Cultural practice and utopian desire in German Social Democracy: Reading Adolf Levenstein's Arbeiterfrage (1912)

Abstract

During the Wilhelmine period, leaders of the German Social Democratic Party began to redefine socialism as a 'cultural movement' which was concerned as much with the educational, artistic and leisure-time needs of workers as it was with trade union struggles and the future prospect of revolutionary social transformation. This drew them into a debate about the relationship between politics and 'culture', understood in terms of both 'high' and 'mass' culture, and the role of the latter in mobilizing German workers to the cause of socialism. Drawing on the methods of cultural studies, this article offers a close reading of Adolf Levenstein's important survey of the attitudes, 'hopes and wishes' of male rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists from 1912, and his other related publications, in order to examine the ways in which German workers assigned meanings to cultural texts. In this way, it identifies the utopian political investments revealed in workers' leisure-time practices, ranging from poetry writing to novel reading, and their challenges to the structuring binarisms - oppositions between culture and politics, high culture and mass culture, art and everyday life, the masculine and the feminine, and reality and fantasy - of Social Democratic cultural politics in pre-war Germany.