolume Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik (1851–1869, The National History of the People as the Basis of a German Social Policy), Riehl explains what he calls the essence of a people through the natural and cultural landscape and its manifestation in national ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One: Imperial Germany
• Part Two: Weimar Republic
• Afterword: A Historiography of the Proletarian Dream
• Select Bibliography
• Index