Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War

by Richard J. Evans

This book - as a history of the German labor movement - offers a critique of the traditional emphasis on organization and ideology both through a survey of the literature and a presentation of new evidence, including a study of working-class opinion on a wide range of political and social issues, based on reports compiled by police spies in the pubs and bars of Hamburg between 1892 and 1914.

Genres: History

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1991

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very uneven attack against teleology (read: Marx-shism) in the study of the German working class up to WWI. Most of the chapters are lethargic bibliographical essays which are treated very critically (he takes on Tilly, the little cuss) but are not matched with complementary solutions to the problems he brings up. The last chapter is an interesting analysis of German police surveillance reports in Hamburg and an attempt to use them as evidence of the nature of the mentalite of German workers, but is dubious for the obvious reasons. Little to no graphic sex in this work.