Abstract
This article returns to Eduard Claudius's classic 1951 East German production novel, Menschen an unsrer Seite, reading its deep engagement with German working-class experience and subjectivity in order to reopen the complexities of cultural production in the early GDR. Far from an affirmative celebration of socialist construction, Claudius's novel is a profound meditation on the narrativity of experience in the nascent public sphere of the GDR, which must confront the multigenerational legacy of proletarianization in order to cultivate emancipated socialist laboring subjects, while at the same time being bound to legitimate a coercive regime of labor discipline.
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