The Bonds of Labor : German Journeys to the Working World, 1890-1990

For the past century in Germany, writers and others from the middle or upper classes have entered the world of manual labor by becoming workers.

They produced fictional and non-fictional texts that convey their travel to the unfamiliar world of the working class.

Although scholars have devoted attention to the image of work and workers and the role of the intellectual in working-class movements, these journeys to the working world have not been thoroughly investigated.

The Bonds of Labor focuses on how specific autobiographies, reportages, essays, films, and novels represent the unfamiliar experience of becoming a manual laborer.

It also examines the intersections between class, race, and ethnicity, as well as the writings that provoked public debate.

Carol Poore analyzes nineteenth-century social movements, post-World War I conservative movements that culminated in the Nazi Labor Service, social reportage in the late Weimar Republic, alliances with workers in the German Democratic Republic, and the re-emergence of the question of class inequality in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Poore illuminates the concepts and fantasies of work and workers held by those who left their more privileged positions for a brief time.

Their sojourns in the world of labor were as much about strengthening the intricate "bonds" of domination over manual workers as about creating "bonds" of fraternity.

The Bonds of Labor is a rich, yet well-defined book that augments both historical studies of class relations and the labor movement as well as literary studies of German themes and images by exploring the cultural history of responses to social inequities.

This literary exploration of the industrial worldwill be important reading for scholars and students of German cultural and social history, German literature, and labor studies.