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The Workingmen's Choral Movement in Germany before the First World War

The 'unpolitical' workingmen's associations and societies are, as one scholar realized as long ago as the 1950s, of considerable importance to the social history of the labour movement although they have been seriously neglected up to now.' Nor, on closer examination, do they prove to have been quite as unpolitical as they might at first seem. By offering workers independent organizations of their own, clearly distinct from those of the bourgeoisie, and which not only determined the entire context of workers' lives but could also provide a ready-made communications network, if required, for concrete political action, they were politically highly relevant. One of these 'unpolitical' yet political workingmen's associations was the 'German Workers' Choral Federation' (DASB Deutscher Arbeiter-Sdngerbund) which came into being in 1908 as the successor to the 'Association of German Workingmen's Choral Societies' (Liedergemeinschaft der Arbeiter-Sangervereinigungen Deutschlands) of 1892 and which, with a total membership in 1914 of almost exactly 200,000, was the largest and arguably the most important workers' cultural organization in Germany before the first world war. The workingmen's choral societies of which the Federation was made up are to be seen as part of a much broader attempt to create a separate proletarian culture or 'workers' culture'.2 This term is more neutral in its associations than that of 'social-democratic subculture', which was coined with special reference to the Wilhelminian period and the social-democratic movement and which 'is intended to signify both social democracy's detachment from the system and its inner links with it.'3 There are two additional reasons why this latter definition cannot be considered entirely satisfactory. First, the