The late years of the Weimar Republic were a time of political disillusionment and economic disintegration. Nowhere were the forces competing for the political allegiances of the working class more active than in Berlin. Bodek's study examines the interplay of socialist and communist politics with the world of the working class (and particularly its young people) in the forms of agitprop theater, workers' chorus, and the modernist theater of Brecht.

Using sources such as newspaper articles and reviews, the texts of agitprop plays, festival and concert programs, and police reports, Bodek provides a new angle on the cultural and political forces at work in the proletarian sphere during the period, and shows how the theater of Brecht draws on many of its aesthetic assumptions.

Bodek examines the very different aesthetics and political assumptions of Social Democratic workers choruses and Communist agitprop theater. Although the political cadres of both parties were concerned with the influence of economic, social, and class factors on the production of art and in turn on the population in general, they developed and pursued radically different programs in their attempts to use culture to further their political goals.

The unwillingness of these two Marxist movements to work together helped to open the door to the National Socialist seizure of power.

The book's attention to Communist agitprop troupes in Berlin is path-breaking. The young people of these troupes wrote and performed their own material, which was supposed to be of general topical interest and based on the Communist Party's (the KPD's) political line at the time. The troupes were important to the KPD because they served as a surrogate mass medium for communication of its message.

To understand these troupes, Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin investigates the realities of the lives of working-class youth of the period, describing and analyzing unemployment, housing, education, and leisure activities, and examining their relationship to the Weimar state as they saw it.