Beer and Skittles? Workers and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Beginning of article

This paper first examines the culture of the workers' leisure organisations associated with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then attempts to assess the extent to which it resembled or differed from `bourgeois' or `high' culture on the one hand and other `working-class' cultures on the other.

By 1914 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had over one million individual fee-paying members and was the largest party in the Reich. It had a relevance to the lives of many workers, however, which extended well beyond the realm of politics: through a plethora of cultural and leisure organisations it constituted part of the daily world of working-class communities in Germany's large Protestant industrial cities such as Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. There were social-democratic chess, smoking, drama, skittles, sports and gymnastic clubs, the Naturfreunde (ramblers), educational associations and choral societies, which usually carried the prefix Arbeiter- (Workers') before their name. By 1914 these organisations could claim a massive membership, as the following figures demonstrate:

Deutscher Arbeitersangerbund (choral
 societies)                                 165,000 members
Arbeiter Turn- und Sportbund (sports
 and gym clubs)                                     187,000
Arbeiterradfahrerbund Solidaritat
 (cyclists)                                      150,000(1)

In total over 600,000 Germans belonged to the workers' leisure and cultural organisations by 1914. Many of these had their own specialist newspapers (e.g. the Arbeiterradfahrer for the worker cyclists), published by social-democratic printing houses, which also produced alternative children's comics (e.g. King Mammon!) and fairy tales, re-written from a socialist perspective. There was even a workers' Punch and Judy show (Arbeiterpuppentheater), which is preserved to this day in the Fritz-Huser-Institut fur Internationale Arbeiterliteratur in Dortmund.(2)

The function of these workers' organisations has been disputed. Whereas some of their members argued that they constituted the "third pillar" of the labour movement (together with the unions and the political party) and served to reinforce the class consciousness of German workers, many historians have come to disassociate them from economic and political conflict.(3) For Guenther Roth the countless social-democratic leisure organisations did little more than reproduce traditional ("bourgeois") cultural values and integrate workers into the social fabric of Imperial Germany, albeit "negatively". Such a view has not been the preserve of latter-day historians. It was shared at the time by some trade-union and SPD activists, who feared that the Party's leisure organisations would distract their members from the prime task of industrial and political struggle. The executive of the SPD's Dusseldorf branch, for example, claimed that:

   a good comrade is not one who joins the choristers, sports, swimming,
   stenographers, health and other organisations but one who is an active
   member of the party and union.(4)

In the Ruhr in 1913 local party leaders complained that social-democratic events and festivals were increasingly devoid of political content and had become concerned almost exclusively with popular entertainment.(5)

These fears and Roth's analysis seemed to be validated in a variety of ways. The culture purveyed by workers' choirs and dramatic societies, for example, was in many respects divorced from both the workplace and the daily realities of proletarian existence; it consisted largely of "high" culture. Workers' drama groups, for example, put on plays by Goethe and Schiller; and although the Freie Volksbuhne (the "Free People's Stage") in Berlin performed more avant-garde pieces, these were in general unpopular with proletarian audiences. In fact its offerings became increasingly broad in nature, whilst the number of plays with a specifically political or social message staged there declined. The experimental section of the Neue Freie Volksbuhne, established to rectify this deficit in 1912, was not very successful. (Indeed the conflicts in this area reflected a more general tension between bourgeois intellectuals and workers in the German labour movement). The workers' choral societies sang traditional folk-songs and often bore names without a hint of socialist militancy ("Edelweiss", "Forest Green", "Harmony"). At union and party events, as well as "cultural evenings", workers' bands and orchestras performed works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Verdi, L6har, Strauss and Wagner. It also appears that professionalism of performance, rather than simple participation, became increasingly valued after 1906. Similarly the Arbeiter Turn- und Sportbund (Workers' Gymnastics and Sports League) was forced by pressure from its members to embrace a degree of competition (though within and not between branches), in spite of official hostility to such "bourgeois" competitive values. Thus the cultural organisations of the SPD focussed their interest on works of high culture -- more often than not the works of "bourgeois idealism" -- rather than Marxist theory, whilst the musicians and gymnasts came to embrace the supposedly non-proletarian values of performance and competition.(6)

These developments seem to have mirrored the interests of the workers themselves to judge by patterns of library borrowing and journal subscription figures. Even amongst unionised workers, only a small minority borrowed books from workers' libraries: in Hamburg in 1909 12 per cent of unionised shop assistants, 5 per cent of unionised metalworkers and just 1 per cent of the organised dockworkers did so. Those that did use the facilities of the Arbeiterbibliotheken, furthermore, rarely borrowed works of Marxist theory: only Bebel's Woman and Socialism and Kautsky's Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx featured prominently in the borrowing statistics. Craft manuals, vulgarisations of evolutionary biology and the adventure novels of Friedrich Gerstacker were far more popular. Most popular of all was historical fiction, especially that of Alexandre Dumas, whose Count of Monte Cristo was borrowed from the Hamburg Workers' Library no fewer than 217 times in a single year.(7) The circulation figures of social-democratic journals are no less revealing. Whereas the (Marxist) theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit had some 10,500 subscribers and the (revisionist) theoretical journal Sozialistische Monatshefte a mere 2,100, the worker cyclists' Arbeiterradfahrer could claim 168,000, the satirical magazine Wahrer Jakob 371,000 and the entertainment magazine Neue Welt 550,000.(8) Furthermore, when Neue Welt attempted to include some serious, realist writing, it was denounced by several party branches!(9)

That entertainment displaced politics in the leisure-time of social-democratic workers would also seem to be confirmed by the evolution of the party and trade-union festivals, which were moved to Sundays, often held in garden restaurants, included concerts and put on entertainments, such as shooting and greasy pole contests, coconut shies for the kids and yam-winding competitions for the women (no subversion of gender roles there!).(10)

According to Roth and other commentators, the provision of such social activities by the SPD served to integrate its members into Wilhelmine society by creating a kind of protective cocoon in an otherwise hostile world. Just as boys' clubs were meant to do in the 1950s, so the social-democratic …