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Bawdy Bodies or Moral Agency? The Struggle for Identity in Working-Class Autobiographies of Imperial Germany
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 28, Number 4, Fall 2005
- pp. 534-557
- 10.1353/bio.2006.0013
- Article
- Additional Information
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Master narratives in Imperial Germany typically equated "the laborer" with immoral bodies. Proletarian autobiographers insisted that wretched existential conditions caused working-class bawdiness, and devised counterstories to the ideological theft of moral agency. Class-conscious male authors outlined a proletarian morality, while female authors in general claimed either a private or bourgeois respectability for themselves.