Patrick Eiden-Offe

Patrick Eiden-Offe (Germany) is a writer and researcher, specialized in social history of literature and culture. He works in a center for literary and cultural studies in Berlin. Last year he published the book "Die Poesie der Klasse. Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindungdes Proletariats" (The Poesy of Class. Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat), which focuses on the development of the proletariat as an object of social critique, ideological discourse, and revolutionary theories of change during the time ofthe so-called Vormärz. During this time, the proletariat developed as a collective of impoverished craftsmen, urban rabble, rural vagabonds, broke aristocrats, and intellectuals who lived a free but precarious life. Patrick emphasizes the importance of literary discourse for the figuration of this proletariat, which was more a "motley crew" of "dangerous classes" than the uniform and organized class that it would later become with the development of the modern labor movement.