Sabine Hake is Professor of Germanic Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she has taught since 2004. A cultural historian working on nineteenth and twentieth century Germany, she is the author of eight monographs, including German National Cinema (2008), Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008), and the first two volumes of The Proletarian Dream trilogy (2017 and 2023). She has coedited four anthologies and published numerous articles on German film, Weimar culture, and Nazi culture. From 2011 to 2021, she served as the editor of German Studies Review, the journal of the German Studies Association. Her interdisciplinary research has been supported by the National Gallery, the German Academic Exchange Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright, Rockefeller, Getty, and Mellon Foundations. Most recently, she received the 2022 Reinhold Schünzel Preis in recognition of her contribution to the German film heritage.
Project statement:
The Proletarian Dream Trilogy
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.
