Sabine Hake est professeur d’études germaniques à l’université du Texas à Austin, où elle enseigne depuis 2004. Historienne culturelle travaillant sur l’Allemagne des XIXe et XXe siècles, elle est l’auteur de huit monographies, dont German National Cinema (2008), Topographies of Class : Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008), et les deux premiers volumes de la trilogie The Proletarian Dream (2017 et 2023). Elle a coédité quatre anthologies et publié de nombreux articles sur le cinéma allemand, la culture de Weimar et la culture nazie. De 2011 à 2021, elle a été rédactrice en chef de German Studies Review, la revue de la German Studies Association. Ses recherches interdisciplinaires ont été soutenues par la National Gallery, le German Academic Exchange Service, le National Endowment for the Humanities et les fondations Fulbright, Rockefeller, Getty et Mellon. Plus récemment, elle a reçu le 2022 Reinhold Schünzel Preis en reconnaissance de sa contribution au patrimoine cinématographique allemand.
Énoncé du projet:
Trilogie The Proletarian Dream
The three-volume book project presents more than a hundred years of cultural texts and practices produced in the name of the proletariat and identified with the (male) worker as the personification of class struggle or, alternatively, the idea of the people or community. Neither a history of the German working class nor of socialism/communism, the individual case studies are concerned above all with the various (i.e., utopian, anticipatory, and compensatory) functions of the figure of the worker in giving rise to new images and stories of the people, whether in conjunction with Marxist conceptions of the working class as revolutionary class or National Socialist ideas about race and folk community. These connections are examined through a combination of thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and formal analysis; interdisciplinarity and multimediality are essential to the choice of examples and approach to the material. The Proletarian Dream (2017) reconstructs the making of the proletarian dream, its debts to Marxism, Social Democracy, and bourgeois culture, from the pre-Wilhelmine years to the end of the Weimar Republic. The Nazi Worker (2023) traces the shift from class to race as the new site of collective identifications through the discourse of Arbeitertum, a shift made possible through the convergence of nationalist, socialist, and populist perspectives. The third volume (currently in the research phase) examines the competing images and stories organized through the figure of the worker in East and West Germany, including through their very different responses to the legacies of National Socialism and the specter of a postindustrial society. As indicated by the subtitle, Socialism, Culture, and Emotion, these connections are explored through the focus on the politics of emotion, the culture of populism, and then-contemporary debates on the end of class and the future of work.
