Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism

Crowds and Democracy

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors

ADVISORY BOARD

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself, where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged, and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry.

Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera

Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W Adorno

Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto

John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions

Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity

Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty

Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory

Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips

György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler

Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism

Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention

Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond

Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory

Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics

Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen

Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art

Crowds and Democracy

THE IDEA AND IMAGE OF THE MASSES FROM REVOLUTION TO FASCISM

Stefan Jonsson

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53579-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jonsson, Stefan, 1961-

Crowds and democracy : the idea and image of the masses from revolution to fascism / Stefan Jonsson.

pages cm.—(Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16478-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)—

ISBN 978-0-231-53579-3 (e-book)

1. Popular culture—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Popular culture—Austria—History—20th century. 3. Politics and culture—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Politics and culture—Austria—History—20th century. 5. Collective behavior—Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 6. Collective behavior—Political aspects—Austria—History—20th century. 7. Democracy—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 8. Democracy—Social aspects—Austria—History—20th century. 9. Germany—Intellectual life—20th century. 10. Austria—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

DD238.J66 2013

306.20943–09041—dc23

2013000641

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Jacket designed by Thomas Ng

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

They were everywhere, and belonged nowhere.

—KRACAUER

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

1.  Introducing the Masses: Vienna, 15 July 1927

(ELIAS CANETTI—ALFRED VIERKANDT—HANNAH ARENDT—KARL KRAUS—HEIMITO VON DODERER)

1. Shooting Psychosis

2. Not a Word About the Bastille

3. Explaining the Crowd

4. Representing Social Passions

5. A Work of Madness

6. Invincibles

7. Mirror for Princes

8. Workers on the Run

9. Lashing

2.  Authority Versus Anarchy: Allegories of the Mass in Sociology and Literature

(GEORG SIMMEL—WERNER SOMBART—FRITZ LANG—LEOPOLD VON WIESE—WILHELM VLEUGELS—GERHARD COLM—MAX WEBER—THEODOR GEIGER—AUGUST SANDER—HERMANN BROCH—ERNST TOLLER—RAINER MARIA RILKE)

10. The Missing Chapter

11. Georg Simmel’s Masses

12. In Metropolis

13. The Architecture of Society

14. Steak Tartare

15. Delta Formations

16. Alarm Bells of History

17. Sleepwalkers

18. I Am Mass

19. Rilke in the Revolution

3.  The Revolving Nature of the Social: Primal Hordes and Crowds Without Qualities

(SIGMUND FREUD—HANS KELSEN—THEODOR ADORNO—WILHELM REICH—SIEGFRIED KRACAUER—BERTOLT BRECHT—ALFRED DÖBLIN—GEORG GROSZ—ROBERT MUSIL)

20. Sigmund Freud Between Individual and Society

21. Masses Inside

22. In Love with Many

23. Primal Hordes

24. Masses and Myths

25. The Destruction of the Person

26. The Flâneur—Medium of Modernity

27. Ornaments of the People

28. Beyond the Bourgeoisie

29. Shapeless Lives

30. Organizing the Passions

4.  Collective Vision: A Matrix for New Art and Politics

(LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY—MARIANNE BRANDT—WALTER BENJAMIN—ERNST JÜNGER—EDMUND SCHULTZ—WILLI MÜNZENBERG—DER ARBEITER-FOTOGRAF— ERWIN PISCATOR—WALTER GROPIUS)

31. Mass Psychosis and Photoplastics

32. Johanna in the Revolution

33. A Socialist Eye

34. The Secret Code of the Nineteenth Century

35. Speaking Commodities

36. Deus ex Machina

37. Democracy’s Veil

38. The Face of the Masses

39. Learning to Hold a Camera

40. The Gaze of the Masses

41. Total Theater

5.  Coda: Remnants of Weimar

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1.    Mounted police fighting violent demonstrators with cobblestones and sticks, Vienna, 15 July 1927

1.2.    The burning Palace of Justice, Vienna, 15 July 1927

1.3.    Victims of the Day of Horror, postcard commemorating about half the victims of police violence on 15 July 1927 in Vienna

1.4.    Karl Kraus, poster calling for the resignation of the chief of police Johann Schober. Vienna 1927

1.5.    Rudolf Ledl, Remember the 15th of July! And Vote for the List of the Christian Socialist Party and the Homeland Defense! Austrian election poster, 1930

1.6.    Panic-stricken demonstrators and onlookers fleeing from police gunfire, Vienna, 15 July 1927

1.7.    Days of Storm in Vienna, page from Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, July 1927

1.8.    Mounted Police While Evacuating a Street, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, July 1927, detail

1.9.    Police Officers on Horseback Break the Demonstrators Apart picture from Julius Braunthal, Die Wiener Julitage 1927: Ein Gedenkbuch, 1927

1.10.  Protest Against the Shameful Verdict, demonstrating workers on the morning of 15 July 1927

2.1.    Obedient masses: shift workers in Metropolis meet at the factory gate. Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927

2.2.    Rioting masses: workers of Metropolis are roused to strike and destroy. Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927

2.3.    August Sander, Unemployed, 1928

2.4.    August Sander, Untitled (Members of the Piscator Theater), 1929

2.5.    August Sander, Untitled (National Socialists at Cologne Central Train Station), 1937

3.1.    Georg Grosz, Ecce Homo, 1922, plate 68

4.1.    László Moholy-Nagy, Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) / In the Name of the Law, 1927. Photoplastic montage

4.2.    Marianne Brandt, Es wird marschiert (On the March), 1928. Photomontage

4.3.    László Moholy-Nagy, Hoch die Einhetsfront (Up with the United Front), 1925–1930

4.4.    The Voluntary Entry Into Uniform, page from Edmund Schultz and Ernst Jünger, Die veränderte Welt: Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit, 1933

4.5.    Mourning masses and celebrating masses, pages from Edmund Schultz and Ernst Jünger, Die veränderte Welt: Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit, 1933

4.6.    Unidentified photographer, girl with spinning wheel, cover of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, May 1929

4.7.    Unidentified photographer, A Refreshing Shower, cover of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, June 1931

4.8.    Unidentified photographer, proletarian darkroom, clipping from Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, September 1930

4.9.    Unidentified photographer, Pursued—Beaten—Detained, page from Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, August 1928

4.10.  Conquering the Machines of Observation, first page of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, June 1928

4.11.  The Worker’s Eye, first page of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, July 1930

4.12.  Erwin Piscator and his theater building at Nollendorf-Platz, Berlin, circa 1926

4.13.  The Piscator Stage, model with ramps and platforms, circa 1925

4.14.  László Moholy-Nagy, stage design for Der Kaufmann von Berlin(The merchant of Berlin), directed by Erwin Piscator, 1929

4.15.  László Moholy-Nagy, cover for Erwin Piscator’s Das politische Theater (The Political Theater), 1929

4.16.  Erwin Piscator, poster for Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything), 1925

4.17.  Walter Gropius, drawing for Erwin Piscator’s Total Theater

4.18.  Walter Gropius, drawing for Erwin Piscator’s Total Theater, 1927

4.19.  Floor plan for Erwin Piscator’s Total Theater, 1927

4.20.  Walter Gropius, floor plan for Erwin Piscator’s Total Theater, 1927

PREFACE

No new book is needed to declare that German and Austrian culture between the wars was shaped by the masses In all surveys and histories of the eventful years from the revolutionary uprisings in November 1918 to the Nazi takeover in 1933 there is a chapter or section devoted to them. They are usually discussed as revolutionary crowds or as fascist mobs or as urban multitudes engaged by the new phenomenon of mass culture or as the rising anonymous middle classes or, again, as an object of anxiety pervading the zeitgeist. The prominence of the idea and image of the masses in this period has been thoroughly discussed. It has been illustrated and judged. It has been viewed as a self-evident feature of the historical landscape. We have grown accustomed to look upon the interwar period as an era of crowds.

Strangely, however, few authors have connected the theme of the masses to Weimar history in any deeper sense. They loosely hint at the German revolution, fascist propaganda, swarming Berlin streets, Bauhaus programs for cheap housing for the working classes, or other phenomena that serve well to illustrate the period’s obsessive talk about the masses but not to clarify it. Even more strangely, no one has sought to organize these images and ideas of the masses by relating them to one another and to subsequently subject them to theoretical analysis in an attempt to find out what, if anything, they have in common—except that they all exemplify some typical German condition of modernity.

In this book I construe the masses as a global issue affecting all areas of interwar German and Austrian society. I argue that the compulsive treatment of this theme can guide us toward a defining historical predicament of both states. The problem was felt in all spheres of life and concerned the political and cultural organization of state, nation, and society in its most basic sense. The problem is a well-known one: how to effect a transition to democracy.

Of course, just as little as we need a new book to tell us that people in interwar Germany and Austria debated the masses, we need one to show that these societies had trouble instituting democracy and that the transition failed. What may be needed, though, is a study that connects these observations to each other. This is what I seek to accomplish in this book, but I also try to do more than that. I try to constitute the connection between the masses and the transition to democracy as an explanatory framework that allows us to see both the specificity of this historical period and the general problematic that it has passed on to posterity. According to the explanation I offer, the specificity of interwar Germany and Austria is the way in which the masses were turned into a general signifier for most, if not all, cultural endeavors. The mass was the dark sun, unapproachable for all the heat it emitted, around which scholarly studies, aesthetic experiments, political activities, and social programs moved in the vibrant and violent cultures of interwar Germany and Austria. Or so believed those who explored the distant planet of the masses. In reality, however, that sun was nothing but an optical illusion generated by the energy from conflicts erupting in the social terrain beneath their own feet. These conflicts had to do with the agonizing transition toward democracy. By analyzing German and Austrian culture and society in the interwar years, this book will also offer perspectives on the more general problem—which has become ever more pressing while I have been writing this book—of carving out a politics of liberty, equality, and solidarity between the poles of revolutionary utopianism and fascist repression. For the masses have today again become a cause of concern, as so-called austerity programs are imposed in one nation after another and, predictably, people are taking to the streets to protest being pushed into poverty. Portrayed as disorderly and misinfomed, these crowds are, according to the elites, a threat to such political stability as is needed for the markets to calm down and the economy to recover. Voter influence or democracy as such is described by leading European politicians as deceitful and unpredictable, undermining the very preconditions for investments and growth. This, then, is the moment when interwar Germany and Austria merits our attention. In his history of German film, Siegfried Kracauer described these societies as being caught in a double bind between tyranny and anarchy. Firmly convinced that these two options were the only ones, dominant circles of Germany and Austria fatefully embraced authoritarianism and accepted dictatorship, in the fear that society would otherwise fall apart.

Like my previous book A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (2008), which charted the long trajectory in the European conception of the masses from 1789 to 1989, this book about the masses in the interwar period arranges readings of seemingly disparate texts and events into one interdisciplinary and multidimensional montage. This strategy is based on a conviction that informs both books. Aesthetics teaches a lesson about politics and society that politicians and political experts are predestined to deny and that often remains hidden for those who are living in that society. What lesson? That the political arena always will fail to represent society. That the borders that determine who may be seen and heard in public life are contested. Democracy, the representation of the people by the people, is an unfinished process, marked by a constant struggle to sort out the proper representatives of the people. This is the political lesson of the aesthetic works that have concerned me in this history of the masses. They map and make visible those very borders that separate citizens from masses, human being from beast, and they show that these borders are at best contingent, at worst genocidal. But the power of aesthetics lies not here only but also in its ability to imagine a society where the borders are redrawn, thus remaking the system of representation so as to make room for people previously dislodged from political space. Surely, this capacity also explains the intensity of aesthetic experimentation in German and Austrian culture during the interwar period, as well as the strong attraction it exerts on later generations.

I began writing this book during a two-year fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at that time concentrating on the mass uprisings in Vienna in 1927 and Georg Simmel’s sociology. Some ten years later, these sketches have attained their proper shape and placement, framed by a historical and political context that I did not fully grasp as I embarked on what was then simply a critical history of mass psychology and crowd theory. In that early stage of my research, I saw these branches of knowledge as distinguishable and interesting theoretical formations that could contribute to an understanding of the civil wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocidal military campaigns that marked the latter part of the 1990s. Today, by contrast, I see mass psychology as well as general crowd theory as vague and intriguing phenomena that offer no clarification of social movements or political issues but rather are problems in their own right—problems, moreover, that have less to do with the causes of extremist collective movements or the mobilization of religious and ethnic communities than with the precarious institution of democracy itself.

Crowds and Democracy is thus the outcome of a project that has grown out of bounds in unpredictable ways, to the effect that a number of essays and even an entire book have branched off as separate undertakings—most importantly, A Brief History of the Masses, which is tightly coupled to the present book—but also an ongoing project on contemporary ideas of political universality and collective action in which I hope to bring the discussion on crowds and democracy closer to the present moment.¹

Needless to say, over a decade of more or less intense research and writing has left me indebted to a number of institutions and individuals. I especially want to recognize the Getty Research Institute and its resourceful staff and excellent librarians, along with the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, which, during my year-long stay as spouse of one of its fellows, provided me with all the books and documents I needed and much more, in addition to the department of Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan, where I taught as visiting professor and learned from brilliant colleagues, and, finally, Linköping University, my current academic home, where I have been able to bring this project to a close, aided by the university’s skilled librarians and inspired by the outstanding research collective at the Institute for Research in Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO). I am also indebted to colleagues affiliated with the Crowds Project at the Humanities Lab of Stanford University and to former colleagues at the Department of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. I have benefitted from the services of the National Library of Austria and the archives of the Labour History Society, both in Vienna, the library of the Humboldt University (special thanks, there, to Ute Mousa) and the archives of Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and the National Library of Sweden and the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm. Financial support in the final phase has come from the research program Time, Memory, Representation, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. A special grant from this foundation also helped me, at the very last stage, to revise the manuscript and obtain the necessary illustrations. I acknowledge the support of these institutions with gratitude. I am also thankful to the expert staff of Columbia University Press, above all Wendy Lochner, Michael Haskell, and Christine Dunbar.

Thanks are also due to a number of individuals whose comments, advice, suggestions, and invitations have left their marks on this book: Kerstin Barndt, Petra Bauer, Jonathan Beller, Catherine Benamou, Erik Berggren, Gabriele Brandstetter, Kathleen Canning, T. J. Clark, Heinrich Dilly, P.-O. Enquist, Geoff Eley, Martha Feldman, Lydia Goehr, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Dan Karlholm, Wolf Lepenies, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Maria Lind, Chantal Mouffe, Richard Meyer, Toril Moi, Johannes von Moltke, Inka Mülder-Bach, Anders Neergaard, Ernst Osterkamp, Michael Roth, Charles Salas, Allan Sekula, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anders Stephanson, Neferti Tadiar, Häkan Thörn, Sophie Tottie, Ann Wegner, Peter Weingart, David Wellbery, and Jasmina Založnik. I am grateful to Sara Danius for intellectual inspiration in the early stages of this work. Aris Fioretos not only gave precise feedback on the final draft but has supported and improved my work throughout. I also thank Peo Hansen for years of inspiring conversations and collaborative work. For her accurate feedback and unfailing commitment, and for her faith in historical and political praxis, I thank Patricia Lorenzoni, minha querida.

Finally, a note on terminology is needed. Etymology is indispensible for understanding the terms that are central to this book: crowd, mass, and masses, usually put in the determinative: the crowd, the mass, the masses It is instructive, for instance, to know that mass derives from Greek maza, which means dough, and that crowd harks back to the old Germanic verb kroten, which means to press, to push However, etymological and semantic analysis is poor guidance if we wish to know what was meant by these words in interwar Europe. Despite the period’s numerous efforts to define them, they never fit into any terminological grids. I am thus in the awkward position of writing a history about a notion and phenomenon—the masses—that elude standard scholarly exactitude. Still, since I am interested in how these terms were used by German and Austrian intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, I must use them myself. But I make no attempt to provide my own definitions of crowd, mass, and masses For reasons that will become clear, I think such definitions are impossible, and this book is in one sense an explanation of the very impossibility to give coherent meaning to the masses The reader is therefore asked to accept or, at best, learn from the constitutive lack of conceptual consistency that characterizes my own and everyone else’s use of these words.

An additional problem is that the English word mass, in singular, sounds far more awkward and technical than does its German original, "die Masse Sometimes I have therefore rendered this expression as the crowd or the masses rather than the mass." As will be seen, however, die Masse (the mass) was centrally important as an organizing signifier in German and Austrian public discourse. There is no other way to convey that centrality except by finding an English equivalent and giving it equal weight in my own text, and that equivalent must be the mass. However, in expository sections, where I am focused not on any specific texts but on generalities, I variously use mass, masses, and crowd without making any sharp distinctions but always mindful of intellectual clarity. In all translations from the German, and wherever conceptual rigor is called for, my terminology is consistent. For instance, in the German sources "Masse (mass, crowd) is sometimes used in distinction to Menge (crowd, multitude), and in such cases mass is the obvious English choice whereas Menge is then translated as crowd or multitude"

1

Introducing the Masses

VIENNA, 15 JULY I927

1. SHOOTING PSYCHOSIS

There was no question of issuing any warning before the firing started. The panic, which now arose, is beyond description.

At eight o’clock in the morning of the fifteenth of July, 1927, Vienna’s electricity workers switched off the gas and electricity supply to the city.¹ Public transportation, communication, and production came to a complete halt. It was a signal: People left their work places and living quarters and began marching toward the parliament. Joining them halfway was Elias Canetti, later to become one of Austria’s most distinguished writers and a Nobel laureate: During that brightly illuminated, dreadful day, he wrote, I gained the true picture of what, as a crowd, fills our century²

The march was sparked by a court judgment concerning a killing that had occurred on January 30 of the same year in Schattendorf, a village in Austria’s Burgenland near the Hungarian border.³ A group of social democrats had marched through town. Throughout the 1920s, such manifestations took place almost every Sunday in nearly every town and village of Austria, a country split between the socialist movement and that of radical conservatives supporting the governing coalition and often organized in the local defense corps, the Heimwehr. As the Schattendorf social democrats passed the tavern of Josef Tscharmann, the watering hole for a gang of right-wing vigilantes called the Frontkämpfer, the Front Fighters, rifles were fired from a window. Matthias Csmarits, a worker and war veteran, and Josef Grossing, an eight-year old boy, were shot in the back and killed.

On the fourteenth of July, the jury of the district court in Vienna pronounced its verdict. The accused were the two sons of the innkeeper, Josef and Hieronymus Tscharmann, and their brother-in-law, Johann Pinter, all members of the Frontkämpfer. It was incontestable that they had fired at the demonstrators. They had confessed this themselves. It was incontestable that two people had died. The verdict of the jury was not guilty⁴

A Clear Verdict declared the Reichspost, the organ of the governing party, the following morning. The murderers of the workers acquitted ran the first-page headline of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the major social-democratic newspaper, which published a fuming editorial by Friedrich Austerlitz. The bourgeois world is constantly warning of a civil war; but is not this blatant, this provocative acquittal of people who have killed workers, for the reason that they were workers, already by itself a civil war?⁵

Austerlitz expressed the sentiments of the working classes in Vienna, and this day they acted in accord with their passions. Their demonstration was not preceded by planning or announcements. It caught the leaders of all political parties off guard.⁶

The immediate goal of the workers was to voice their dissent in front of the parliament. Before reaching their destination, they were struck down by mounted police. Many began to arm themselves with rocks and sticks (see figure 1.1). The police responded by making arrests and brought the captured to their quarters on Lichtenfelsgasse. Demonstrators next attacked this station to force the release of the detained, overpowering the police and setting the building on fire. Meanwhile, the police had lined up outside the nearby Palace of Justice, on the assumption that this symbolic seat of the law was the demonstrators’ primary goal but not realizing that, by now, the police force itself had become the target. Attacking the police chain, the demonstrators besieged the Palace of Justice and forced their way into the building, some carrying containers with gasoline.

At 12:28, the fire department received the first emergency call from the flaming Palace of Justice (see figure 1.2). Fire engines were promptly dispatched, but the crowd—its number now exceeding 200,000—refused to let the vehicles pass. The chief of state, Ignaz Seipel, and the chief of police, Johann Schober, decided to arm 600 officers with rifles and gave them order to march toward the turmoil. Around 2:30, just as the demonstrators had yielded way to the fire engines, the police started shooting. By this time, Otto Bauer, the leading theorist of Austro-marxism and chairman of the Social Democratic Party, had reached the site:

FIGURE 1.1 Mounted police fighting violent demonstrators with cobblestones and sticks, Vienna, 15 July 1927. Unidentified photographer. Source: Austrian National Library. ÖNB/Vienna. 449671-B.

FIGURE 1.2 The burning Palace of Justice, Vienna, 15 July 1927. Unidentified photographer. Source: Austrian National Library. ÖNB/Vienna. 229.324-B.

I and some of my friends saw the following. A lineup of security officers progressed from the direction of the opera toward the parliament, a true lineup, one man beside the other separated by one to two and a half steps. At this time Ringstrasse was empty and only at the other side of Ringstrasse a couple of hundred people were standing, not demonstrators but curious onlookers who had been watching the burning Palace of Justice. Among them were women, girls, and children. Then one unit approaches, I saw them move forward, rifles in hand, persons who for the most part had not learned to shoot, even when firing they leaned the butt against their belly and fired left and right, and if they saw any people—there was a small group in front of the building of the School Council and a larger one in the direction of the Parliament—then they fired at them. The people were seized by frantic fear; for the most part, they had not even seen the unit. We saw people running away in blind fear, while the guards were shooting at them from behind.⁷

Gerhard Botz, the principal historian of the July events in Vienna, speaks of a shooting psychosis.⁸ The police shot demonstrators, spectators, and their own. They fired at men and women, at children and the elderly, at fire engines and ambulances. When calm was restored, eighty-five civilians and four police officers had been killed, and more than one thousand people were injured (see figure 1.3). One of the responsible officials, vice chancellor Karl Hartleb, admitted that the scene sometimes looked like a rabbit hunt.⁹ It was soon revealed that the ammunition distributed to the officers were so-called dumdum bullets, with uncased noses designed to expand upon contact with the target. The doctors attending to the wounded in Vienna’s hospitals related horrendous sights of bodies with wounds that appeared to have been inflicted from a distance of less than one meter.¹⁰

FIGURE 1.3 Victims of the Day of Horror Postcard commemorating about half the victims of police violence on 15 July 1927 in Vienna. Source: Collection of Stefan Jonsson. Copyright 1927: Fotograf Wilhelm Müller, Vienna. Photo: David Torell.

It was a price worth paying for the restoration of order, the bourgeois establishment of Austria believed. The Automobile Club of Austria expressed their gratitude by donating 5,000 schillings to the police. The chief of police likewise received financial compensation from the Association of Bankers, the Central Association of Industry, and the Chamber of Commerce. The Grand Hotel in Vienna reassured potential guests that the unfortunate events—instigated by communists—would in no way affect the comfort offered to foreign visitors. Dozens of police officers were decorated with medals of honor, tokens with which the upper classes encouraged the force that had protected their idea of society.¹¹

Meanwhile, communists and left-wing social democrats believed that the July events were the sign of an imminent revolutionary situation. Soon, they thought, they would take advantage of the opening to realize their idea of society.

The fifteenth of July 1927 saw the breakdown of the democratic forms that had until then contained the political passions of Austria’s postimperial society. Created by the decree of the victors of World War I, the young republic was ruled by a Christian conservative government that had barely managed to stake a course through the postwar chaos. Thanks to the parliamentary cooperation of the social democrats, the government had resolved the crises caused by the destruction of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, establishing between the working classes and the bourgeoisie a precarious equilibrium that held off the threat of civil war and gave the democratic institutions room to maneuver. July 1927 changed all this. From now on, the upper classes would associate the workers’ idea of a good society with the raging masses or the Bolshevik revolution, and these masses would see, in the burghers’ idea of a good society, the flashing muzzle of a gun.

Yet what emerged from the ashes of this class struggle was a vision of society that triumphed over both socialists and conservatives: a fascist front, superior to the socialists in mobilizing the people and better than the conservatives in maintaining social order. For the only force to truly benefit from the July events was the Heimwehr, the local militias. In order to consolidate the regime against the socialist threat, Austrian authorities, private donors, and the fascist governments of Italy and Hungary increased their financial and political support of this paramilitary force.¹² The Heimwehr thus grew into a political force that could gradually realize its fascist ideal of an Austria purged of Reds and Jews. In sum, the fifteenth of July 1927 was a turning point in Austria’s history.¹³

2. NOT A WORD ABOUT THE BASTILLE

On Stadiongasse he jumped up on the heap of stones, which was there at the time, opened his coat, stretched out his arms widely, and shouted to charging security forces: Shoot here, if you dare to! And the unthinkable happened. The forces fired a volley at the defenseless man—covered in blood, he fell down on the stone heap.

Fifty-three years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones, Elias Canetti remarks in his memoirs. It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced. Since then, I have known quite precisely that I would not have to read a single word about the storming of the Bastille.¹⁴ Canetti was so influenced by his experience that he spent the larger part of his life investigating the behavior of the masses. His investigation was not concluded until 1960, when he presented the results of his research in Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), one of the most ambitious works of twentieth-century intellectual history, and maybe the most enigmatic.

If Canetti today is regarded as the very model of the solitary intellectual struggling to understand crowd behavior and collective delusions, we must not forget that his efforts were part of a collective undertaking. In political life as in social life, the masses has become a battle cry, wrote German theologian Paul Tillich in 1922.¹⁵ Virtually every thinker, writer, scholar, artist, filmmaker, and journalist of Weimar Germany and Austria’s first republic was preoccupied by or obsessed with the masses. All of them struggled with or against the masses. Some of them elaborated full-blown social theories and aesthetic programs, not to speak of political organizations and ideologies, on the basis of the social agent that they designated by that term. In all areas of interwar society, the mass was seen as the mother of all problems, if it was not seen as a promise of all solutions.

The masses? No one could avoid encountering them on streets and squares, writes Siegfried Kracauer in his history of the German film, recalling the situation after World War I. These masses were more than a weighty social factor; they were as tangible as any individual. A hope to some and a nightmare to others, they haunted the imagination.¹⁶ What was the nature of this agent? Why were mass and crowd deemed as fitting denominations for it? How come all branches of European art, culture, knowledge, and politics of this period worried so deeply about it? How come intellectuals and artists of no matter what background unanimously asserted that the masses, as novelist Alfred Döblin put it, were the most enormous fact of the era?¹⁷

The following pages will analyze, discuss, and explain the production and recycling of the category of the mass in interwar Europe. We will see that the mass functioned as a description of a certain social agent—an agent, however, whose true nature was highly disputed and whose location in the social terrain remained uncertain. But we will also discover that the mass was a political idea and an aesthetic fantasy, in some cases even an ontological category, without any firm denotation in reality.

The sheer ambiguity of the word goes some way toward explaining its frequency in the culture of the Weimar Republic and interwar Austria. In one magnum opus of Weimar sociology, Alfred Vierkandt lists all that was meant by the mass in the 1920s:

1. Mass = followers as opposed to leaders, 2. Mass = average people as opposed to those above the average, 3. Mass = lower strata (uneducated) as opposed to higher strata (educated), 5. [sic!] Mass = uprising or any temporary association as opposed to group, 6. Mass = association, class, social stratum, race, or the like, where often no distinction is made whether what is meant is a group (as a totality) or a series of similar individual beings forming something like a species, 7. Mass = temporary association of people in a state of strong excitement (as in ecstasy or panic), in which self-consciousness and higher spiritual faculties strongly regress (and without sign of any collective consciousness in the sense of a community).¹⁸

When someone spoke of the masses in the 1920s, the statement may have been an expression of common prejudice against the lower classes, but it may also have been an expression of social anxiety brought on by the war, the economic crisis, the appearance of women in public affairs, the rapid industrialization, or the bad times in general. Moreover, the statement may have carried a scholarly pretension of explaining the current state of affairs, but it may also have been used to voice social criticism, to confess the speaker’s utopian aspirations, to argue for urban renewal, to assert that history was headed on the wrong path and that the world had become a dangerous place, or to warn against the degeneration of the human species and the German race. Whether the word intended one thing or another depended entirely on the context and attitude of the speaker. The word could, in fact, mean one thing just as well as another, which is why—and Vierkandt stressed this point—so many speakers found it so useful and adequate for expressing whatever social views and opinions they held.

The first thing to realize about the mass as a term and about the masses as a social phenomenon in the interwar period, then, is that both were unclear and ambiguous. But the difficulty in asserting the meaning or nature of the mass should not be seen as a weakness on the part of those who spoke about the masses or as an error that could have been corrected by a more rigorous sociological and historical analysis. Instead of deploring or denying the contradictory references to the mass, the contradiction should be accepted, or even emphasized, as an indication and symptom of