Workers literature

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Workers ' literature (also: workers' poetry ) is a collective term for literary works by workers in which they deal with their own living conditions. In a broader sense, it also means any literature on the situation of workers, regardless of the author's social origin.

Emergence

In the middle of the 19th century, with the emergence of the social question , authors began to deal with the living conditions of the working class. The writers, most of whom came from the bourgeoisie themselves , called for social justice in their works. Significant representatives of this working class literature include the poets Heinrich Heine , Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Freiligrath . In naturalism ( Gerhart Hauptmann ) and expressionism ( Ernst Toller ) authors took on the subject. After the Second World War , authors from Group 61 in the Federal Republic and the Bitterfelder Weg in the GDR dealt with the problems of modern industrial society. There, however, worker poetry was supposed to celebrate the life of workers under socialism .

At the end of the 19th century, representatives of the workers 'milieu began to process the subjects and subjects of the workers in literary terms in the course of advancing industrialization and the emergence of the workers' movement . This worker's poetry reached its peak after the First World War . Towards the end of the 1920s, authors from all walks of life tried to use novels to induce workers to act in a class-struggle manner. The victorious world communism was the prescribed goal of this workers' literature, which saw the everyday life of the proletarians primarily through the party glasses. After war, destruction, and reconstruction, workers' literature in the west was less pathetic. The old workers' literature was reissued for students after 1968.

A representative of workers' literature in the 20th century was Hans Dieter Baroth . With him you can find descriptions of everyday life in mining in the Ruhr area.

Workers' literature outside of Germany

Austria

The two contemporary Austrian authors Franz Innerhofer and Gernot Wolfgruber deal with depictions of the everyday life of workers at the lower end of society .

France

In other European countries writers began to deal with the situation of the working class from the middle of the 19th century. Émile Zola , a representative of French naturalism, described in his novel Germinal the everyday working life and living conditions of the miners in northern France. In the first half of the 20th century, Henry Poulaille, with his commitment to proletarian literature (French: littérature prolétarienne ), and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, with his concept of literary commitment, set new accents in the direction of a socio-ethical function of literature . In the aftermath of May 1968, a new literary confrontation developed with the working class and the social question , which set itself apart from Sartre and gave literature greater autonomy. Leslie Kaplan with her experimental text Der Excess (French: L'excès-usine , 1978) and François Bon , among others with his novel Sortie d'usine (1982), can be regarded as important representatives . Robert Linhart is more sociologically and socially committed in his novel L'établi (1981).

Authors of the working class

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Gerhard Engel : The worker poet Werner Möller (1888-1919), in: Work - Movement - History , Volume III / 2016.