The Industrial Working Class

Abstract This chapter analyses industrial workers as an occupational category, i.e. in their patterns of work on the shop floor, in their social environment, i.e. in terms of wages, living costs and housing, and in the context of the social and cultural associations that structured their leisure time pursuits. The materials presented in this chapter demonstrate that ‘industrial workers’ never comprised a fully unified social class with identical needs or desires. Some workers were beginning to aspire to the middle class. Others held on to Christian values and associations. Rivalries existed between coworkers over skills and status. Working-class women and men lived very different lives. And rural workers had little in common with those in the tenements of the metropolises. On top of these long-standing differences, the coming of new forms of mass culture also challenged workers’ loyalties to any singular identity. In all its early manifestations mass culture began to tap into commonalities within German society across class divides; it also began to offer a language of personal consumption and pleasure that reached across national borders.