We are the red megaphone!: Political music, agitprop theater, everyday life and Communist politics in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

This dissertation studies the relationship among culture, everyday life and radical politics in working-class Berlin during the Weimar Republic. One question underlying the entire work is how people understood their surroundings and acted upon this understanding. The study addresses working-class music and theater. Section One dissects the different ways in which the German Social Democratic and Communist Parties used culture to advance their political goals. Song is investigated because it was the most important of the forms used by Social Democracy to represent itself and is a perfect example of how the Communist movement turned away from the model established by Social-Democratic cultural theorists. Section Two explores Communist agitprop troupes in Berlin. These troupes consisted of youths who wrote and performed their own material (consisting of short sketches, songs and dance), which was supposed to be topical, of general interest and based upon the KPD's current political line. They were vitally important to the KPD because they served as a surrogate mass medium. To understand these troupes, the chapters investigate the structures of working-class youths' life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. They describe and analyze housing, education, unemployment and the relationship that unemployed youth had to the Weimar State as it manifested itself in their lives and their attempts to empower themselves in brutalizing circumstances. To accomplish the latter, the ways that young workers spent their time, including membership in youth gangs, 'hanging out' and joining political organizations, such as the KPD and its affiliates are examined. Following this are analyses of the agitprop troupes' material and of the organization which was supposed to function as the umbrella for all agitprop troupes. This study tries to show that although both parties' cultural cadres were concerned with the influence that economic, social and class factors had on the production of art, they developed radically different programs in their attempts to use 'culture' to further their economic and political goals.PhDCommunication and the ArtsEuropean historyModern historyMusicPolitical scienceSocial SciencesSocial structureTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128554/2/9034388.pd