Performing The ‘Proletarian Dream’: Women’s Revolutionary Activism in Berta Lask’s Die Befreiung and Leuna 1921

Abstract

This article examines the depiction of women’s revolutionary activism in Berta Lask’s mass dramas Die Befreiung (1925) and Leuna 1921 (1927). Building on Sabine Hake’s concept of the ‘proletarian dream’, it argues that Lask uses the performative structures of the mass drama in an attempt to create gendered communities of proletarian identification that transcend the boundary between actor and spectator. Her use of the mass drama to foster revolutionary sensibilities is nevertheless underpinned by an ambivalent approach to women’s emancipation that can be explained by reading her work in the context of the competing discourses of the Communist Women’s International and the KPD in the 1920s. The article thus sheds light on the place of women in the communist political culture of the Weimar Republic and the discursive construction of gender roles in the wake of World War I.