H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight’s observation that ‘the nature of working-class fiction remains a topic for future essays and collections’ (p. 2) could not have been more accurate. The two volumes of Working-Class Literature(s) by Lennon and Nilsson, published in 2017 and 2020, constitute a landmark development in the study of working-class writing. Placing chapters on the history of and research into the working-class literature of various nations alongside one another, Lennon and Nilsson introduce a much-needed international perspective to this field. However, the comparative, side-by-side analysis of different national working-class literatures remains beyond the scope of these volumes, perhaps lagging behind as scholars adjust to operating across different languages as much as literary traditions.

Stepping into this new terrain, this chapter compares the presentation of working-class masculinity in English and West German miners’ novels, 1945–70, focusing on Georg Breuker’s Jörgen der Bergmann (1956), Len Doherty’s A Miner’s Sons (1955), Max von der Grün’s Irrlicht und Feuer (1963) and Stan Barstow’s Ask Me Tomorrow (1962).¹ It addresses the fact that there is a class dimension to masculinity which these texts begin to expose. I will begin with a post-war contextualisation of masculinity and coal mining in England and West Germany, before interrogating the concept of masculinity in mining novels by looking at the fictional representation of miners and male figures both at work and at home.

The Second World War had a considerable impact on men and on the concept of masculinity in both England and West Germany. In addition to the vast scale of destruction during the Blitz, the British men who returned to England from the war ‘faced uncertainty about their position in society’ (Crowley, 2020, p. 22) which had been exacerbated by the critical role women had played in the workplace during the war. Yet this uncertainty was perhaps belied by the triumph of victory: on VE day ‘Britain was Great and felt Great; it was one of the “Big Three” – militarily, economically and politically’ (Lee, p. 1). For this reason, historians have undoubtedly registered ‘a special feeling of [masculine] pride in Britain’s role in the defeat of the Axis’ (Bartlett, p. 2), and post-war novels including Eric Williams’s The Wooden Horse (1949) reflected this heroic sense of masculinity.

Men returning to Germany from the war faced a more complex set of circumstances. During the war, masculine identity had been strongly influenced by the National Socialist ideal of ‘fanatical militaristic masculinity’ (Beynon, p. 91), represented by images of the all-conquering male fighter and protector. After the war, this construct of masculinity was considerably discredited and was replaced instead by ‘[f]eelings of failure and humiliation’ (Vaizey, p. 113). The returning German soldier was ‘barely recognizable, scruffy, emaciated and hobbling. [He was a] stranger, an invalid’ (Jähner, p. 116). The Allied occupation between 1945 and 1949 further threatened the concept of German masculinity as Allied soldiers ‘appeared so strong, healthy and manly, in comparison to German men [who had been] physically and often psychologically weakened by war and captivity’ (Vaizey, p. 114). The extra-marital relationships between ‘occupation soldiers and German women [had] also enhanced the German male’s sense of defeat’ (p. 114). In the aftermath of the war, German male identity needed to be reshaped and reconstructed: according to Jeffords, masculinity became a site where ‘growing anxieties about consumerism, identity, Americanism […] and domesticity could be resolved’ (p. 163).

Coal, coal mining and miners were pivotal in the rebuilding of the economies of post-war West Germany and England, and this centrality was reflected in the different literary interpretations of masculinity in West German and English mining novels. Between 1945 and 1970, coal mining in both countries peaked but also began to experience the first waves of deindustrialisation. Coal had helped to power the German ‘economic miracle’ and the subsequent post-war recovery. The miner in the Ruhr was seen as ‘a key figure’ (eine Schlüsselfigur) aware of his ‘importance and responsibility’ (Bedeutung und Verantwortung) (Ruhr Almanach, p. 199). Coal was also seen as the key to Britain’s industrial recovery. In 1951 Geoffrey Lloyd, the Minister for Fuel and Power stated that ‘[i]n peace and war alike, King Coal is the paramount Lord of Industry’ (Hall, p. 271). The economic importance of coal fed into the post-war concepts of masculinity in West Germany and England. Miners in both West Germany and England were prominent, almost totemic figures and this is reflected in English and West German mining novels in the statements of fictional characters who worked hard to ‘serve the material needs of industrial capitalism’ (Jenkins, p. 2). The central character and miner Jürgen Fohrmann in Irrlicht und Feuer states that ‘miners were the economic spine of the nation’ (Bergleute waren das wirtschaftliche Rückgrat der Nation) (von der Grün, p. 43). Fohrmann’s observation is echoed in Doherty’s A Miner’s Sons by the union representative Barratt when he makes the case for the importance of the miner to the British economy after the Second World War: ‘they’ve forgot how hard we worked then to get ’em through their bloody crisis. We was big heroes then […]. It were in all the papers and on the wireless’ (p. 115).

From the end of the war until 1961, West German novelists faced obstacles in representing working-class experience in fiction, and this hinged on a number of ideological and socio-cultural factors, including the onset of the Cold War, the division of Germany into two separate countries, the suspicion surrounding communism and socialism, and America’s growing influence on West German culture. The socio-cultural climate began to change in the 1960s, and the formation of the Gruppe 61 by a group of writers, including Max von der Grün, was instrumental in bringing the representation of the working world to the fore. However, between 1945 and 1961 the production of working-class novels and novels dealing with mining communities was not completely prevented. Among the latter were Heinz Wrekk’s Jungens an der Ruhr (1947), Willi Reschke’s Schlagende Wetter (1949), Anni Geiger-Hof’s Jan Ellerbusch (1952) and Georg Breuker’s Jörgen der Bergmann (1956).

Typically, these novels were for and about young people and stressed the positive benefits of mining. The focus on younger men at this time was a deliberate ploy to recruit young men into the mining industry, where lowering the age profile of the workforce was on the agenda. The optimistic representation of young men in these texts functioned as a counter to the post-war crisis in masculine identity in West Germany. Heralding a new generation, these novels sought to re-invent the image of the young German male and to present him as a young, healthy anti-communist man, anxious to work hard and to create opportunities for himself and his family.

Breuker’s novel Jörgen der Bergmann (1956) reflects these ideas and also the different complexities around post-war German masculinity. The novel can be read as a metaphor for the re-emergence of West Germany post 1949. In particular, Jörgen’s masculinity functions as a site where issues around gender roles, the relationship between the industrialist and the worker, and the image and status of the new worker are explored. In contrast to the more oppositional depictions of working-class life and experience in English working-class novels of the 1950s, Breuker’s idealised and romantic vision of the miner and his work glosses these concerns. At the start of the novel, following a family disagreement, the Baumann family move from the country to the more urban environment of Bochum. This upheaval embeds the representation of masculinity in the contexts of family and work.

There was a concern in West Germany that the war had ‘drastically altered pre-war conceptions of gender roles’ and there was a drive to reinstate the ‘traditional conceptions of the family’ (Vaizey, p. 151) which included clearly defined roles for women in the home. Breuker’s novel reflects the post-war move back to the traditional family model in West Germany where the man would once again be the breadwinner, while the woman would again focus on the home. This ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, pp. 131–2) continued well into the 1960s. Bruno Gluchowski’s Der Durchbruch (1964) opens with a description of Klara Holtkamp, wife of the miner Wilm Holtkamp, and her morning routine. She is described as being hard-working and after making breakfast for her husband and seeing him off to work, she sets to on the housework, and dutifully cleans the bedrooms, kitchen, and mops the stairwell. This is also reflected in English miners’ novels of the 1950s and early 1960s. For example, in Doherty’s novel, miners are attributed with ‘features of an elite masculinity that separate men from women’ (Jenkins, p. 156) and the novel reinforces Marwick’s observation that ‘[t]he most rigid segregation of rôles [is] to be found in […] mining communities’ (Marwick, p. 68). Mrs Mellers is described in the novel as ‘a cleansing gale’ (Doherty, p. 19) and the priorities for the miner Jud Rodger’s wife are ‘my house, that kid upstairs and t’baby that’s coming’ (p. 59).

On discovering coal on the land his father has acquired, the titular character Jörgen assumes a number of roles and positions in the mine in the course of the novel before becoming the pit manager. Breuker does not avoid descriptions of the physicality of pit work, but his focus is on work as a restorative, spiritually and physically uplifting activity. There is a clear sense that the work undertaken by Jörgen is for the wider benefit of all, reinforcing the contemporary ideal of the male as a confident, contributing citizen. This sense of masculinity has nothing to do with the confrontation or class antagonism seen in some English working-class novels. Jörgen is clearly not a worker who represents ‘an iconic figure in the class struggle between the militant proletariat and the exploitative capitalists’ (Moitra, p. 337) as is the case, for example, with Robert Mellers in A Miner’s Sons. Jörgen’s masculinity is a productive, creative ‘soft’ entity and not a destructive force.

Through Jörgen’s capacity as pit manager, Breuker explores the image crisis of the post-war West German industrialist and his relationship with the West German worker. Many industrialists were complicit with Nazism and the industrialist was regarded in the post-war working world as ‘an unsavoury figure and an anti-hero’ (Wiesen, pp. 173–89). This image needed to be addressed so that the post-war West German industrialist could not only be seen as a bulwark against communism, Marxism and other dangerous Cold War influences but also as a role model for the West German worker and crucially as ‘the source of [West] Germany’s [post-war economic] renewal’ (p. 173). This re-imaging or rebranding of the West German industrialist also incorporated the West German worker as it was important to ‘protect the worker [and] to keep the worker happy’ (p. 81) to ensure that he would not fall prey to socialist or revolutionary tendencies.

In Breuker’s novel, Jörgen values the individual worker and is proud to share both the work and the profits: ‘we must work together and share the returns of our collective efforts’ (so müssen wir […] zusammen arbeiten und den Ertrag unserer gemeinsamen Arbeit teilen) (Breuker, p. 335). The relationship between Jörgen the pit manager and his workers is of ‘a more individual than collective nature’ (Mason, p. 55), however, and reflects the post-war managerial emphasis in West Germany ‘to pacify and befriend the worker’ (Wiesen, p. 191). The workers in Breuker’s novel are not exploited at all and do not seek ‘a confrontation [with Jörgen’s mining company] in order to pursue their own interests’ (Moitra, p. 336), as Jörgen is of the view that ‘one [worker] is no more or less important than another’ (der eine ist nicht mehr und nicht weniger als der andere) (Breuker, p. 336). There is no ‘us against them’ mentality in Breuker’s novel which characterises the fiction of Doherty, for example.

Taking Jörgen’s trajectory into account, Breuker’s novel can be read as a ‘folklore to capitalism’ (Wiesen, p. 134), in which a young man from a poor background achieves the heights of business glory by dint of sheer hard work and perseverance. He is the literary embodiment of the post-war conflation of industrialist and worker, a benevolent ‘factory father’ who cares ‘as much for his firm and his family of workers as he [does] for profit’ (p. 137). Jörgen’s masculinity functions as a bridge between the Nazi past and ‘the promise of future material glory’ (p. 139). It may also be the case that Jörgen represents a post-war conservatism in West Germany, where the ‘positive values of harmony and beauty [are] stressed [and] where the negative and seedy sides of social reality’ are avoided (Berghahn, p. 335). Jörgen is an unblemished individual and functions as a symbolic counter to any threat posed by communism and the Cold War.

The ideological identification of masculinity in Breuker’s novel is also replicated in Doherty’s A Miner’s Sons, which focuses on Robert Mellers and his relationship and work with the local Communist Party. Doherty’s communism reflects the greater openness to socio-political concerns and this is a significant difference between English and West German working-class novels in the 1950s. English working-class novels were able to include the languages of socialism and communism whereas West Germany in this period was characterised by a virulent anti-communism. Not only was the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) banned in West Germany in 1956, but the literary language of overt criticism was largely absent as West German writers of the 1950s ‘put on a good face and kept quiet’ (machten eine gute Miene zum unguten Spiel – und schwiegen) (Estermann et al., p. 12). Doherty’s novel was politically driven, being ‘deliberately written to support the [British] Communist Party’s cultural policy’ (von Rosenberg, p. 151), and in A Miner’s Sons, it is the task of the central character, Robert Mellers to reinvigorate the local Communist Party branch in Mainworth and to show that a Party man defines himself by word and deed. As the communist hero figure in the novel, the character of Robert Mellers is central to, but not the sole source for, the novel’s interpretation of masculinity.

Doherty, like Breuker, stresses the physicality and dangerous, demanding nature of pit work as a badge of pride, but whereas Breuker’s novel focuses on the development of the young boy Jörgen Baumann and his unalloyed relish for work, Doherty emphasises the miner’s fundamental alienation. This distance between the miner and his work is immediately underscored at the start of the novel with a focus on an unnamed collier who works in the pit and with ‘powerful two-fisted swings of the short-handled six pound hammer […] drives the prop home as tight as he can’. This scene is immediately followed by the aggression of Robert’s brother, Herbert, who ‘attacked the coal as though he hated it’ (Doherty, p. 6). Masculinity is not just determined by physical strength, skill and power but it is also predicated on an unswerving allegiance to the pit and pit work and is best exemplified in the novel by Robert’s father, Jim Mellers. Jim is an ageing miner approaching retirement, suffering from silicosis (lung disease). However, giving up working in the pit would rob Jim of his identity because ‘his whole attitude to life was that of a man who worked in the pit. Completely he was a miner. To become something else would mean no longer being himself at all’ (p. 15). It is part of Robert Mellers’s function in the novel as the lead communist figure to see beyond this worthy but limited sense of masculinity and to take others with him. Through his reading of Marx and Engels, Robert believes that miners are ‘locked into […] restrictive patterns of male behaviour required of industrial capitalism’ (Jenkins, p. 8) and that ‘lives [are] being frittered away to no real purpose – good minds being wasted’ (Doherty, p. 193). The novel charts Robert’s efforts to win back the trust of the local Party lads, help his father leave the pit, and to resolve his relationship with his girlfriend, Irene. Throughout, Robert’s masculinity is determined by his involvement with the Communist Party, and he exhibits a firm conviction that the communist way ‘is the only way’ (p. 40).

As a Communist Party novel, A Miner’s Sons is at its simplest the working out of an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ conflict between the pit workers and the pit management, having at its heart a dispute over wages. The novel focuses on confrontation, aggression and violence inside and outside the workplace, but also on the changing role of women. All of this inevitably determines the different masculinities in the novel. The latent sense of aggression is referenced by Jud Rodgers in an underground scene in which the miners are discussing German rearmament and the Potsdam Agreement. Jud’s comment that he would ‘be ready for shooting the silly sods’ (p. 83) can be interpreted as a casual, throwaway comment. However, it also shows a masculinity and sense of bravado ‘sanctioned [by the] violence [of the Second World War which] elides effortlessly’ into everyday behaviour (Jenkins, p. 17). The underlying violence in Jud’s comment finds a physical manifestation in Robert’s character. At the beginning of the novel, he returns to the mining village of Mainworth, having served a three-year prison sentence for the manslaughter of the miners’ lodge delegate Mathews who had sworn at Robert and his girlfriend, having also turned ‘gaffer’s man’ (Doherty, p. 48). Robert’s returning status in the mining community is immediately defined by the handiness of his fists, a sense of macho pride and an unshakeable identification with his fellow miners.

Aggression, and the concomitant idea of it validating masculine status, is not just represented through physical violence but also finds representation through the collectivity of industrial action and trade union involvement in Doherty’s novel. This, too, is a point of difference with Breuker’s novel, and although Breuker had a strong union background, there is no reference at all to any form of confrontation between union and management in Breuker’s novel. While for Doherty the wage is similarly an important element of the miner’s status and his breadwinner masculinity, he describes in detail the episode with the miners on docket day where there is ‘an excited thrill of […] an open fight’ (p. 143) as the miners consider an overtime ban after having had their wages docked. This scene shows that mining communities ‘demonstrate the effects of patriarchal dominance in the trade union movement’ (Campbell, p. 251), as their very show of strength and power is founded on a masculine ‘solidaristic work culture’ (Savage, p. 27) and a distrust of pit management. Union action is also seen on an individual basis and Doherty charts the union representative Barratt’s aforementioned act of defiance towards the pit management at the end of the novel.

In a powerful scene, Barratt’s masculinity is a complex of his detailed knowledge and understanding of union procedure, his tough, uncompromising stance toward management, and of his identity as a working miner. Doherty contrasts this depiction of a working masculinity with the ‘swelling paunch[es], […] fleshy featured face[s], […] nervous hands and perfect false teeth’ (p. 251) of members of the pit management. This contrast between Barratt and the pit management reflects the masculine fight for power, and the desire for ‘uncompromising control’ (Jenkins, p. 16) of the workplace. Barratt had been identified by the Coal Board as the ringleader in disputes in the Mainworth pit and so the Coal Board management team, led by Soskins, were anxious to recruit Barratt to their side. However, despite attractive offers of a car, an office and a salary of a thousand pounds, Barratt does not sell out and he rejects the management’s bribe out of hand. In so doing, he maintains his allegiance to his fellow miners, his status in the workplace and his resentful distrust of ‘[b]osses who had never envisaged – nor tried to – a miner’s daily life’ (Doherty, p. 261). Barratt’s identity, like that of Robert Mellers at the opening of the novel, continues to be bound up with that of his fellow miners and after the meeting and on returning to the hall where the other miners are waiting, Barratt is proudly received as being ‘of them and from them’ (p. 262).

The ‘precise nature [and timing] of [a] crisis in masculinity is ill-defined and elusive’ (Beynon, p. 75) but English and West German societies from the late 1950s were moving, according to Zygmunt Bauman’s thinking, from the ‘heavy, solid’ certainties of industrialisation to a new ‘consumer-friendly “liquid” modernity’ (Bauman, pp. 25, 63, 120). Bauman’s concept has a wider relevance and can also be applied to the changes in masculinity. Seen like this, two triggers can be identified in England and West Germany from the late 1950s onwards which threatened the ‘solid’ perceptions of working-class masculinity. These were firstly the threat of unemployment and changes to the stable pattern of male employment in the coal industry, and secondly that women were beginning to have ‘more scope to determine their own personal lifestyle […] [and to find and] create their own place in society’ (Kolinsky, p. 1).

The threat of unemployment is not a major concern in A Miner’s Sons nor in Barstow’s Ask Me Tomorrow, where Harry Cotton makes the observation that ‘I can get a job easy enough […]. Plenty more pits’ (Barstow, p. 188). However, the role of women inside and outside of the home is a significant theme. In Doherty’s novel, the growing threat to traditional gendered roles is often stressed, where (as Robert would have it) ‘men and women […] cling to the old idea of work and politics for the one and the kitchen for the other – their lives sharply divided’ (p. 175). The Party recognises this change and organises a meeting of local women who wished to break away from their feelings of entrapment – their ‘responsibility […] to make sure that their husband’s […] home is comfortable’ (Pitt, p. 76) – and to contribute to wider local concerns about poor street lighting and the lack of a clinic. Doherty does not fully develop this theme in the novel and, instead, continues to reflect the idea that any involvement of women outside the sphere of the home is somehow taboo and unacceptable.

English working-class novels of the 1960s did begin to represent women in a more nuanced way and Stan Barstow’s novel Ask Me Tomorrow (1962) is a case in point. The late 1950s saw the emergence of the term ‘Angry Young Men’ being applied to a number of writers in England including Stan Barstow. Although the term ‘should be treated with caution’ (Crowley, 2019, p. 57), it does perhaps evoke expectations of a masculinity predicated on being less respectful, more aggressive, unruly and chauvinist. Barstow’s novel focuses on the Cotton family and in particular on the contrasting lives and masculinities of Wilf Cotton, a wages clerk and his brother Harry, a miner, in the Yorkshire pit village of Calderford. Harry Cotton is the ‘stereotypical image of the ultra-masculine, working-class northerner’ (Kalliney, p. 94), who was ‘a man in a man’s world’ (Barstow, p. 22), someone ‘who did a man’s work’ (p. 162) and looked down upon women’s work. Harry’s affair with June Betley, wife of the union official Ronnie, defines both his masculinity and his perception of women. Harry’s sexual prowess and virility are for him a badge of honour and his relationship with June Betley is just another no-strings-attached sexual conquest. The affair also enables Harry, like Sillitoe’s character Arthur Seaton, to judge and categorise men based on their sexual prowess: ‘those that looked after their wives, and those that were slow’ (Sillitoe, p. 42). If ‘looking after’ is defined in narrow terms of masculine sexual gratification, then Harry is able to look after women, but ‘slow’ men – like Ronnie Betley – who is ‘shy with his wife’ (Barstow, p. 173) are perceived by Harry as being somehow less masculine and sexually inadequate.

Although Wilf Cotton affirms his masculinity through his physical relationship with his landlady Poppy Swallow, the novel does show the emergence of newer, more sensitive forms of working-class masculinities which run counter to the ‘Angry’ label. Although born into a mining family, Wilf Cotton has a grammar school education which offers him different prospects. The novel opens not with a description of physical pit work, but with Wilf listening to classical music before the radio performance of his play. Although the broadcast of the radio play signifies a form of success for Wilf, his overriding ambition is to be a novelist. Wilf’s education leads him to a different form and expression of working-class ambition and masculinity, as he moves away from the pit to the world of writing. Wilf’s masculinity is a hybrid of the ‘macho’ but also of the insecure desk-bound writer who ‘pushed a pen and messed about writing in his spare time’ (p. 162). Wilf’s crisis is that he does not easily and readily conform to the fixed and established categories of working-class masculinity which define his brother. His writing begins to move Wilf from the old, ‘solid’ masculinity to a more ‘liquid’ and uncertain sense of masculinity and one in which women have an important influence beyond the mere physical.

Wilf’s efforts at being published meet with rejection and it is only through his relationship with Marguerite Fisher and by following her advice that he becomes not only more self-confident and successful in his writing but also more conscious of women as individuals and as equal partners. Marguerite’s role in the novel explodes the myth, maintained in Doherty’s novel, that women’s sphere is domestic. Marguerite is public-school educated, speaks French and her move back to Calderford, after breaking up with her American boyfriend Floyd, is in part a journey back to confront her own past. This reinforces her independence. She is able to quickly find a job and rejects the advances of Stephen Hollis, her employer. In so doing, Marguerite understands that she has turned down the chance to be the stereotypical boss’s wife. Moreover, her relationship with Wilf is not just based on physical attraction but is also intellectual and emotional. This marks a huge step for Wilf and there is a suggestion that Wilf’s masculinity is taking not an ‘angry’ turn but a more progressive direction – both his education (and his prospects) tend towards a more deferential view of women, though the fact of Marguerite’s higher social status should be a consideration here also. Despite Wilf having constantly eschewed the idea of marriage and commitment, in meeting Marguerite’s father at the end of the novel, he seems to return, in a different way, to the matrimonial conventions of working-class life exemplified by his mother and father at the start of the novel.

Max von der Grün’s Irrlicht und Feuer (1963) was a key text of the Gruppe 61 and had the same path-breaking impact in West Germany in the early 1960s as the working-class novels of the late 1950s had in England. The novel is seen through the perspective of the miner Jürgen Fohrmann, and it deals with a number of issues including West Germany’s National Socialist past, consumerism, conflict with the union, the effects of pit closure, Jürgen’s search for fulfilment in other jobs outside mining and the fracturing of the traditional working-class family ethos. Von der Grün makes the self-determination and self-awareness of women one of the central themes of the novel and he questions the conventional, hitherto accepted roles of man and wife inside and outside of marriage.

At the start of the novel, Jürgen Fohrmann works in the pit and experiences the associated pressures, dangers, health impacts and concerns about money. His work is physical and his sense of masculinity, like his job, would appear to be ‘fixed and stable’ (Beynon, p. 3). However, this certainty begins to be undercut almost immediately. Fohrmann is concerned about being late for his shift and openly states that he hates his job, and his growing alienation from his work is exacerbated by his difficult and uneasy relationship with the union and its works council. All of this is underpinned by a deep sense of mistrust and cynicism on Fohrmann’s part. The union and its officials are criticised by Fohrmann on three occasions in the novel, beginning with the episode of the first union meeting at the pit.

Fohrmann is angry about the inability and indifference of the union and management to see miners as individuals. He articulates his justified concerns about the introduction of a new but dangerous cutting machine (which caused the decapitation of one of the foremen), and is frustrated that his physical power in the pit does not transfer easily to the more formal union meeting setting. Fohrmann’s reception at the end of the meeting is telling. Though praised by some, he is vilified by many others, and is unceremoniously thrown out for speaking, as he puts it, ‘my version of the truth which was not their version’ (meine Wahrheit, die nicht ihre Wahrheit war) (von der Grün, p. 55). Fohrmann’s attempts to challenge management reflect a significant change in the socio-political attitudes from those exhibited in Breuker’s novel, but Fohrmann’s anger is not shared by the other workers. The workers who eject Fohrmann from the meeting have been fed a diet of co-determination and the promise of increasing affluence, and are resistant to change. Fohrmann’s lone voice exposes him to the harsh, brutal realities of working life in affluent West Germany. He does not emerge triumphant from the meeting and his masculinity as a consequence becomes less secure. Fohrmann falls victim to the decline of the West German coal industry and is made redundant, and his already uncertain masculinity begins to fragment and becomes more ‘liquid’. The novel describes Fohrmann’s unsuccessful search for some sort of fulfilment and identity in his subsequent jobs in an iron works, a building site, and finally a plastics factory. It is in this last job where the disconnect between Fohrmann, his masculinity, and his work becomes clearer to him. The factory does not have a name and this anonymity reinforces Fohrmann’s sense of the meaninglessness of his task of boring holes into pieces of plastic: ‘I drill holes and I don’t know why I drill holes’ (ich bohre Löcher und weiβ nicht warum ich die Löcher bohre) (p. 150). Fohrmann’s personal life does not offer a counterbalance to his growing insecurities and uncertainties in the workplace.

In Fohrmann’s eight-year marriage to Ingeborg, there are difficulties and a slow and gradual fracturing of the ideal working-class patriarchal family. Jürgen would like a child but only because this would then force Ingeborg to stay at home to validate his chauvinist understanding of the woman as housewife. This hope proves illusory because Ingeborg does not want children and has her own ideas on leading her life. She is undoubtedly influenced by the growing affluence in West Germany and sees children as just another consumer item and as being ‘no longer modern’ (nicht mehr modern) (p. 38). Ingeborg’s independence and affront to Fohrmann’s patriarchal masculinity are further emphasised when she takes a job in a machine factory in Unna, which also results in further humiliation and a role reversal for Fohrmann as he now has to do the housework and recognises that ‘my housework is a part of her money’ (meine Hausarbeit ist ein Teil ihres Geldes) (p. 90). Fohrmann’s concept of masculinity is eroded still further in an argument with his wife over voting. Fohrmann is adamant that Ingeborg should vote the way he votes, but Ingeborg openly defies him and laughs at him, commenting ‘the times have long gone when you could tell me what to do. Once and for all’ (Die Zeiten sind vorbei, wo du mir etwas vorschreiben konntest. Ein für allemal) (p. 111). Ingeborg is ‘no longer content to fit into [her] assigned roles’ (Blackshaw, p. 8) and is keen to break with convention. Her independence and at times anger is a direct threat to Fohrmann as she steadily undermines his masculinity and sense of control.

As this chapter has shown, although mining played an important role in the post-war economies of both England and West Germany, masculinity developed along different lines during this period – a fact which is captured in the respective novels of both countries. The shame of defeat after 1945, together with the threats of communism and the Cold War, led to an uncertain and depoliticised masculinity in West German miners’ novels, whereas in England, miners’ novels reflected a more emboldened and politically aware masculinity. That being said, points of convergence emerge in the mining novels in the wider context of deindustrialisation, the threat of unemployment and the emergence of women as equal partners in the workplace. Perhaps most significantly, the novels of both countries demonstrate the ways in which working-class masculinity – as identified with strength, ability and power – was paradoxically undermined by the fact that, within a capitalist system, working men were ‘dispensable and dependent figures’ (Jenkins, p. 16). This inherent fissure within working-class masculinity was clearly only brought into greater crisis in the post-war era. What can also be seen, however, is the prospect of different masculinities, reflected most in Barstow’s Ask Me Tomorrow, where through education (and partnership with a more educated woman), Wilf breaks free from narrow patriarchalism into a more equal and respectful relationship. Evidently, by the 1950s and 1960s, what emerges in both countries is a masculinity that was no longer a singular, uniform or fixed entity but was ‘composed of many masculinities’ (Beynon, p. 1).