| On July 20, 1889, the delegates attending the International Socialist Congress in Paris passed a resolution calling for an international demonstration to be held on May 1, 1890, in support of an eight-hour working day. The Congress's appeal for demonstrations on May Day struck a responsive chord with workers in Europe and the United States, and in many places the May Day demonstration became an annual event. The demonstration was especially popular in Wilhelmine Germany, where socialist workers almost immediately defined the demonstration as a spring rite. In defining the May First demonstration as a spring rite, German workers did not strip it of its political content. Rather, its political motifs and its festival content were synthesized to create a modern festival tradition: the workers' May Festival. The dissertation, Mayday: The Struggle Over Working Class Culture in Modern Germany, analyzes the terms of this synthesis by focusing upon the festival's rituals and its pictorial art. Guided by the methodological insights of E. P. Thompson and Erwin Panofsky, the dissertation argues that the festival played an important role in the struggle German workers waged at the close of the nineteenth century to win a better place for themselves and for their children in modern industrial society. |
