Nowadays the proletariat is connected to an image of a white, male industrial working class, but up to the revolution in 1848, it was understood as a »motley heap« (Karl Marx). The »invention of the proletariat« in the period leading up to the revolution is an active and creative process, and not merely a matter of reception. Dr. Patrick Eiden-Offe traces this process in a city tour, trekking along the tracks of the paupers, workers and »rabble« of the March Revolution.
Dr. Patrick Eiden-Offe is a literature and German studies scholar, his specialties include the entanglements between literature, economics and politics, and the Romantic era. His current project is an intellectual biography of the Hungarian literary theorist, political intellectual and revolutionary Georg Lukács, supported by the Berlin Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung.