The Working Class In Vernon Lidtke's The Alternative Culture

Germany’s working class throughout the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century revolved around routine. Shift work was established to ensure the max amount of output was achieved by keeping factories running around the clock. This made any leisure events done outside of the daily routine exceptionally important for factory workers in Germany. Vernon Lidtke stats in his book The Alternative Culture, “…it became more likely that workers, even in skilled trades, looked with greater anticipation to their nonwork hours for meaningful experiences” (Lidtke 76). Most organizations in Germany held festivals multiple times annually and these festivals provided an opportunity for the working class to break from their otherwise routine …show more content…
Though the activities were carefully planned by working party leaders, it was the people who enjoyed the festivities. The working class attended festivals for pleasure, though political messages did play a major role in the developing of the festival itself, without them, the working class would have a bland, hard, and grey life. These festivals provided entertainment in a communal form. Lidtke quotes Karl Grünberg in regards to the May day festival, who was a young boy during the labor movement, “women made coffee; worker athletes showed off their skills; and the workers' singing [clubs] sang 'One People, One Heart, One Father-land' ('Ein Yolk, ein Herz, ein Yaterland')” (Lidtke 99). The working class bonded over food, drinks, music, and sports; they were able to break socially from the bleakness of their small work station they manned for ten hours a day (until the turn of the century when it was changed to eight). Lidtke states, “in a day's activities festivals brought together in one concentrated event many, if not all, of the ingredients of the social-cultural world of the socialist labor movement” (Lidtke 101). In the processions alone, “crafts, trades, occupations, the arts, forms of learning, and historical events can all be found represented in one form or another in festival processions” (Lidtke 90). This idea of community, culture, and leisure shared by the working class at the festivals was the main social interest of not only the party leaders but factory workers and their families. The socialist labor party gave working class citizens a sense of belonging that most had never received before, epitomized in their sponsorship of the festivals and heightened by the culture, values, and interest portrayed in