Working-Class Culture and Modern Mass Culture before World War I

Abstract

Problems ofDefinition From its beginnings in the mid-19th century the German workers' movement considered itself to be not only an instrument of economic and political but also of cultural and educational emancipation. Both Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the first socialist party in Germany (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), and Wilhelm Liebknecht, with August Bebel co-founder of Sozialdemokratische Arbeiter-Partei in the 1860s, incorporated into the official self-definition of the Democratic Party the assertion that the working class was the bearer of modern culture. The working class was, according to this programmatic view, the successor to a bourgeoisie which had abandoned its ideals. Toward the end of the 19th century this notion contributed to the growth of a network of parallel organizations in which masses of workers pursued their own version of socialist commitment. they were mainly interested in singing, gardening, drinking, sports, and other leisure activities, the participation in cultural-educational programs represented an important and prestigious part of their political self-identification. Guenther Roth, in his pioneering study The Democrats in Imperial Germany (1963), called this phenomenon the Social Democratic subculture and juxtaposed it with the of the ruling classes. However, Roth made clear that this juxtaposition pertained more to the proclamation than to the substance: While separate cultural activities were a constitutive part of the Democratic subculture, most of these activities were not different from those of the culture at large. Since many educators within the isolated labor movement attempted to impart as much of recognized Kultur as possible to the workers, this increased the influence of at least parts of the dominant culture among workers, although these components were not necessarily closely related to the central values of the dominant political system.' In other words, while the German working