The Many Lives of German Labour: A Review Essay

IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, social-historical approaches have made a substantial contribution to the history of the 19thand 20th-century German labour movement. Each of the books under review here carries this general project forward; yet each book also confronts us with quite different, at times, incompatible representations of "the German working-class." Indeed one comes away from reading these five new studies with a troubling question; is there still a "collective subject" whose history German labour historians can continue to write? The skilled metalworkers described by both Neufeld and Bellon lived very different lives, inhabited quite different worlds than the foreign labourers who are the subject of Ulrich Herbert's excellent, original, and much-needed study. Ute Daniel's and Karen Hagemann's pioneering studies clearly show that gender played a major role in structuring working-class experiences, interests, and identities. And Hagemann's book also warns us about the dangers of taking the rhetoric