Inscribing Class Struggle in Space

What is it about?

This article foregrounds the spatial dimensions of culture and lifeworld and argues that worker’s lived spaces helped constitute and shape unemployed protest in ways historians of the Weimar Republic have not considered. Using insights from the ‘spatial turn’ in history, anthropology, phenomenology, historical geography, and Marxism, it complements the analysis of the temporal aspects of unemployed contention that the author highlighted in other work with a focus here on the spatial aspects. In merging the spatial and temporal and linking unemployed protest to working-class lifeworld and culture, this article shows how the mode of producing, appropriating, and re-appropriating specific spaces in the greater Ruhr industrial region was integral to unemployed protest there during the late Weimar Republic (1929-1932).

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Why is it important?

Spaces of protest figure prominently in recent studies of unemployed contention but usually as fixed physical locations or static backdrops for processes of active contention. At a more macro-level, scholarly focus has been on the spread, organization, or dispersion of protest over wide geographic areas. With one exception, classic and recent studies of working-class politics and neighbourhood spaces have not focused on unemployed protest. This article breaks new ground by exploring the spatial dynamics that informed and provided meaning to the contentious collective actions of unemployed workers in the Ruhr. Their collective acts were a critique and rejection of their everyday life and threw order and control into open contention in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

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