Echoes of the Proletariat: Literature and the Birth of Class
In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged from impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats, and precarious intellectuals, a group soon to be known as the proletariat. However, this collective lacked unity and formal political representation. The diverse appearances, dreams, and longings of these individuals, uprooted from economic stability, found expression in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins.

These disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were later criticized as reactionary and anarchic by leaders of the labor movement for not conforming to their vision of linear progress. In The Poetry of Class, Patrick Eiden-Offe recounts the formation of this early proletariat in Vormärz Germany (1815-1848). Through the works of authors like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, Eiden-Offe reveals striking parallels to the disorderly classes of today.