Approaches to the history of class relations in Germany as elsewhere have changed dramatically over the past two decades or so. Historical class analysis, which once pointed to the clear significance of class as a social marker, a cultural and political identity, in short, as a force of history, has became dulled in the wake of the collapse of socialism, the decline of organized labor, and the intellectual challenges associated with postmodernism, feminism, and race theory. As one student remarked in a recent seminar on the history and historiography of class relations in Europe, class has become the unexamined third pillar of the race, class, gender triad. Historians do not deny the significance of class relations; it has just that figuring out how to theorize and document the history of class is much more complicated than it used to be.

It is therefore refreshing to encounter Carol Poore's study Bonds of Labor which approaches this question of documenting class from an interesting angle: the boundary between German workers and their social superiors as this has been described by a century of boundary crossers, in Poore's words “writers and others from the middle or upper classes [who] have set out for the most varying reasons to enter into the world of manual labor by becoming workers themselves for a time.”(14) Poore's study focuses on key authors and their published works (with an occasional glance at cinematic and visual representations), very much rooting these sojourners in their social, political and intellectual contexts. The history is not continuous but rather episodic, as at different political moments the motives and institutional supports for such projects has varied and as the imagination of class has advanced and receded in the consciousness of readers and writers.

The book's organization thus follows the episodic quality of the literary production of accounts of journeys into the working world. There are chapters and sections on particular historical moments when the idea of descent into the working class was sufficiently embedded in literary and political institutions to encourage the genre of cross-class travel literature. Writers like Paul Göhre and Max Winter established many of the conventions of the genre in their social reportage that emerged with the flourishing of the Social Democratic Party in the 1890s. These early works in many ways set the parameters for the genre's later evolution. They wrote accounts of undercover operations of varying durations during which they took jobs in factories and mines, for middle-class publics who were increasingly fascinated with or fearful of working-class neighborhoods, lives, and subcultures. Often employing metaphors of depth or darkness that echoed other forms of othering, these writers acted from quite diverse political motives, all traits that would characterize later episodes of cross-class narratives. Some traveled and wrote as moral uplifters who sought to reform life in the depths; others operated from hopes of generating cross-class nationalist solidarities that would counter that class-based organizations proliferating under the auspices of the socialist movement. Still others, like Winters, who wrote of his experiences in underground Vienna, were sympathizers with the socialist movement. Throughout her analysis of the accounts, Poore addresses the questions of political perspective, authorial positioning, and representations of workers and their options in a manner that is nuanced and adept.

After the First World War the genre was infused with new sorts of accounts, first those by work students who produced a spate of stories in the 1920s, followed by another novelty in the 1930s with the introduction of accounts by veterans of the Nazi Labor Service. Not surprisingly, these narratives emerged from very different projects and perspectives than the previous social reportage that still continued. The Weimar-era work students were much more likely than their journalistic or socialist predecessors to express resentment at their forced migration into the world of work. Many felt little but disdain for their coworkers. Although some took with them a sense of comradeship they had associated with wartime experiences, student workers were generally far less open to or interested in developing cross-class relationships. They were not usually making their journey on a mission to redeem or expose. Instead, they were reluctantly to make their own way toward a better destiny, one that they felt they were owed. Wilhelm Wernet, for example, who kept a diary as a work student between 1921 and 1923, “could only view the workers as a hostile mass, an attitude that strengthened his own feelings of enmity toward them and of displacement from his rightful social position.”(71) In contrast, Nazi propaganda against such class arrogance was a feature of reportage produced in the context of the National Labor Service program; among its other goals, it was intended to bring together young men and women of all classes who would work together across cross class divides (and, of course, to reinforce racial divides). Politically sanctioned accounts of labor service years tended to be faithful to the party line. For example, Nazi Party propagandist Eugen Hadamovsky uses his 1938 account Hilfsarbeiter Nr. 50 000, in which he describes his stint as a factory worker, according to Poore, “to conjure up in frantic, empty phrases the supposed ‘togetherness' between himself and the permanent workers.”(117)

After the Second World War, descent stories reemerged in the two Germanies in strikingly different forms and following different chronologies. In the German Democratic Republic the Bitterfeld Program, begun in the late 1950s, officially encouraged writers to combine art and life by creating art based in various work settings. Poore argues that the early Bitterfeld projects did bring something new to the genre. If earlier reporters wanted to expose conditions in the working world, uplift workers, or learn from their work experiences how better to lead and sway workers, in contrast, GDR journeys into the working world were rooted in a desire to participate in the socialist state's project of building up a society qualitatively different from that of the past. These writers wanted to help dismantle older hierarchies of privilege and create new opportunities for the working majority to develop all their “human faculties.” In Poore's view, their narratives thus “provide glimpses of the desire for creating a community of equals”(169–170) which was largely absent from the works of earlier boundary crossers. By the early 1970s, disillusionment with the GDR state undermined this form of writing; it reemerged later in a very different form at the moment of the Wende. Volker Braun's career offers a telling example. Braun's growing disillusionment with the GDR project of redefining class relations was already apparent in his first account of the factory town of Hoyerswerda, where many GDR writers had previously journeyed in their quest for cross-class enlightenment. In Braun's 1971 article “Die Leute von Hoywoy,” the gaps between the intellectual visitor and the workers already seem unbridgeable. In Braun's the post-unification return to the subject in “The People of Hoywoy II, 1992,” the town appears on television as the site of racist violence on the part of the sons of his former workmates.

In the postwar Federal Republic, cross-class journeys were undertaken rarely and without official sponsorship. There were occasional journalistic ventures by reporters and in the late 1960s students of the New Left went into working-class settings in search of a political base. Often acting out of guilt over their own class privilege, most of these students found themselves unable to bridge to political and cultural gaps between them and the workers they encountered. In the context of the immigration of large numbers of guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey, a new twist on the genre appeared in the form of writers who disguised themselves as Turkish immigrant workers, most notably Günter Walraff, who published Ganz unten in 1985. Bother of these new forms of social reportage of the postwar era proceeded in ignorance of their predecessors and with significant distinctions from earlier works. Turkish workers were generally presented as victims; the ideological context was German grappling with the racism of the Holocaust; the labor movement context had all but disappeared. The disappearance of the link between cross-class travel and the politics of class is striking, especially in the case of Walraff who had earlier practiced the reportage of class expose. The much more complex and racialized politics of Ganz unten produced a level of controversy that in effect brought such experiments to a halt.

Poore concludes with a discussion of the problem of trying to cross class boundaries in a context where class is no longer widely recognized as a viable basis for political organization (despite economic evidence that suggests that inequalities of wealth and privilege intensifying). In the end, Poore provides not just a fascinating account of the particular writers and projects that are the focus of her study, but also a new and subtle iteration of the historical problem of class.