Hake S. The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863-1933

Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. — 400 p. — ISBN10: 3110549360; ISBN13: 978-3110549362 — (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies)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.Imperial GermanyThe Threat of the Proletariat and the Discourse of the Masses
Proletarian Dreams: From Marx to Marxism
Emotional Socialism and Sentimental Masculinity
On Workers Singing in One Voice
The Proletarian Prometheus and Socialist Allegory
Ferdinand Lassalle, the First Socialist Celebrity
Re/Writing Workers’ Emotions
The Socialist Project of Culture and EducationWeimar RepublicRevolutionary Fantasy and Proletarian Masculinity
The Revolutionary Fantasy Revisited
Franz Wilhelm Seiwert’s Critical Empathy
Social Democracy and the Performance of Community
Taking a Stand: The Habitus of Agitprop
Marxist Literary Theory and Communist Militant Culture
The Emotional Education of the Proletarian Child
Wilhelm Reich and the Politics of Proletarian Sexuality
John Heartfield’s Productive Rage
Kuhle Wampe and “Those Who Don’t Like It”Afterword: A Historiography of the Proletarian Dream
Select Bibliography