Contemporary culture and literature have experienced a somewhat surprising renaissance of the figure of the working class, now often forcefully imagined as diverse. Historically, the working-class has always been a contested political and cultural figure, often marked by tensions between political attempts at homogenization and actual heterogeneity. The latter has increasingly become a focus in disciplines like global history, sociology, and literary studies. Against this background, the talk will look back to an earlier chapter in the long history of literary constructions of the working class: the West German left-wing literary group Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt, which was founded in 1970 in order to rejuvenate a political kind of working-class writing. If the Werkkreis attempted to organize workers to write, to build class consciousness through literature, and to create a literary counter-public, it did so under the specific conditions of the 1970s: Among them were an increasing disintegration of working-class milieus and a change in workers’ lifestyles, on the hand, and the growing significance of individual authenticity and identity politics, on the other. In this conjuncture marked by a broader cultural importance of diversity, the Werkkreis published a book series with the established Fischer publishing house that ran for almost two decades, indexing different groups within the working class by editing individual books about them. The talk will focus on selected anthologies from this book series in order to discuss the anthology as medium of depicting, constructing, and regulating working-class diversity.