Sabine Hake's The Proletarian Dream is an ambitious, original, and convincing portrait of the lifeworlds of the German industrial working class in the imperial and Weimar periods. In this dense, interdisciplinary study, Hake sets out to capture the emotional regimes, cultural practices, visions, and aspirations (in other words, the dreams) of a community whose boundaries were often inchoate and contested. The book, the first in a two-volume project, argues that political emotions, as expressed through “images, stories, songs, performances, symbols, and rituals,” were constitutive of a German working class more complicated and ambivalent than has previously been imagined (1). Hake argues that these political emotions and the cultural practices that coincided with them were not contained by and cannot be captured exclusively through the study of more conventional subjects like party or union membership, or even everyday associational sociability. She shows that although these working-class dreams did not always align neatly with Marxist theory, they were never merely adoptions of petit-bourgeois values, instead always striving toward an ideal of liberation through the proletariat as a universal revolutionary class. “Part cultural history, part cultural theory, and part a series of case studies,” the book makes its argument via eighteen short chapters, each of which focuses on an aspect of proletarian culture, starting with nineteenth-century theories of the mass and the crowd, and ending in 1932 with the transformation of that crowd into a vehicle for working-class solidarity and power (7). Several of the individual chapters are especially penetrating and insightful, for example those on sentimental masculinity (chapter 3), choral societies (chapters 4 and 12), visual and literary allegories of Prometheus (chapter 5), workers’ autobiographical writings (chapter 7), and programs of cultivation and education (chapters 8 and 15).

As Hake reminds us, the German working class was never entirely politicized or aligned with any one party, nor identical with trade unionism or social democracy. Despite powerful trends of isolation and marginalization, it had significant points of continuity with mainstream culture, but the emotional experiences and identifications of workers defy simple categorization. Feelings such as humiliation, loneliness, inferiority, and local belonging were just as important in constructing a working-class identity as were rage, strength, or international solidarity. In parsing these themes, Hake skillfully utilizes a wide range of disciplinary tools from critical theory and the early sociology of massification to the academic vocabularies of art history (in analyses of propaganda posters and graphic art), musicology and dance history (in chapters on agitprop and Sprech- und Bewegungschor), and literature (in extended discussions of socialist appropriation of the classics versus the forging of a new proletarian modernism). Recalibrating the scholarly lens to take in a wider range of behaviors, practices, symbols, and emotional registers gives the book a rare interdisciplinarity, sharpness, and confidence.

Part one, “Imperial Germany,” develops Hake's concept of “emotional socialism” through analysis of literary, visual, and performative sources. Inflected with both romantic and Marxist theories and aesthetics, and reliant on a specific sentiment of abused but resilient masculinity, “emotional socialism” sustained communities in which individuals often felt misused and humiliated, allowing them to transform personal pain into political fraternity. Hake demonstrates the significant extent to which democratic socialism and working-class identifications constituted a compensatory emotional regime for workers who experienced themselves as atomized and oppressed. Part one reveals the heterogenous desires and self-understandings of a complex community that disagreed about whether and how socialism could be immediately achieved, ending with an allusion to the 1917 revolutions in Russia that would deepen and harden the splits among the politicized German working class.

By comparison, part two, “Weimar Republic,” is somewhat less comprehensive and convincing. Despite the gesture toward the Bolshevik Revolution, Hake neither narrates nor investigates in more than a cursory way watershed events such as the Great War, November Revolution, founding of the Weimar Republic, or emergence of the communist party (KPD). More concerningly, especially after her careful assertions throughout part one that the German working class was identical neither with social democracy nor with trade unionism, her discussion of several novels dramatizing the Ruhr Uprising of 1920 appears to collapse the entire working class into the most militarized segment of the KPD, and, by extension, the postwar German Democratic Republic (GDR). This teleological conflation weakens the first three chapters of part two and unsettles the reader's sense of chronology and of cause and effect.

Across both sections, but more intensively in part two, Hake engages issues of masculinity and misogyny. She offers a necessary critique of the communist movement, which claimed to stand for gender equality and yet glorified and indeed prioritized a proletarian persona that was increasingly and aggressively male, homosocial, and heterosexual. Yet her choice of sources perhaps overemphasizes this tendency, deprioritizing women's images and voices in a way that duplicates her subjects’ attitudes. For example, the chapter on sexuality and reproductive reform focuses on the sexologist Wilhelm Reich rather than on figures such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, or even Magnus Hirschfeld, all of whom Hake mentions but does not make central to her analysis. Moreover, studies such as Julia Sneeringer's Winning Women's Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (UNC Press, 2003) remind us that working-class households were often split along gender lines in their support for the SPD versus the KPD, suggesting that the fantasy of communist masculinity was never particularly compelling to women, who sought alternatives, even within a (superficially) communist-dominated milieu. However, several chapters offer nuanced and fascinating analyses of gendered topics such as pedagogy, children's programs, and modernist dance, theater, and film, with an especially welcome treatment of Bertolt Brecht's 1932 film Kuhle Wampe.

Throughout, Hake reminds the reader that her subject is identifications rather than identities, imaginaries rather than ideologies, discourses rather than experiences—that is, the culture, defined as a “symbolic communication,” of a working class, rather than the social realities or lived experiences of that class (2). Indeed, her facility with an extremely wide variety of critical and theoretical frameworks allows her to effectively engage her diverse sources. Yet her insistence that her claims apply only to discourses rather than to historical realities is too modest. Hake could be much bolder in making interpretations and claims about historical experiences and realities. First, because the book will likely be read as such, and in building upon her broad and useful work, other scholars may not be so sedulous in maintaining the distinction between “social reality” and “culture.” Second, because her analysis, particularly of sources such as workers’ life-writings, demonstrates her adeptness with historical methodology and the excellent historiographical afterword communicates a fluent knowledge of academic debates around proletarian culture dating from the late 1950s. The care Hake takes in staking her claim and her insistence upon not overstepping that claim are admirable, but more admirable still are her wide-ranging knowledge and powers of analysis.

On balance, Hake's book is an extremely impressive and comprehensive contribution to a field of study that has often been less capaciously conceived and less creatively investigated. By understanding the lifeworld of the German working class as an overlapping set of practices, aspirations, cultures, and emotions, Hake moves beyond narrower definitions and arguments around party membership, radical action, or everyday associational culture. The forthcoming volume, whose two sections will focus on the Third Reich and the GDR, should be eagerly anticipated.