ABSTRACT
Did unemployment lead to political mobilisation or political apathy? The best-known contemporary accounts of the phenomenon in Weimar Germany tend to suggest the latter. For instance, in the film Hunger in Waldenburg (1929), the nearest we find to any form of protest by the unemployed miners who lived in the village of the title, is an individual and isolated outburst by one man (who had only recently moved there in the hope of finding work) against an exploiting landlord. This protest is undertaken after a long series of fateful events which have brought him down into the social abyss. After a short physical struggle with the landlord, the man is thrown down the stairs of the tenement and dies. The film is heavy with symbol and conveys not only the bleakness and poverty of unemployment but also the futility of protest. While the film gives glimpses of working-class solidarity, this is inward-looking and has absolutely no political overtones. Similarly, the celebrated field-study of the effects of unemployment on working-class family and community life carried out in the industrial village of Marienthal in Austria in 1932-3 also makes no mention of any collective protest by the villagers against their lot.1 This does not mean that there was none. It merely reflects middle-class perceptions of how unemployment impinged upon the ‘lower orders’. Both the film and the study were executed in a period of political and social disequilibrium when the public sphere was characterised by a charged political atmosphere in which violence came to play an increasingly important part. More recently, two historical studies of Communist efforts to mobilise the unemployed in this period have also reached negative conclusions on mobilisation.2 The German Communist Party (KPD) is convicted of merely succumbing to its own rhetoric, while the unemployed are said to have been unreceptive to Communist
appeals for action because of the subjective factors of social isolation, hunger, psychological and physical demoralisation, all of which led to political apathy. Instead, it is argued, a collective political answer to the problem of unemployment was replaced by individualist strategies of survival on a daily basis.
