Weimar Contact Zones: Modernism, Workers’ Movement Literature, and Urban Imaginaries Christoph Schaub Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 ©2015 Christoph Schaub All rights reserved ABSTRACT Weimar Contact Zones: Modernism, Workers’ Movement Literature, and Urban Imaginaries Christoph Schaub Located at the intersections of new modernism, urban, and minority studies, Weimar Contact Zones examines the interplay between modernism, urban imaginaries, and the cultural production of the workers’ movement. While the Weimar Republic has long occupied a paradigmatic place in discussions of modernity and modernism in literary and cultural studies, proletarian literature and the analytical category of class have played only a marginal role. Bringing canonical Weimar literature together with the marginalized tradition of workers’ movement literature, film, and performance, the dissertation demonstrates that urban spaces functioned as contact zones where different groups interacted across lines of class and where hybridizations across boundaries of high and low culture occurred. The cultural production of the workers’ movement becomes visible as a tradition that articulated and appropriated modernist aesthetics to catalyze and represent, from the standpoint of proletarian collectives, social transformation. Understood from this perspective, modernism is not limited to high modernism or the historical avant-garde, but includes alternative cultural forms that articulate modern experiences of the lower classes. Weimar Contact Zones in this way also challenges the opposition between modernism and realism, which typically aligns workers’ movement literature with realism. The dissertation analyzes literary works by Anna Seghers, Franz Jung, Klaus Neukrantz, Kurt Kläber, Karl Grünberg, and the movie Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World?, amongst others. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 I. Contact Zones and Urban Imaginaries 4 II. New Modernism Studies and Workers’ Movement Literature 10 III. Minority Studies, the Struggle for Visibility, and the Poetic Construction of Class 18 IV. Texts and Chapters 23 CHAPTER ONE: Urban Contact Zones, Poetics of Class, and the Exploration Narrative 29 I. Representing Class in Urban Contact Zones 29 II. The Modern City and the Exploration Narrative 35 III. Encountering Proletarian Spaces: Exploration Narratives in Erich Kästner’s Fabian and Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns 41 IV. Into the City’s Non-Proletarian Other: Proletarian Culture and the Exploration Narrative in Reverse: Klaus Neukrantz’s Barrikaden am Wedding 56 V. Proletarian Culture through Petty-Bourgeois Eyes: The Appropriation of the Exploration Narrative in Karl Grünberg’s Die Brennende Ruhr 70 VI. Conclusion 83 CHAPTER TWO: Left-Wing Internationalism, Transnational Urban Modernity, and World Literature: Kurt Kläber, Anna Seghers, and Beyond 87 I. Sameness and Difference in Transnational Modernity 87 i II. Early Transnational Urbanism in Tergit, Hessel, and Siegfried Kracauer 93 III. Left-Wing Internationalism 108 IV. Labor Migration and the Politics of Dialogue: Kurt Kläber’s Passagiere der III. Klasse 116 V. Exiles, Traveling Activists, and the Politics of Montage: Anna Segers’s Die Gefährten 130 VI. Internationalist World Literature: The Literary Politics of Die Linkskurve 147 CHAPTER THREE: Modernist Realisms in Workers’ Movement Literature: Franz Jung’s Early Weimar Novels and the Rote Eine-Mark-Romane 160 I. Modernist Realisms in Weimar Literature 160 II. Realism and the Production of Reality in Franz Jung’s Early Weimar Novels II.a. Franz Jung in Early Weimar Critical Discourse 173 II.b. Between Authentication and Self-reflexivity: Joe Frank Illustriert die Welt 180 II.c. Literary Realism and Utopia: Die Eroberung derMaschinen 189 III. Authenticity-Claiming Realism, the ‘Red Street,’ and the Rote Eine-Mark-Romane III.a. Alfred Döblin, Die Linkskurve, and the Question of Realist Representation 204 III.b. Walter Schönstedt’s Kämpfende Jugend 214 III.c. Klaus Neukrantz’s Barrikaden am Wedding 219 CHAPTER FOUR: Performing Collectives: Masses, Workers’ Performances, and Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? 229 I. Kolonne Links, Metropolis, and Workers’ Performances 229 II. A Different Kind of Contact Zone: Cultural Production in the Workers’ Movement Public Sphere 240 ii III. Representations of Cross-Class Encounters in Kuhle Wampe 249 IV. Montage, Workers’ Performances, and the Production of Identification 259 V. Masses and Cinematic Language 273 CONCLUSION 291 BIBLIOGRAPHY 300 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance of my advisors Andreas Huyssen and Stefan Andriopoulos. Andreas Huyssen has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project from the beginning and his thinking about modernism and modernity is present throughout this dissertation. For me, his work has been an inspiration for a kind of literary studies that speaks to broader cultural and political concerns without sacrificing historical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and close reading. Stefan Andriopoulos has been a meticulous reader of my drafts and taught a stimulating class on “Weimar Cinema,” which provided the foundation for this dissertation’s fourth chapter. Both also deserve a lot of credit for helping me improve my written English. I want to thank my dear friends Florian Kappeler, who read the entire dissertation, and Ana Keilson, who read most of it, for their time and comments. June Hwang, Harro Müller, Joe Sheppard, Oliver Simons, Martin Valenske, and Dorothea von Mücke have read chapter drafts, and I am indebted to their insights and suggestions. All errors, inaccuracies, and infelicities must remain of course my own. I am particularly grateful for my mentors at Freie Universität Berlin and at Emory University, who set me on the path to this dissertation: Elizabeth Goodstein and the late Gert Mattenklott. Among the friends that have shaped me intellectually, I want to specifically thank Jana Tschurenev, who introduced me to feminist and postcolonial thought. Her thinking about “geteilte Geschichte” helped me conceive of the outlines of this project in its earliest stages. I would also like to thank: Johan Horst, Tine Kley, Guirdex Massé, Hanna Müller, and Hannes Schülein. Among the many wonderful graduate students at the Department of Germanic Languages, I want to mention Alexis Radisoglou, Johanna Urzedowski, and Yvonne Živković. Muhammed Al-Azzawi and Tabea Weitz deserve a lot of credit for having iv made our shared office such a pleasant and productive place to be. A fellowship from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation ensured my final year of writing was both productive and free of distractions. Last but not least, I want to thank the members of my family for their support: my parents, Heike and Karl Heinz, my brothers Sebastian and Sven, and my grandma Lilo. After all, this dissertation may well have started one evening at my grandmother’s house, when I – maybe eight or nine years old and under the influence of my best friend who probably harbored class prejudice and pride because of his father’s job as a judge – told my mother that all workers were stupid. She replied: “You can be really happy now that your grandma didn’t hear that.” “Why,” I asked. “Because your grandpa was a worker too,” which, I guess, I hadn’t really been aware of. But then, this dissertation may have begun elsewhere; what is more important is that it came to an end. v INTRODUCTION In the early 1930s, Georg Lukács criticized contemporaneous developments in proletarian literature in two essays, “Willi Bredels Romane” (1931) and “Reportage oder Gestaltung?” (1932), both published in the communist literary journal Die Linkskurve.1 In nuce, Lukács argued that workers’ movement literature should model itself after nineteenth-century realism and humanism, but not follow the avant-gardes and modernism. The articles came after more than a decade of aesthetically and politically diverse attempts to forge a workers’ movement literature in the Weimar Republic. They anticipated the anti-modernist doctrine of socialist realism2 and developed arguments Lukács would later elaborate in the so-called “expressionism debate.”3 Since then, discussions about Marxist aesthetics and left-wing literature have more often than not been channeled through the dichotomy between realism and modernism/avant-gardism, which typically aligns workers’ movement literature with realism. It is partially because of the perpetuation of this politically charged and analytically insufficient binary that the literature of the workers’ movement has barely played a role in the booming research on literary modernism and urban modernity. Challenging the opposition between workers’ movement literature and modernism, my dissertation integrates the literature of the workers’ movement into recent discussions about a broadly conceived and internally 1 Georg Lukács, “Über Willi Bredels Romane,” Die Linkskurve 3, no. 11 (1931), 23-27; and Lukács, “Reportage oder Gestaltung? Kritische Bemerkungen anläβlich eines Romans von Ottwalt,ˮ in Marxismus und Literatur: Eine Dokumentation in drei Bänden, vol. 2, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz (Reinbek bei Hamburt: Rowohlt, 1969), 150-158. First published in Die Linkskurve 4, no. 7 (1932), 23-31. 2 Socialist realism was a vaguely defined term first officially used in 1932 and then codified in 1934. See Frank Trommler, Sozialistische