Kiev Communard
27th August 2011, 16:54
Here I will post some information on this subject which I have found on Questia. Not so long ago Die Neue Zeit asked me to find Vernon Lidtke's book on the SPD cultural policies in Imperial period, yet it appears that this source is absent on Questia. In any case, I believe that this post is still relevant to the issue.
The German Proletariat and the Cultural Heritage:
The Foundations
At the 1896 conference of the German Social Democratic Party held in Gotha a banner at the back of the hall proudly proclaimed that 'Socialism is the bearer of all Culture'. This sentiment was undoubtedly widely shared among the politically conscious sections of the German working class. In concrete terms the slogan alluded to the expanding network of organisations catering for the leisure-time interests of the German workers, which had been established largely under social-democratic influence. On a more intangible plane it found its expression in the claims of the socialist section of the German working class to be the inheritors of the cultural achievements of the past, and to be the force which was destined to break the shackles of bourgeois dominance in the cultural sphere - a consummation which would be achieved with the victory of socialism. Culture in this context was essentially the 'High Culture' of the past, and it denoted primarily the arts and the expression of the wider creative activities of man.
In this chapter I examine the role of culture in the discussions and in the practice of the German labour movement in the three decades from 1890 to 1920. The period began with Social Democracy on the road to becoming a mass party with a Marxist programme; and it ended with the aftermath of the 1918 revolution. After this the two separate and for most of the time mutually hostile political parties, Social Democrats and Communists, each also followed its own path as far as thoughts and policies on culture were concerned; and these separate developments form the theme of the next two chapters.
The importance which almost all sections of the social-democratic movement attached to the creative activity of the past and to that of their own time must be seen in the wider context of socialist ideology and the role it assigned to culture in the emancipatory struggle of the working class. Even in the days when the young labour movement was still linked to the bourgeois radical movement it had already looked forward to the spiritual as much as to the material and political emancipation of the worker. Art in its widest sense was seen as one of the most sublime expressions of the human spirit. It was one of the most powerful elements of the cultural heritage to which German socialism had laid claim from its earliest days.
As the socialist movement developed its own ideology it laid claim to being the only progressive moral force in society. According to that ideology the socialist working class was destined to advance and to be victorious because of the sense of moral responsibility of its members and because the long-term interests and goals of the proletariat were identical with the true interests of mankind in respect: of its political, its economic and its cultural progress. 'It was of the greatest importance for the course of [social] development that today the interests of the working class coincided with those of culture and of progress', wrote Karl Kautsky, the editor of the Neue Zeit, the SPD's principal theoretical journal, in the first volume of the periodical.
The aims of the economic and social struggle had always been clear. They included the abolition of wage slavery, the replacement of private capitalism by public enterprise and the full enjoyment of all civic rights by all, especially by the workers, who had hitherto been excluded from political power. The cultural aspirations of the German workers were not as unambiguously formulated. Even in its incipient form the socialist movement had recognised that the intellectual oppression of the working class went hand in hand with bourgeois economic power. In order to make the national cultural heritage its own, the working class needed education, which the universal system of elementary education, instituted as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, had failed to give them. The German Volkschule was recognised by the workers as an agency for the dissemination of the ruling ideology, or at best as a training of the workers for their role in the economy, not as providing Bildung in the way in which the latter was conceived by the German bourgeoisie. An expansion and improvement of workers' education was necessary the better to conduct the emancipatory struggle, and the 'cultural question' as it affected the German proletariat is best considered in connection with the educational and cultural practices of the labour movement and its organisations.
In the 1860s Workers' Educational Societies, often founded with the help of middle-class radicals or as part of bourgeois philanthropy, sprang up all over Germany 'like mushrooms after a warm summer day', as August Bebel observed in his Memoirs. Originally these societies were largeiy concerned with the provision of elementary education which would help the skilled worker in his drive for self-improvement and vocational advance. These aims continued to be pursued, but under the influence of the early leaders of the German socialist movement these societies increasingly turned to the task of using education for the advancement of new social and democratic ideas. In doing so they parted company from their bourgeois sponsors, who thought in terms of personal advance and support for democratic middle-class radicalism.
The political parting of the ways did not mean that the socialist movement also rejected the culture which the bourgeoisie sought to transmit to it. Ferdinand Lassalle, at that time the most outstanding, and for long after his early death in 1864 the most popular of the socialist leaders, argued that the purpose of workers' education was not to develop the cultural identity of the worker as distinct from that of the bourgeoisie, but to enable the proletariat to fulfil its objective role as the bearer of cultural progress - as it was of social progress - in a conscious and subjective sense also.
The self-improvement through education which Lassalle urged on the skilled and responsible artisans and workers to whom he principally addressed himself was a service to all workers. The struggle of the Arbeiterstand was a moral as well as a material one. As Lassalle put it in his 'Workers' Programme', 'once the sovereignty of the fourth estate over the state had been achieved there would be a flowering of morality, of culture and of science such as the world had never seen!' Here were the roots of a Kultursozialismus which came to fruition half a century later.
Like Lassalle, the members of the first generation of social-democratic leaders came mostly from the ranks of the German middle class and petty bourgeoisie. Their upbringing and their ifestyle reinforced the tendency to accept the attainment of the national culture as a goal of education for the working class. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, together with August Bebel, led the SPD for a quarter of a century, had himself received a university education, and was a strong believer in the classical ideals of education and of the view of the ideal human being held originally by the philosophers of the German Enlightenment. He demanded that the workers should enjoy to the full the fruits of this tradition. He and other socialist writers claimed that the German bourgeoisie, the original guardian of these ideals, had abdicated its responsibility by its political compromise with the German aristocracy. It had surrendered its claims for democracy, and as a result the German educational system was not an instrument for the spread of universal Bildung, but, together with the Army and the popular press, one of the 'agencies of stupefaction' (Verdummungsanstalten) of the state. In his famous address 'Wissen ist Macht - Macht ist Wissen' on the relationship of education and emancipation Liebknecht argued that only in a free German state could genuine Bildung be achieved, and that only the working class, through its emancipatory struggle, could attain such a state. Hence the slogan to follow was not 'through Bildung to freedom' but 'through freedom to Bildung'.
But already even now the aspirations of the social-democratic working class embodied all the ideals of humanity: 'it was the rock which stood above the tossing waves, and', Liebknecht told the Reichstag on 28 November 1888, 'on that rock European culture would save itself. In practice the Social Democratic Party was beginning to mount educational activities as soon as conditions permitted. In 1891 it started the Berlin Workers' College (Arbeiterbildungsschule). This provided both elementary instruction -German, bookkeeping, stenography and courses in public speaking to complement elementary education and to fit workers for the organisational and agitational tasks of the party, as well as education in more theoretical and cultural subjects.
Such central and party-directed activities were from the beginning paralleled by formally independent Education Societies, such as the Leipzig Arbeiterverein, the model for the Arbeiterbildungsschule. It dated back to the 1870s, and in 1892 it was, with 2,000 members, the largest working-class organisation in the city, and was clearly regarded by the police as a social-democratic body. It provided both instruction and entertainment in the form of recitations, and, by the end of the century, the performance of plays, mainly by Schiller and Lessing.
It was the literature of the German classical period which was urged on the working class by its leaders as an example of the cultural heritage which it should make its own. And this not only because it was held to be a pinnacle of artistic achievement, but because poets and dramatists such as Lessing and Schiller had made the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the shackles and prohibitions of feudalism and the injustices of aristocratic privilege a major theme in their work. Franz Mehring, the historian and literary critic who had joined the SPD after a journalistic career in the bourgeois press, and who was to become one of its authorities on cultural matters, held up the classical dramas as signposts for the German workers in their own emancipatory struggle. And among the classical dramatists it was above all, Schiller, the 'poet of freedom' and the author of William Tell, the drama of resistance against tyranny, who occupied a central place.
Another group of artists who were accorded special recognition were bourgeois radical writers, such as Freiliggrath and Herwegh, connected with the unsuccessful revolution of 1848. Some socialist intellectuals, however, wished to hitch the social-democratic cultural wagon to the rising star of naturalist drama and narrative literature. Some of the resulting controversy was over the choice of plays for the Volksbühne, the new people's theatre movement; another ground of dispute was the place and value of naturalist literature in workers' reading and in the socialist press. Edgar Steiger, the editor of Neue Welt, the social-democratic Sunday magazine taken in many workers' households, argued that Naturalism was the appropriate art for the proletariat, and the right vehicle to make workers sensitive to art as such. Like the microscope in the study of nature, naturalism, he argued, was capable of showing up the subtlest stirrings of the human psyche. In doing so it showed up dialectically the dependence of consciousness on social reality.
Steiger, who saw his task as an educational one, had practised his theories by serialising in the Neue Welt novels which dealt with working-class life in a frank and unadorned fashion, and at times used coarse and indelicate language. Many readers took exception to this and felt let down by the fact that the standards of behaviour of the proletarian characters were often unheroic, and even, in their eyes, immoral. This was not only a gut reaction. For the socialist Hamburger Echo it was an expression of healthy class consciousness and of a wish for a literature which would extol virtues and altruism, love of freedom, and a feeling of solidarity.
When the issue was discussed at the 1896 party conference the leading Hamburg Social Democrat, Karl Frohme, said that he was not concerned with decorous behaviour and moralising attitudes; but the new literature offended against good taste and common decency. And even less sensitive delegates attacked the publication of this kind of literature because it did not entertain the reader, and only depressed workers who were already experiencing unhappiness and misery. Edgar Steiger countered this by warning that the party was stepping on to the slippery slope which led to the printing of literature without value. The heroes of classical literature did not always behave heroically, and it would be wrong to 'show workers in dinner jackets'.
Mehring did not share the prudish attitude of the ordinary party member; but he pointed out that they had recognised an inherent weakness of naturalist literature, namely that, while it described life at the lowest levels of society, it prescribed no solution to the problems which it uncovered. It thus failed to give the workers hope and support in their struggle. 'Naturalist art did in no way measure up to the historic magnitude of the proletarian struggle for emancipation', he wrote; it only knew how to criticise existing society, and not how to point the way to the society of the future.
If the discussion on the content and literary policy of the Neue Welt forms one of the significant points of reference for our discussion of the meaning of workers' culture and of working-class aesthetics in the Wilhelmine period, the assessment of the person and work of Friedrich Schiller forms another. It raises questions about the meaning of the bourgeois heritage for the proletariat, and it shows up some differences in the way in which the marxists and the revisionists within the social-democratic movement regarded that heritage.
Before 1914 Friedrich Schiller was clearly the central classical author in the pantheon of the working class, as he was for the nation at large. But, following Lassalle, the German worker sought above all the pure aesthetic experience which could be derived from classical literature, and, beyond all others, from the author of the 'Hymn to Joy'. Schiller was revered mainly as a great poet and an admirable human being, not as the historian of the emancipatory struggle of the bourgeoisie, destined, in its turn, to provide ideological ammunition for the fight of the proletariat as the disadvantaged class of their own day.
We have evidence of this interpretation of Schiller from the widespread celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death in 1905 held by social-democratic organisations throughout Germany. These demonstrated a great longing for culture, and showed the veneration in which the poet was held; but what moved audiences was not so much Schiller's ideological role or his political message, but 'its transformation into art, in the aesthetic form of beautiful poetry with its intoxicating pathos'.
The Berlin memorial celebrations were, in the words of the Vorwärts, a tribute to Schiller as the mighty advocate of 'Art as the great educator of mankind'. Beneath a bust of Schiller, and following on the performance of the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony, the veteran Austrian socialist August Pernersdorfer referred to Schiller as the beloved poet, the embodiment of a humanist and aesthetic ideal of a human being. In his plays he had shown the ideals of strong and daring personalities, rebellious by nature. To realise such ideals, to create a society in which a harmonious, confident personality could arise, was the task of socialists.
A strongly positive view of Schiller's contemporary significance was also expressed in a Jubilee brochure issued by Vorwärts, to which leading revisionists contributed. They stressed Schiller's revolutionary idealism, which was still relevant for the labour movement. His failure to identify with the French Revolution was explicable in terms of his courtly surroundings. 20 Even more positive was the article by Friedrich Stampfer, one of the authors of the pamphlet, which was widely reprinted in the social-democratic press. He suggested that the enjoyment of works of art, and, naturally, Schiller's own writings, proceeded irrespective of their actual intellectual content, because they gave a pure, deep and true happiness. The admiration which the masses had for Schiller, which had shown itself in their pressure for the production of his plays, was for Stampfer a sign of a deeper understanding of the poet, which even his critical views on the contemporary masses and his rejection of the French Revolution could not undo. The slogan was thus not 'back to Schiller', but forward to Schiller, forward with him. 21
Against such an idealistic interpretation of Schiller's significance the Marxist assessment of the poet and of his work, expressed in Mehring's biography and in a special issue of the Neue Zeit, sought to put Schiller in a historical context. His failure to appreciate the meaning of the French Revolution could not just be explained by his environment, it was rooted in his general mentality. Schiller was not even a bourgeois revolutionary, and the contemporary worker could only receive a psychological impetus from the ideals of freedom and the mood of rebelliousness of the early plays, which it must re-interpret for its own ends.
Rosa Luxemburg made a similar point in her contribution to the discussion. She wrote that 'the working class must look at all manifestations of the political and the aesthetic culture in their strictly objective historical and political context, It must see them as part of the general social development which is pushed ahead by its own revolutionary struggle. Schiller could bejudged objectively as a mighty figure of bourgeois culture, instead of letting oneself be absorbed in him subjectively', as Stampfer had advocated.
The extent and the solemnity of these anniversary celebrations and the enthusiastic reception of the poet and of his work symbolised the strength of the workers' desire for culture. It also demonstrated the ability of the working class to give concrete expression of their commitment to culture. At the same time the differences in the assessment of Schiller's meaning for the workers reflect the ideological controversy in the SPD over the road to socialism, which had begun at the turn of the century. For the revisionists, who believed in society growing gradually into socialism, the value of the traditional culture for the working class was not in doubt. Schiller the idealist and the fighter was a good model of commitment to the struggle in general terms. Marxists, on the other hand, with their belief in tactics which would eventually bring about a social revolution, wished to judge the culture of the past more in terms of its didactic influence on the preparation of the proletariat for such a struggle.
The Labour Movement and Cultural Practice: The Education Guidelines of 1906
Questions about the relevance of the bourgeois heritage for the emancipatory struggle of the working class, which were raised in the interpretation of Schiller's work, emerged at about the same time in connection with the discussion of the party's educational programme. Although the SPD had long been concerned with problems of education, the issue was first raised at the party conference in Jena in 1905. This led to the acceptance of a set of 'Guidelines on Educational Policy' (Leitsätze zum Thema Volkserziehung und Sozialdemokratie), and to the setting up of the Central Education Council (Zentral Bildungsausschuβ) at the next conference held in Mannheim in the following year.
The background to this decision was a discussion in the columns of Die Gleichheit, the party's paper for women, edited by Klara Zetkin. This centred on the inadequate educational background of young workers, and on the need for a politically more knowledgeable membership. Zetkin and Heinrich Schulz, a former teacher, and now editor of the socialist Bremer Bürgerzeitung, were charged by the Party Executive with the preparation of an education programme. This spoke of the need to achieve for the working class 'the highest scientific and cultural ideals of our time, but to do so in clear distinction to bourgeois ideology and to bourgeois science and art'. Those concerned with education in the SPD would be expected to identify with the aims of the party. Instruction, especially in the economic and social field, should be closely related to the workers' struggle, and, in the words of Klara Zetkin, 'promote the combative character of the proletariat'.
The education proposals received comparatively little attention at the SPD Conference, which was overshadowed by the issue of the political strike; but the discussion of the underlying question was carried on in the socialist journal press of the period. The marxist point of view was put mainly in the Neue Zeit, while the group of revisionist intellectuals wrote mainly in Die Neue Gesellschaft. The latter rejected the assumption that bourgeois society corrupted the worker by its claims of a value-free art and science, as Heinrich Schulz had asserted. They attacked the idea of a Marxist science, claiming that there was only one great and all-embracing science, neither bourgeois nor proletarian, although they conceded that concessions might be made with regard to economics. Bourgeois art and science were admittedly not free from prejudices and from conservative notions; but more recently scholars had begun to free themselves from such shackles. In any case 'the task of proletarian education was not to create a new science, let alone a new art, but to bring the old science and the old art to its fullest (and purest) development'.
What the revisionists wanted in particular was to give workers a liberal, humanist education which would not be committed in a party-political sense, although they accepted an exception for education in socialist theory and policy. By contrast Schulz and his colleagues believed bourgeois science and scholarship in general to be perverted by political views, and cited the exclusion of known Social Democrats from teaching posts as an indicative example. If faced with such teaching the workers would not have the critical faculties to absorb it selectively. Those who were to give lectures to socialist workers must themselves be socialists.
The discussion on the role of the arts in the life of the working class was differently focused from that on the education issue. Art, literature and music were widely accepted as the creation of men of genius, transmitting beauty and elevated feelings. This meant that they were not so easily seen in class terms. The guidelines stated that, given the historical mission of the proletariat, it could not 'simply take over the spiritual culture of the bourgeoisie', but that it had to 'evaluate it according to its own basic ideology'.
To do so was to prove difficult in practice. If the party sought to dismiss 'bourgeois' science and all other knowledge as biased, and interpret it according to its theories, it could do so comparatively easily in the formal sense by employing only party members as lecturers and teachers. For the arts, however, this implied not interpretation, but selection, and the possible discarding of all that had gone before. The paragraph which dealt with the organisation of the arts within the labour movement is, by implication, aware of the dilemma. It stated that 'within the party we must awaken and foster the artistic sensitivity through illustrated publications. The party should publish valuable works of fiction and issue reproductions of masterpieces of art. It should organise concerts... guided tours of museums or introductory lectures, publish reviews in the press and apply high aesthetic standards for the staging of festivals.'
It was hardly possible to seek the highest values in respect of transmitted art while rejecting the mass of the art of the past and of the present as the product of a bourgeois society with its false values. Especially so, because apart from some examples of workers' poetry the German proletariat could not lay claim to a solid body of cultural and artistic achievement. Yet it was feared that too great a dependence on bourgeois culture, as on bourgeois science, could lead to ideological corruption, and weaken the fighting spirit of the proletariat. A resolution put to a Bremen SPD meeting by Heinrich Schulz in 1905 summed up the issue as follows:
Art and science are... influenced by the bourgeois capitalist basis of the contemporary social order. When seeking to satisfy their needs in respect of science and the arts the class conscious workers must be on their guard lest, under the pretext of a 'free' science and a 'free' art they let themselves be misused for the political interests of their bourgeois opponents.
In the more theoretical discussion the objections to restrictions in respect of art were more widespread than those in respect of bourgeois science. Max Maurenbrecher argued that as far as art was concerned it was not a question of origin but of quality. It was the task of the labour movement to bring the culture of the past to its fullest flowering--something that the bourgeoisie was prevented from doing.
While the sciences were to serve the needs of the intellectual preparation of the working-class struggle, and hence the eventual victory of that class, the role of the arts was seen to be more direct and immediate. Their practice within the sphere of working-class activity was already seen by some as a visible signal of workingclass emancipation. At the same time the arts were expected to give emotional support to the workers in their fight, and fill their life with greater meaning. 'Art should help in the class struggle by giving the worker a respite from the noise of battle--but neither too much nor too often to weaken his political resolve.'
The cultural aspirations of the proletariat grew during the first decade of the century. This is shown in the growth of its own organisations, as well as in the demands for higher standards and a richer cultural fare. Otto Rühle had noticed this in 1904, when he wrote that 'the labour movement's performance and achievement is in part at least determined by the intellectual capacity and the moral integrity of its members. Hence apart from the fight for material gains a good deal of the struggle must be directed at satisfying the general and deeply felt desire for higher intellectual and moral culture.'
To satisfy this need the working class, it was argued, could not wait until its own art was born. 'It was more important that the workers should achieve a strong feeling for life and for victory' here and now. The practice of the SPD seemed to heed such suggestions. In the following years local social-democratic organisations organised a considerable and slowly-growing number of cultural, and particularly artistic, events. Statistics based on reports by local Education Committees to the central organisation suggest that attendances at such events was counted in tens and, for theatre performances, in hundreds of thousands; and these figures do not
Table 2 Cultural events promoted by local associations of the SPD, 1911/12
22 Dichterabende (Poetry Evenings) with 11,572 participants
97 Concerts with 58,115 participants
212 Rezitationen und Kunstabende
(Poetry Recitals and other artistic events) with 94,825 participants
742 Feiern (Festivals) with 40,669 participants
42 Lieder und Märchenabende
(Song and Fairy-tale recitals and readings) with 94,825 participants
848 Theater Vorstellungen
(Theatre Performances) with 599,199 participants
Source: Figures from the annual report of the Zentral Bildungsausschuβ to the
national conference of the SPD in 1912 (SPD Parteitag 1912, p.46). Figures
for that year were a little lower than in earlier years because of the elections
of 1912.
take account of many local parties which did not report to the centre.
The proposals for cultural and artistic activities which the Central Education Committee of the SPD published regularly show how far the movement relied on music and literature from the bourgeois cultural heritage. Between 1908/09 and 1910/11 the Bildungsausschuβ issued some twenty such programmes for socalled Kunstabende ('art evenings') whose titles read like a roll-call of the great figures in the arts. There were programmes devoted to Beethoven, Chopin, Goethe, Heine, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schiller, in addition to Folksong Evenings, Christmas matinees and Spring Festivals; and only the May Day celebrations, the Worker Poets Evenings and the Freiligrath Feiern were specially orientated towards the politics of the audience. The committee also produced proposals for more general forms of entertainment, programmes for an evening devoted to Ballads, or to the theme of Art and Revolution, or simply for anniversary celebrations. The works whose performance is implied by the programmes for these events include some that convey radical or socially critical sentiment; but many are just well-known songs, or popular music, or slides reproducing classical works of art--which, together with the appropriate music and poetry, were to accompany a lecture on the place of dance in literature, music and art.
In seeking to satisfy the desire for greater enjoyment and entertainment those charged with the organisation of the events were generally more concerned with the preservation of standards of performance than with ideological probity, although sometimes both were achieved. To present Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its concluding appeal to universal brotherhood, to a three thousand-strong working-class audience was a great achievement indeed. Kurt Eisner, until recently a journalist on the staff of Vorwärts, took this as a sign of the maturity of the proletariat, which 'everywhere sought to attain the highest and was reaching out to the stars'. On the other hand there was also a growing concern about the lowering of the cultural level, especially in respect of the so-called 'Entertainment Evenings'.
An example of this can be seen in the work of the Education Committee (Bildungsausschugβ) for Greater Berlin, the largest'such body in the country. In its annual guide to educational and cultural activities, which gave detailed proposals for fêtes and festivities, it argued that art performed an elevating and enthusing function. 'It must become a vehicle to give workers new courage for their struggle.' Art could not be neatly divided into bourgeois and proletarian compartments. It appealed to the emotions and it should be cultivated so that the rebelliousness of the individual, and hence that of the masses, should be strengthened. 'When we educate the masses to derivejoy from art we stimulate the desire for improvement in the material aspects of life.'
The report noted that in the winter of 1913/14 the committee had arranged 133 artistic events and fêtes for 81 organisations; but it admitted that the majority had been of the music-hall type. It argued that 'less might have been more' and that they should really concentrate on events of a high quality. The committee saw it as their task to lead the worker gradually to the appreciation of more serious art and to the understanding of more difficult works. The celebrations of the working class should be 'dignified', and they should demonstrate that the working class endeavoured to raise all culture to the highest level of attainment possible. 'Art must become a source of genuine enthusiasm and this enthusiasm must in turn become a source of strength for the mighty struggle of the working class.'
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=35386699
The German Proletariat and the Cultural Heritage:
The Foundations
At the 1896 conference of the German Social Democratic Party held in Gotha a banner at the back of the hall proudly proclaimed that 'Socialism is the bearer of all Culture'. This sentiment was undoubtedly widely shared among the politically conscious sections of the German working class. In concrete terms the slogan alluded to the expanding network of organisations catering for the leisure-time interests of the German workers, which had been established largely under social-democratic influence. On a more intangible plane it found its expression in the claims of the socialist section of the German working class to be the inheritors of the cultural achievements of the past, and to be the force which was destined to break the shackles of bourgeois dominance in the cultural sphere - a consummation which would be achieved with the victory of socialism. Culture in this context was essentially the 'High Culture' of the past, and it denoted primarily the arts and the expression of the wider creative activities of man.
In this chapter I examine the role of culture in the discussions and in the practice of the German labour movement in the three decades from 1890 to 1920. The period began with Social Democracy on the road to becoming a mass party with a Marxist programme; and it ended with the aftermath of the 1918 revolution. After this the two separate and for most of the time mutually hostile political parties, Social Democrats and Communists, each also followed its own path as far as thoughts and policies on culture were concerned; and these separate developments form the theme of the next two chapters.
The importance which almost all sections of the social-democratic movement attached to the creative activity of the past and to that of their own time must be seen in the wider context of socialist ideology and the role it assigned to culture in the emancipatory struggle of the working class. Even in the days when the young labour movement was still linked to the bourgeois radical movement it had already looked forward to the spiritual as much as to the material and political emancipation of the worker. Art in its widest sense was seen as one of the most sublime expressions of the human spirit. It was one of the most powerful elements of the cultural heritage to which German socialism had laid claim from its earliest days.
As the socialist movement developed its own ideology it laid claim to being the only progressive moral force in society. According to that ideology the socialist working class was destined to advance and to be victorious because of the sense of moral responsibility of its members and because the long-term interests and goals of the proletariat were identical with the true interests of mankind in respect: of its political, its economic and its cultural progress. 'It was of the greatest importance for the course of [social] development that today the interests of the working class coincided with those of culture and of progress', wrote Karl Kautsky, the editor of the Neue Zeit, the SPD's principal theoretical journal, in the first volume of the periodical.
The aims of the economic and social struggle had always been clear. They included the abolition of wage slavery, the replacement of private capitalism by public enterprise and the full enjoyment of all civic rights by all, especially by the workers, who had hitherto been excluded from political power. The cultural aspirations of the German workers were not as unambiguously formulated. Even in its incipient form the socialist movement had recognised that the intellectual oppression of the working class went hand in hand with bourgeois economic power. In order to make the national cultural heritage its own, the working class needed education, which the universal system of elementary education, instituted as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, had failed to give them. The German Volkschule was recognised by the workers as an agency for the dissemination of the ruling ideology, or at best as a training of the workers for their role in the economy, not as providing Bildung in the way in which the latter was conceived by the German bourgeoisie. An expansion and improvement of workers' education was necessary the better to conduct the emancipatory struggle, and the 'cultural question' as it affected the German proletariat is best considered in connection with the educational and cultural practices of the labour movement and its organisations.
In the 1860s Workers' Educational Societies, often founded with the help of middle-class radicals or as part of bourgeois philanthropy, sprang up all over Germany 'like mushrooms after a warm summer day', as August Bebel observed in his Memoirs. Originally these societies were largeiy concerned with the provision of elementary education which would help the skilled worker in his drive for self-improvement and vocational advance. These aims continued to be pursued, but under the influence of the early leaders of the German socialist movement these societies increasingly turned to the task of using education for the advancement of new social and democratic ideas. In doing so they parted company from their bourgeois sponsors, who thought in terms of personal advance and support for democratic middle-class radicalism.
The political parting of the ways did not mean that the socialist movement also rejected the culture which the bourgeoisie sought to transmit to it. Ferdinand Lassalle, at that time the most outstanding, and for long after his early death in 1864 the most popular of the socialist leaders, argued that the purpose of workers' education was not to develop the cultural identity of the worker as distinct from that of the bourgeoisie, but to enable the proletariat to fulfil its objective role as the bearer of cultural progress - as it was of social progress - in a conscious and subjective sense also.
The self-improvement through education which Lassalle urged on the skilled and responsible artisans and workers to whom he principally addressed himself was a service to all workers. The struggle of the Arbeiterstand was a moral as well as a material one. As Lassalle put it in his 'Workers' Programme', 'once the sovereignty of the fourth estate over the state had been achieved there would be a flowering of morality, of culture and of science such as the world had never seen!' Here were the roots of a Kultursozialismus which came to fruition half a century later.
Like Lassalle, the members of the first generation of social-democratic leaders came mostly from the ranks of the German middle class and petty bourgeoisie. Their upbringing and their ifestyle reinforced the tendency to accept the attainment of the national culture as a goal of education for the working class. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, together with August Bebel, led the SPD for a quarter of a century, had himself received a university education, and was a strong believer in the classical ideals of education and of the view of the ideal human being held originally by the philosophers of the German Enlightenment. He demanded that the workers should enjoy to the full the fruits of this tradition. He and other socialist writers claimed that the German bourgeoisie, the original guardian of these ideals, had abdicated its responsibility by its political compromise with the German aristocracy. It had surrendered its claims for democracy, and as a result the German educational system was not an instrument for the spread of universal Bildung, but, together with the Army and the popular press, one of the 'agencies of stupefaction' (Verdummungsanstalten) of the state. In his famous address 'Wissen ist Macht - Macht ist Wissen' on the relationship of education and emancipation Liebknecht argued that only in a free German state could genuine Bildung be achieved, and that only the working class, through its emancipatory struggle, could attain such a state. Hence the slogan to follow was not 'through Bildung to freedom' but 'through freedom to Bildung'.
But already even now the aspirations of the social-democratic working class embodied all the ideals of humanity: 'it was the rock which stood above the tossing waves, and', Liebknecht told the Reichstag on 28 November 1888, 'on that rock European culture would save itself. In practice the Social Democratic Party was beginning to mount educational activities as soon as conditions permitted. In 1891 it started the Berlin Workers' College (Arbeiterbildungsschule). This provided both elementary instruction -German, bookkeeping, stenography and courses in public speaking to complement elementary education and to fit workers for the organisational and agitational tasks of the party, as well as education in more theoretical and cultural subjects.
Such central and party-directed activities were from the beginning paralleled by formally independent Education Societies, such as the Leipzig Arbeiterverein, the model for the Arbeiterbildungsschule. It dated back to the 1870s, and in 1892 it was, with 2,000 members, the largest working-class organisation in the city, and was clearly regarded by the police as a social-democratic body. It provided both instruction and entertainment in the form of recitations, and, by the end of the century, the performance of plays, mainly by Schiller and Lessing.
It was the literature of the German classical period which was urged on the working class by its leaders as an example of the cultural heritage which it should make its own. And this not only because it was held to be a pinnacle of artistic achievement, but because poets and dramatists such as Lessing and Schiller had made the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the shackles and prohibitions of feudalism and the injustices of aristocratic privilege a major theme in their work. Franz Mehring, the historian and literary critic who had joined the SPD after a journalistic career in the bourgeois press, and who was to become one of its authorities on cultural matters, held up the classical dramas as signposts for the German workers in their own emancipatory struggle. And among the classical dramatists it was above all, Schiller, the 'poet of freedom' and the author of William Tell, the drama of resistance against tyranny, who occupied a central place.
Another group of artists who were accorded special recognition were bourgeois radical writers, such as Freiliggrath and Herwegh, connected with the unsuccessful revolution of 1848. Some socialist intellectuals, however, wished to hitch the social-democratic cultural wagon to the rising star of naturalist drama and narrative literature. Some of the resulting controversy was over the choice of plays for the Volksbühne, the new people's theatre movement; another ground of dispute was the place and value of naturalist literature in workers' reading and in the socialist press. Edgar Steiger, the editor of Neue Welt, the social-democratic Sunday magazine taken in many workers' households, argued that Naturalism was the appropriate art for the proletariat, and the right vehicle to make workers sensitive to art as such. Like the microscope in the study of nature, naturalism, he argued, was capable of showing up the subtlest stirrings of the human psyche. In doing so it showed up dialectically the dependence of consciousness on social reality.
Steiger, who saw his task as an educational one, had practised his theories by serialising in the Neue Welt novels which dealt with working-class life in a frank and unadorned fashion, and at times used coarse and indelicate language. Many readers took exception to this and felt let down by the fact that the standards of behaviour of the proletarian characters were often unheroic, and even, in their eyes, immoral. This was not only a gut reaction. For the socialist Hamburger Echo it was an expression of healthy class consciousness and of a wish for a literature which would extol virtues and altruism, love of freedom, and a feeling of solidarity.
When the issue was discussed at the 1896 party conference the leading Hamburg Social Democrat, Karl Frohme, said that he was not concerned with decorous behaviour and moralising attitudes; but the new literature offended against good taste and common decency. And even less sensitive delegates attacked the publication of this kind of literature because it did not entertain the reader, and only depressed workers who were already experiencing unhappiness and misery. Edgar Steiger countered this by warning that the party was stepping on to the slippery slope which led to the printing of literature without value. The heroes of classical literature did not always behave heroically, and it would be wrong to 'show workers in dinner jackets'.
Mehring did not share the prudish attitude of the ordinary party member; but he pointed out that they had recognised an inherent weakness of naturalist literature, namely that, while it described life at the lowest levels of society, it prescribed no solution to the problems which it uncovered. It thus failed to give the workers hope and support in their struggle. 'Naturalist art did in no way measure up to the historic magnitude of the proletarian struggle for emancipation', he wrote; it only knew how to criticise existing society, and not how to point the way to the society of the future.
If the discussion on the content and literary policy of the Neue Welt forms one of the significant points of reference for our discussion of the meaning of workers' culture and of working-class aesthetics in the Wilhelmine period, the assessment of the person and work of Friedrich Schiller forms another. It raises questions about the meaning of the bourgeois heritage for the proletariat, and it shows up some differences in the way in which the marxists and the revisionists within the social-democratic movement regarded that heritage.
Before 1914 Friedrich Schiller was clearly the central classical author in the pantheon of the working class, as he was for the nation at large. But, following Lassalle, the German worker sought above all the pure aesthetic experience which could be derived from classical literature, and, beyond all others, from the author of the 'Hymn to Joy'. Schiller was revered mainly as a great poet and an admirable human being, not as the historian of the emancipatory struggle of the bourgeoisie, destined, in its turn, to provide ideological ammunition for the fight of the proletariat as the disadvantaged class of their own day.
We have evidence of this interpretation of Schiller from the widespread celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death in 1905 held by social-democratic organisations throughout Germany. These demonstrated a great longing for culture, and showed the veneration in which the poet was held; but what moved audiences was not so much Schiller's ideological role or his political message, but 'its transformation into art, in the aesthetic form of beautiful poetry with its intoxicating pathos'.
The Berlin memorial celebrations were, in the words of the Vorwärts, a tribute to Schiller as the mighty advocate of 'Art as the great educator of mankind'. Beneath a bust of Schiller, and following on the performance of the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony, the veteran Austrian socialist August Pernersdorfer referred to Schiller as the beloved poet, the embodiment of a humanist and aesthetic ideal of a human being. In his plays he had shown the ideals of strong and daring personalities, rebellious by nature. To realise such ideals, to create a society in which a harmonious, confident personality could arise, was the task of socialists.
A strongly positive view of Schiller's contemporary significance was also expressed in a Jubilee brochure issued by Vorwärts, to which leading revisionists contributed. They stressed Schiller's revolutionary idealism, which was still relevant for the labour movement. His failure to identify with the French Revolution was explicable in terms of his courtly surroundings. 20 Even more positive was the article by Friedrich Stampfer, one of the authors of the pamphlet, which was widely reprinted in the social-democratic press. He suggested that the enjoyment of works of art, and, naturally, Schiller's own writings, proceeded irrespective of their actual intellectual content, because they gave a pure, deep and true happiness. The admiration which the masses had for Schiller, which had shown itself in their pressure for the production of his plays, was for Stampfer a sign of a deeper understanding of the poet, which even his critical views on the contemporary masses and his rejection of the French Revolution could not undo. The slogan was thus not 'back to Schiller', but forward to Schiller, forward with him. 21
Against such an idealistic interpretation of Schiller's significance the Marxist assessment of the poet and of his work, expressed in Mehring's biography and in a special issue of the Neue Zeit, sought to put Schiller in a historical context. His failure to appreciate the meaning of the French Revolution could not just be explained by his environment, it was rooted in his general mentality. Schiller was not even a bourgeois revolutionary, and the contemporary worker could only receive a psychological impetus from the ideals of freedom and the mood of rebelliousness of the early plays, which it must re-interpret for its own ends.
Rosa Luxemburg made a similar point in her contribution to the discussion. She wrote that 'the working class must look at all manifestations of the political and the aesthetic culture in their strictly objective historical and political context, It must see them as part of the general social development which is pushed ahead by its own revolutionary struggle. Schiller could bejudged objectively as a mighty figure of bourgeois culture, instead of letting oneself be absorbed in him subjectively', as Stampfer had advocated.
The extent and the solemnity of these anniversary celebrations and the enthusiastic reception of the poet and of his work symbolised the strength of the workers' desire for culture. It also demonstrated the ability of the working class to give concrete expression of their commitment to culture. At the same time the differences in the assessment of Schiller's meaning for the workers reflect the ideological controversy in the SPD over the road to socialism, which had begun at the turn of the century. For the revisionists, who believed in society growing gradually into socialism, the value of the traditional culture for the working class was not in doubt. Schiller the idealist and the fighter was a good model of commitment to the struggle in general terms. Marxists, on the other hand, with their belief in tactics which would eventually bring about a social revolution, wished to judge the culture of the past more in terms of its didactic influence on the preparation of the proletariat for such a struggle.
The Labour Movement and Cultural Practice: The Education Guidelines of 1906
Questions about the relevance of the bourgeois heritage for the emancipatory struggle of the working class, which were raised in the interpretation of Schiller's work, emerged at about the same time in connection with the discussion of the party's educational programme. Although the SPD had long been concerned with problems of education, the issue was first raised at the party conference in Jena in 1905. This led to the acceptance of a set of 'Guidelines on Educational Policy' (Leitsätze zum Thema Volkserziehung und Sozialdemokratie), and to the setting up of the Central Education Council (Zentral Bildungsausschuβ) at the next conference held in Mannheim in the following year.
The background to this decision was a discussion in the columns of Die Gleichheit, the party's paper for women, edited by Klara Zetkin. This centred on the inadequate educational background of young workers, and on the need for a politically more knowledgeable membership. Zetkin and Heinrich Schulz, a former teacher, and now editor of the socialist Bremer Bürgerzeitung, were charged by the Party Executive with the preparation of an education programme. This spoke of the need to achieve for the working class 'the highest scientific and cultural ideals of our time, but to do so in clear distinction to bourgeois ideology and to bourgeois science and art'. Those concerned with education in the SPD would be expected to identify with the aims of the party. Instruction, especially in the economic and social field, should be closely related to the workers' struggle, and, in the words of Klara Zetkin, 'promote the combative character of the proletariat'.
The education proposals received comparatively little attention at the SPD Conference, which was overshadowed by the issue of the political strike; but the discussion of the underlying question was carried on in the socialist journal press of the period. The marxist point of view was put mainly in the Neue Zeit, while the group of revisionist intellectuals wrote mainly in Die Neue Gesellschaft. The latter rejected the assumption that bourgeois society corrupted the worker by its claims of a value-free art and science, as Heinrich Schulz had asserted. They attacked the idea of a Marxist science, claiming that there was only one great and all-embracing science, neither bourgeois nor proletarian, although they conceded that concessions might be made with regard to economics. Bourgeois art and science were admittedly not free from prejudices and from conservative notions; but more recently scholars had begun to free themselves from such shackles. In any case 'the task of proletarian education was not to create a new science, let alone a new art, but to bring the old science and the old art to its fullest (and purest) development'.
What the revisionists wanted in particular was to give workers a liberal, humanist education which would not be committed in a party-political sense, although they accepted an exception for education in socialist theory and policy. By contrast Schulz and his colleagues believed bourgeois science and scholarship in general to be perverted by political views, and cited the exclusion of known Social Democrats from teaching posts as an indicative example. If faced with such teaching the workers would not have the critical faculties to absorb it selectively. Those who were to give lectures to socialist workers must themselves be socialists.
The discussion on the role of the arts in the life of the working class was differently focused from that on the education issue. Art, literature and music were widely accepted as the creation of men of genius, transmitting beauty and elevated feelings. This meant that they were not so easily seen in class terms. The guidelines stated that, given the historical mission of the proletariat, it could not 'simply take over the spiritual culture of the bourgeoisie', but that it had to 'evaluate it according to its own basic ideology'.
To do so was to prove difficult in practice. If the party sought to dismiss 'bourgeois' science and all other knowledge as biased, and interpret it according to its theories, it could do so comparatively easily in the formal sense by employing only party members as lecturers and teachers. For the arts, however, this implied not interpretation, but selection, and the possible discarding of all that had gone before. The paragraph which dealt with the organisation of the arts within the labour movement is, by implication, aware of the dilemma. It stated that 'within the party we must awaken and foster the artistic sensitivity through illustrated publications. The party should publish valuable works of fiction and issue reproductions of masterpieces of art. It should organise concerts... guided tours of museums or introductory lectures, publish reviews in the press and apply high aesthetic standards for the staging of festivals.'
It was hardly possible to seek the highest values in respect of transmitted art while rejecting the mass of the art of the past and of the present as the product of a bourgeois society with its false values. Especially so, because apart from some examples of workers' poetry the German proletariat could not lay claim to a solid body of cultural and artistic achievement. Yet it was feared that too great a dependence on bourgeois culture, as on bourgeois science, could lead to ideological corruption, and weaken the fighting spirit of the proletariat. A resolution put to a Bremen SPD meeting by Heinrich Schulz in 1905 summed up the issue as follows:
Art and science are... influenced by the bourgeois capitalist basis of the contemporary social order. When seeking to satisfy their needs in respect of science and the arts the class conscious workers must be on their guard lest, under the pretext of a 'free' science and a 'free' art they let themselves be misused for the political interests of their bourgeois opponents.
In the more theoretical discussion the objections to restrictions in respect of art were more widespread than those in respect of bourgeois science. Max Maurenbrecher argued that as far as art was concerned it was not a question of origin but of quality. It was the task of the labour movement to bring the culture of the past to its fullest flowering--something that the bourgeoisie was prevented from doing.
While the sciences were to serve the needs of the intellectual preparation of the working-class struggle, and hence the eventual victory of that class, the role of the arts was seen to be more direct and immediate. Their practice within the sphere of working-class activity was already seen by some as a visible signal of workingclass emancipation. At the same time the arts were expected to give emotional support to the workers in their fight, and fill their life with greater meaning. 'Art should help in the class struggle by giving the worker a respite from the noise of battle--but neither too much nor too often to weaken his political resolve.'
The cultural aspirations of the proletariat grew during the first decade of the century. This is shown in the growth of its own organisations, as well as in the demands for higher standards and a richer cultural fare. Otto Rühle had noticed this in 1904, when he wrote that 'the labour movement's performance and achievement is in part at least determined by the intellectual capacity and the moral integrity of its members. Hence apart from the fight for material gains a good deal of the struggle must be directed at satisfying the general and deeply felt desire for higher intellectual and moral culture.'
To satisfy this need the working class, it was argued, could not wait until its own art was born. 'It was more important that the workers should achieve a strong feeling for life and for victory' here and now. The practice of the SPD seemed to heed such suggestions. In the following years local social-democratic organisations organised a considerable and slowly-growing number of cultural, and particularly artistic, events. Statistics based on reports by local Education Committees to the central organisation suggest that attendances at such events was counted in tens and, for theatre performances, in hundreds of thousands; and these figures do not
Table 2 Cultural events promoted by local associations of the SPD, 1911/12
22 Dichterabende (Poetry Evenings) with 11,572 participants
97 Concerts with 58,115 participants
212 Rezitationen und Kunstabende
(Poetry Recitals and other artistic events) with 94,825 participants
742 Feiern (Festivals) with 40,669 participants
42 Lieder und Märchenabende
(Song and Fairy-tale recitals and readings) with 94,825 participants
848 Theater Vorstellungen
(Theatre Performances) with 599,199 participants
Source: Figures from the annual report of the Zentral Bildungsausschuβ to the
national conference of the SPD in 1912 (SPD Parteitag 1912, p.46). Figures
for that year were a little lower than in earlier years because of the elections
of 1912.
take account of many local parties which did not report to the centre.
The proposals for cultural and artistic activities which the Central Education Committee of the SPD published regularly show how far the movement relied on music and literature from the bourgeois cultural heritage. Between 1908/09 and 1910/11 the Bildungsausschuβ issued some twenty such programmes for socalled Kunstabende ('art evenings') whose titles read like a roll-call of the great figures in the arts. There were programmes devoted to Beethoven, Chopin, Goethe, Heine, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schiller, in addition to Folksong Evenings, Christmas matinees and Spring Festivals; and only the May Day celebrations, the Worker Poets Evenings and the Freiligrath Feiern were specially orientated towards the politics of the audience. The committee also produced proposals for more general forms of entertainment, programmes for an evening devoted to Ballads, or to the theme of Art and Revolution, or simply for anniversary celebrations. The works whose performance is implied by the programmes for these events include some that convey radical or socially critical sentiment; but many are just well-known songs, or popular music, or slides reproducing classical works of art--which, together with the appropriate music and poetry, were to accompany a lecture on the place of dance in literature, music and art.
In seeking to satisfy the desire for greater enjoyment and entertainment those charged with the organisation of the events were generally more concerned with the preservation of standards of performance than with ideological probity, although sometimes both were achieved. To present Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its concluding appeal to universal brotherhood, to a three thousand-strong working-class audience was a great achievement indeed. Kurt Eisner, until recently a journalist on the staff of Vorwärts, took this as a sign of the maturity of the proletariat, which 'everywhere sought to attain the highest and was reaching out to the stars'. On the other hand there was also a growing concern about the lowering of the cultural level, especially in respect of the so-called 'Entertainment Evenings'.
An example of this can be seen in the work of the Education Committee (Bildungsausschugβ) for Greater Berlin, the largest'such body in the country. In its annual guide to educational and cultural activities, which gave detailed proposals for fêtes and festivities, it argued that art performed an elevating and enthusing function. 'It must become a vehicle to give workers new courage for their struggle.' Art could not be neatly divided into bourgeois and proletarian compartments. It appealed to the emotions and it should be cultivated so that the rebelliousness of the individual, and hence that of the masses, should be strengthened. 'When we educate the masses to derivejoy from art we stimulate the desire for improvement in the material aspects of life.'
The report noted that in the winter of 1913/14 the committee had arranged 133 artistic events and fêtes for 81 organisations; but it admitted that the majority had been of the music-hall type. It argued that 'less might have been more' and that they should really concentrate on events of a high quality. The committee saw it as their task to lead the worker gradually to the appreciation of more serious art and to the understanding of more difficult works. The celebrations of the working class should be 'dignified', and they should demonstrate that the working class endeavoured to raise all culture to the highest level of attainment possible. 'Art must become a source of genuine enthusiasm and this enthusiasm must in turn become a source of strength for the mighty struggle of the working class.'
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