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

With the French Revolution and the advent of democracy, a new actor entered the political arena: the people. Almost a century later, with the consolidation of the organized labor movement, or the so-called fourth estate, this political force was successfully promoting universal suffrage, social justice, and the establishment of democratic sovereignty.¹ Not everyone welcomed this social and political transformation. Many feared that the treasured voice of the people foretold the wicked rule of the mob. As ordinary people slowly worked their way into the political arena, the elite claimed that the stage of history was invaded by threatening masses.² The scholarly discourse of crowd psychology was an expression of this development and a reaction against democracy. From the outset, it exhibited an antiliberal and antidemocratic tone. In his 1959 overview of theories of mass society, the American sociologist William Kornhauser called this an “aristocratic” theory as it expressed “an intellectual defense of elite values against the rise of mass participation”³ Along with this discourse came an array of terms and opinions that journalists, writers, and the educated classes appropriated and made part of their political worldview, especially their understanding of the lower classes.

Surveys of crowd psychology tend to dwell first on its French and Italian origins, usually establishing Gustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules (1895) as the doxa of the discourse, and often disregarding the more important research contributions of Scipio Sighele’s La folla delinquente (1891) and Gabriel Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation (1890) and Lopinion et la foule (1901). The historical reviews then jump to Sigmund Freud’s reinterpretation of Le Bon in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921). Freud’s essay is typically seen both as a continuation of Le Bon’s theory and as a new departure, out of which come the various theories of the masses of the 1920s and onward.⁴

These surveys tell a continuous story where little changes between the understanding of the masses in late-nineteenth-century Paris and the debate on the masses in interwar Germany and Austria. In fact, most analyses of crowds and crowd behavior in modernity still enroll Le Bon as their guide as the discipline of crowd psychology continues to serve as leitmotif for the analysis of crowd phenomena, no matter what society and historical period.⁵ Of course, it is no falsification to construe crowd psychology as a continuous discipline with a specific genealogy of founders, traditions, branches, and intrinsic preoccupations. It is to be doubted, however, that this kind of history of ideas offers interesting approaches to interwar European history and culture. Nor is it certain that canonical crowd psychology serves us well as a master key to historical events of any kind. When Weimar ideas on “the masses” are analyzed in relation to this theory, the historical specificity and contextual references of the Weimar discussion is often occluded.

Late-nineteenth-century crowd psychology was confined to clinical psychology, public policy, and history writing. The Weimar discourse on the masses, by contrast, concerns society in its totality. It addresses the future of humankind, often unfolding entire metaphysical systems, as is the case with the theories of Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, and Oswald Spengler, or large-scale mappings of society as a whole, as in Weimar sociology before and after the First World War.

A crucial chapter is therefore missing in existing histories of the masses. Between the turn of the century and 1920 lie at least three events that shattered inherited assumptions about society and politics: first, the establishment of universal suffrage in most Western countries (in Germany in November 1918), brought about by the dual force of the workers’ movement and the women’s movement; second, World War I, with its patriotic frenzy; third, the Russian revolution, which many Europeans perceived as the ultimate “revolt of the masses,” especially so in Germany, which experienced its own wave of socialist revolutions in 1918 and 1919. A population fatigued by war, poverty, and unemployment now unseated traditional political representatives, from the emperor to local mayors, opting instead for a social organization in accord with principles of self-government and participatory democracy. Of course, all these processes had to have a tremendous impact on both the intellectual and the popular view of the masses.

With the exception of Durkheim, however, French sociologists of the 1890s failed to develop any properly sociological conception of collective life forms. Social phenomena were explained as the products of the psychological interactions of individuals. One such product was the mass, defined as a union of individuals governed by communal passions and agitated by emotional suggestion to the extent that their individual identities were swept away. By affirming that members of a crowd lacked individuality—reason, identity, character, culture—crowd psychology usually served to dispute the lower classes’ ability to function as responsible political agents and, hence, to deny them the right to vote.⁶

But what if belief in individuality wavered? What if individuality could no longer credibly serve as the foundation of social order, decision making, and moral behavior? In the 1890s, the jargon of mass psychology often served to exclude those who supposedly had not raised themselves to the civilized level of the cultured bourgeois and thus had no chance of becoming autonomous individuals. In the 1920s, by contrast, the jargon about the masses voiced a deeper anxiety about a future without individuals and the values and qualities associated to individuality. In his famous cultural diagnosis of 1931, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, Karl Jasper identified “the mass” as a foundational feature of the contemporary world, in the sense that individual will was everywhere canceled by the qualities of the majority. “The basic problem of our time” he concluded, “is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible”⁷

How to describe the slow transformation of French mass psychology into the twilight discussion on mass society and cultural decline in Weimar Germany and Austria’s first republic? Georg Simmel’s career bridges the years between the codifications of mass psychology around 1890 and the end of World War I. Simmel was also the first to introduce French and Italian mass psychology in Germany and Austria, presenting the two books that exerted the greatest influence on late-nineteenth century discussion on crowds and masses. Already in November 1895 he reviewed Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules, published in France the same year.⁸ Two years later he also reviewed the German translation of Scipio Sighele’s La folla delinquente.⁹

Simmel is rarely mentioned in historical accounts of crowd theory. It is true that he never devoted a specific book or essay to the topic. In order to understand his theory of the masses we need to extract it from the general sociological writings in which it is embedded. In Simmel’s work we see a German thinker approaching the category of “the masses” as it was elaborated in French crowd psychology, but only in order to open it up, extending its reference and finally applying it to the social field in its entirety. To be sure, Simmel’s concept of the masses remains remarkably constant throughout this transformation, but he places it in a different theoretical and historical context. After an initial dialogue with the positivist crowd psychology of Tarde, Le Bon, and Sighele, Simmel’s notion of the masses embeds itself in a different philosophical environment. The new landscape is shaped by influences from Bergson and Nietzsche, among others. Its name is vitalism, or Lebensphilosophie—both lieu commun and doxa of German thought at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹⁰ In this way, Simmel adjusts the conceptual machinery of mass psychology to the tradition of German social philosophy, at the same time retooling it for durability in the political terrain that emerged after World War I.

In his article on Le Bon, Simmel immediately problematizes the notion of the individual as the foundation of society and knowledge. Is it not true, he asks, that the historical method of the Geisteswissenschaften and the heredity theory of the natural sciences (i.e., Darwinism) have demonstrated that the individual is a mere cross-section (Schnittpunkt) of social tendencies? “Thus, society is everything, and what the individual can add to its properties is a quantité négligeable.” Yet this proposition, too, is problematized. For is it not also true, Simmel asks, that all things that we value in life, everything exceptional and elevated, are “the products of individuals who have raised themselves above the social average?”¹¹

It is impossible, Simmel concludes, to determine whether society is prior to the individual, or vice versa.¹² Intellectual paradigms have sometimes privileged the individualistic viewpoint, sometimes the social, Simmel observes. In contemporary France, most intellectuals lean toward the individualistic view, he argues, mentioning as evidence the enormous French interest in Nietzsche, as well as Le Bon’s “ferocious charge against all kinds of democracy and socialism.”¹³

Having thus refused to privilege either “individual” or “society,” Simmel goes on to refute many of the assumptions of both Le Bon and Sighele. Both had defined the crowd as a single being governed by a “mass soul.” Simmel objects that this definition stems from a confusion of cause and effect. Collective action often results in one massive effect—the destruction of a building, the roar emerging as if from one throat. This is where the confusion sets in, Simmel explains: “The unified external event resulting from many subjective mental processes is interpreted as an event resulting from a unified mental process—a process, namely, of the collective soul.”¹⁴ Simmel also rejects the idea that the crowd can be defined by suggestibility. In Simmel’s view, the psychological processes of an individual within a crowd are not different from those of an individual by himself. The emotional impact of a mountain view is not qualitatively different from the impact of a surrounding crowd.¹⁵

In refuting the idea of a mass soul and that of suggestibility, Simmel in fact rejects two major criteria that until then had been used to define the crowd, to the effect that he dissolves the foundation of French and Italian crowd psychology and removes the frightening qualities that it attributed to “the masses” Yet in limiting the substance of the definition of the masses, Simmel at the same time extends the concept’s applicability. No longer an entity following its own psychological laws, and no longer a simple ideological projection of the bourgeoisie, the mass is retained as a category for a certain type of sociation, or Vergesellschaftung, that encompasses modern society in its totality.

On the very first page of his Soziologie (1908), Simmel states that it was the emergence of the masses that made scholars discover the relation of individual and society.¹⁶ As the lower classes ascended during the nineteenth century, they also advanced into the view of the upper classes, making these realize that the world is not just made up by individuals situated by providence in different stations and ranks, but that there is a phenomenon called society that conditions which class an individual will be part of. Each human subject now appeared as socially conditioned, impossible to conceive of in abstraction from society. Historically speaking, therefore, the presence of the masses for the first time made manifest the relation of human subject to society.

It follows from this, Simmel argues, that the masses, in fact, are the historical origin of sociology itself because the task of sociology is precisely to examine the relation between subject and society that the masses have exposed. Incidentally, and as evidence of Simmel’s originality, this notion of the masses is very different from that of his colleague Ferdinand Tönnies. Whereas Simmel analyzed the masses as a historical formation typical of modernity, Tönnies subscribed to the more common idea that the mass was simply another name for the ordinary people, whom he regarded as the uneventful but timeless agency behind social change—the grass of history, on which society stood.¹⁷

Let me now turn to Simmel’s formal analysis of the masses as a concrete representation of the relation between human subject and society. Simmel here repeats one crucial element of Le Bon’s and Sighele’s analyses, although he casts it in a theoretical frame that he developed already in Über sociale Differenzierung of 1890. The element concerns the leveling impact of the masses. A crowd, Simmel argues, must base its actions on desires and qualities that all its members have in common, and “what everyone has in common can only be the property of the one with the least property.”¹⁸ What Simmel argues, in short, is that a crowd is never more intelligent than its least intelligent member, never better than its worst part, never richer in possibilities than its poorest member. As he puts it in “Massenpsychologie”: “It is always possible for the one who is up to step down, since the one who has more also possesses what is less; but the one who is down cannot ever step up”¹⁹

Simmel founds this argument on a theory about the relation between “the individual level” and “the social level” that is central to his sociology.²⁰ He argues that the smaller and more homogeneous a society is, the lesser the difference between the level of the individual and the level of the social group. As society grows larger and more heterogeneous, the individual has greater possibilities to differentiate himself. The diversification of labor allows anyone to perfect his or her mastery of a limited task. As a consequence, however, the common ground shared with others is greatly reduced; it can consist only of the simple needs and generic traits of the entire species. Whenever a human being wants to interact with others or wants to influence them, he or she must descend to this level, for this is the only ground that he or she shares with those fellow humans.²¹ The form of sociation in modernity thus allows everyone to become a genius in his own Gebiet, but at the cost of becoming an idiot in everything else. Simmel calls it a “sociological tragedy.”²²

The consequences of the sociological tragedy are manifested in the mass, Simmel argues. An individual who attempts to assert his or her individuality socially finds that he or she can effectively do this only by descending to the lowest common denominator of the members of his society. It is in this context that Simmel produces a clear definition of “the mass” He discusses the questionable virtue of journalists, actors, and demagogues who “seek the favour of the masses” This would not be so bad, he states, if these people really served the mass as a sum of individuals. Yet the mass they serve is no such sum:

The sociological tragedy is accentuated by a closely related dilemma, what Simmel calls “the tragedy of culture.” For Simmel, human life is an ongoing attempt to express one’s inner being in external forms, cultural products, identities, and institutions. These forms constitute what Simmel calls “objective culture” in contradistinction to “subjective culture” the ineffable life process itself, what Henri Bergson called élan vital, which constantly urges for expression and for form.²⁴ As layer after layer of objective culture accumulates, these petrified sediments will gradually prevent the life process from reaching full expression.²⁵ Modern culture is more tormented than any other era by the conflict between individuals urging to express their individuality more strongly than ever and a life world grown so dense, rigid, and intrusive that it effectively prevents everyone from expressing his or her individuality. In his famous essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), Simmel contends that the growing division of labor reduces the individual “to a quantité négligeable, to a grain of dust as against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands all progress, spirituality and value.”²⁶

As we have seen, in his article on Le Bon’s mass psychology Simmel stated that the mass reduces the individual to a negligible quantity. Here, using the same figure of speech, he claims that modern society as such reduces the individual to a negligible quantity. Evidently, the same form of sociation is at work in both cases. Simmel argues, in short, that in modern society, the mass constitutes the relation—the point of mediation—between the human subject and society. The mass is the objective culture, and the structure of sociation, in opposition to which the subject tries to express his or her individuality. In Simmel’s theory, everything external to the mass is also external to the social; it is individual. The mass is the social essence of the human subject.

Let’s return to Simmel’s historical examination of the forms of sociation prevailing in modern society. As I have mentioned, Simmel argues that it was the emergence of the masses that forced scholars to discover “society.” The truly dialectical moment in Simmel’s analysis arrives when he explains that the emergence of the mass as a dominant form of sociation, is, in its turn, a result of individualism.²⁷ The individualism of equality and the rights of man emancipated individuals from those premodern social bonds that previously circumscribed their being, setting them free to realize their universal human essence. Yet this emancipation of everybody’s human qualities has tragically led to its opposite, Simmel claims. The human essence that someone can realize consists only of the primitive parts of his or her being that he or she shares with everyone else. In a word, universal human being is a mass being.

But there is also a different individualism, Simmel stresses. There is the individualism of romanticism, according to which each subject strives to express not a universal essence but his or her particular essence or individuality. This project also founders, however, but for different reasons. The weight of “objective culture” is in modern society so great that there is no room for anyone’s expression of his or her “subjective culture.”

Ultimately, then, what emerges in Simmel’s analysis are two notions of individualism, which prevent each other’s realization. There is an individualism of equality that flattens everyone to the common level of the masses—the sociological tragedy. There is an individualism of difference that throws up such an excess of petrified objective culture that all efforts to express one’s individuality are crushed—the tragedy of culture. In both cases, the result is the same: a society of masses.

When Simmel speaks of the mass, then, he does not speak about a concrete social phenomenon as the French crowd psychologists did. The crowd is for him a sociological structure, always construed in dialectical tension with another abstract structure, individuality. In Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, these structures are eventually assimilated into a metaphysics as two forms of appearance of the eternal dialectic between life and form. Just as life seeks to appear in its naked immediacy but can do so only by producing forms that betray this immediacy, so does individuality seek to realize itself by raising above the common level of the masses but only to find itself pulled down to the baseline from which the project of self-realization must begin anew. This is what Hegel would have called a bad dialectic because it has no telos or synthesis. This is also related to what philosopher Max Scheler, in a famous address of 1927, defined as a process of equalization or evening out (Ausgleich).²⁸ Scheler saw this as the dominant tendency of modernity, and he argued that it could usher in an era of democracy and tolerance, erasing national boundaries and defusing the conflict between masses and elites, provided it received an adequate political response. However, Simmel does not recognize any possibilities of that kind. For him, the problem is not so much that the dialectic is infinite because as long as it continues, the rejuvenating process of life is an end in itself. The problem is rather that in modernity, the dialectical process has reached a standstill as the poles have been equalized. The institutional forms that once kept individuality elevated above the dull level of normality have been dismantled. Therefore, the dialectical tension between individuality and mass has collapsed. The two will henceforth ceaselessly pass over into each other.

Simmel devoted one of his most brilliant essays to a cultural phenomenon that epitomizes this rapid oscillation between individual and mass, uniqueness and conformity: fashion. Fashion satisfies the demand for social adaptation and makes the subject conform to the mass. At the same time, fashion allows everyone to feel like a unique individual. The human subject becomes unique by participating in a mass phenomenon, and he or she adapts to the mass by expressing his or her individuality.²⁹ Fashion allows the human subject to be a part of the mass and an individual at one and the same time. Fashion thus signifies the destruction of those embankments that once separated the dry ground of individuality from the fluid element of the masses.

I mentioned that Simmel saw the emergence of this form of sociation, the mass, as a result of individualism. If we place Simmel’s major work, The Philosophy of Money, alongside his long chapter on power in Soziologie, we see that his work also provides a materialist foundation for this argument. In Soziologie, he describes the mechanisms of “Superordination and Subordination” that stabilize and stratify any given society. The Philosophy of Money, for its part, describes how the money economy, the great leveler, dissolves institutional arrangements and makes all personal values and individual identities fluid and interchangeable.³⁰ These processes thus erode those mechanisms of “Superordination and Subordination” that once stratified society by erecting a hierarchy of representatives and represented, individuals and masses. A society without a firm framework for the organization of power and the stratification of the social field is a society where individuals and masses are inseparable. Simmel’s theory articulates the form of sociation that prevails in such a society, a society in which everybody moves from triumphant individuality to absolute anonymity in an instant. When distinguishing this form of sociation from others, Simmel always employed the notion of the mass.

“My legacy” Georg Simmel wrote shortly before his death, “will be like cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use according to his nature”³¹ I believe Simmel’s theory provides such a supreme articulation of the ideological dilemmas in postwar Germany and Austria that it fuses with the general cultural discourse of the era. As Simmel himself predicted, the dilemmas that he examined were inherited by many and resolved in vastly different ways.

At one extreme, the traditional principle of individuality was reinforced and magnified as the only solution to the deplorable alienation and leveling of the human condition that, supposedly, characterized modernity, and postwar Germany and Austria in particular. By the 1920s, writes the intellectual historian Fritz Ringer, “no German professor doubted that a profound ‘crisis of culture’ was at hand”³² One result of this tendency was a constant rehashing of Simmel’s antinomy of individuality and massification.³³ However, the mass was rarely seen as a general form of sociation in modernity, as Simmel had taught, but was transformed into a social issue and content in its own right, and often it became another name for the lower classes. “The contempt for the masses is a typical characteristic of most intellectuals of the Weimar Republic” Helmuth Berking observes. Their contempt for “the masses” was a defensive reaction, he asserts.³⁴ Werner Sombart, a colleague of Simmel and highly influential in early German sociology, provides another illustration. Summarizing the state of the masses, to which he counted the lower classes in general, Sombart found three distinguishing traits:

1. The masses are mentally limited, not just stupid; that is, they only have practical understanding: their intelligence measures up to the concrete and the technical, not to the abstract and general, to what is practical rather than theoretical…. 2. The masses do not let themselves be guided by rational grounds in their behavior, but either by custom or by compulsive impulses, feelings, moods: they have an ‘irrational,’ feminine predisposition. 3. The masses are in their emotional life at a very low level: the average of their scale of values is very low: values of pleasure and utility are predominant. Their sensations and feelings are primitive, ‘natural,’ crude, undifferentiated.³⁵

Sombart was pained by a postwar situation in which the privileges of the intellectual elite were undermined by media technology, urban forms of life, and ideas of democracy. For German mandarins whose worldviews were organized in terms of “Bildung” “Geist” “Kultur” “Persönlichkeit” “Seele,” “Innerlichkeit,” and “Individualität” the masses could only appear as a symptom of decline; hence the frequent appeals to the necessity of personal cultivation and aesthetic education of all citizens, hence the calls for Führung, and hence the reminders of the responsibility of the elite in the life of the nation. Another writer, having described the 1918 November Revolution as a product of “feminine, primitive, fickle, moody, barbaric, and monstrous” masses, ended a 1919 book on Die Massenseele (The mass soul) with an exhortation: “Let us hope that a German leader with brazen heart and ironclad chest will arise from our people”³⁶ This is the Weimar discourse on the masses that is best known, an “aristocratic” criticism of mass society, and the one that has been the focus of scholarly studies.³⁷ It is also the one that was ultimately realized in the fascist enthronement of the Führer as the embodiment of society. Sombart is representative in this sense as well; in the early 1930s, he came to support the Nazis.³⁸

Theoretically, this version is as sterile as it is simple: given the definition of the masses as opposed to individuality, and given the view of individuality as the support of culture and knowledge, the conclusion follows automatically: a representation of the masses as disorderly and destructive, as an agent of leveling passions in need of discipline and guidance.

As we shall see in the rest of this chapter, however, even this seemingly simple discourse was articulated in a variety of contexts and genres and with various degrees of originality. Georg Simmel’s disciples and colleagues in sociology no doubt provided the most serious treatment of the topic, albeit never really challenging the binary framework that posited the mass as a deviation from a norm.

But before investigating the sociological contributions to the analysis of the masses in the interwar period it is important to get an idea of how it was played out in the general culture of the era. What did the mass look like? What did it feel like? How was it expressed in the broader cultural arena? If we were to choose one cultural document to embody the spirit of Weimar culture, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927 would surely be a predictable candidate: Not only because of its dystopian narrative about a future civilization where the companionship of machine and capital has reduced humanity to a toiling herd. And not only because of its experimental form in which futurism and science fiction were fused with social commentary and gothic expressionism into a vexing imagery of special effects and stage craft that surpassed everything else in its era. And also not only because it was the biggest and most expensive motion picture made in the period, a true mass mobilization of the productive capacity of Weimar’s cultural industry. But also because of its typical portrayal of the crowd, which in Lang’s film is a character in its own right. To measure the extent to which Lang’s portrait of the masses is saturated by the cultural and political fantasies of its time it suffices to repeat some general observations on the film, most of which were made already at its appearance, and the dominant ideology of the masses comes into view.

The masses in Metropolis are anonymous and dressed in uniform. They are placed at the lowest level of the capital city, working in underground power plants and factories and holding meetings in the catacombs. Lang’s masses are not only untouched by civilization and light. They also lack cognitive ability and individuality. Two forces control them: either the hard discipline that impels them to show up every day for their shift in the various plants where they work themselves to death or the ideological manipulation that excites their passions to the point where they erupt in rebellions in which they destroy the machinery and cause the lower levels of Metropolis to be flooded, almost killing their own wives and children (see figures 2.1 and 2.2).

If the masses thus signify body and instincts, Joh Fredersen, the individual that rules Metropolis, signifies mind and intelligence. The film thus posits masses and individual as opposites, and it lets this opposition unfold in any number of related binaries: body against brain, hand against mind, depth against surface, earth against sky, darkness against and light, passion against reason, ignorance against science, primitivity against civilization, femininity against masculinity. The spectacular visual scenery as well as the filmic action is driven by these tensions and the attempt to mediate between them.

Interestingly, the main mediator and catalyst of these tensions is a woman, Maria. At the beginning, she soothes the hapless masses, encouraging their righteous instincts to help them endure. In the science-fiction scenario of the film, Maria is then cloned. Her double is identical to the authentic Maria but her opposite in terms of character. The artificial Maria usurps her position as spiritual leader of the workers and agitates them to revolt. The rivaling Marias—one virgin, one vamp—not only illustrate the ambiguously deceptive nature of femininity, which was another cultural stereotype of the era, but also display the alleged fickleness of the masses as they impulsively react to any stimuli they receive. According to Lang’s scenario, the masses must be guided by somebody capable of directing their passions toward constructive aims, as the real Maria strives to do. Otherwise, the masses become a force of destruction, as the artificial Maria is there to show.

The happy ending of Lang’s film consists not in undoing any of the oppositions generated by its social fantasy but in mending the social divide. This is accomplished through the ritual purging of the female desire embodied by Maria, whose destructive aspect is displayed by the robot vamp that arouses the workers’ lust to revolt, and at the same time through the symbolic castration of the workers, whose inability to maintain the high-tech infrastructure of Metropolis serves to justify that they be held in servitude by their capitalist master. Sexual and political passions are thus thoroughly vilified and eliminated as female desire is visually translated into self-defeating mass violence. As Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, the seductive character of the film stems from its capacity to ignite a sexual and political desire, which is then trimmed and adapted to the technological and economic demands of the existing order.³⁹ Anton Kaes is also on the mark, showing how the film systematically associates collective political organization with feminine hysteria and mad violence: “The very idea of a revolt is delegitimized.”⁴⁰ Instead of challenging the idea that most people are masses and live in the dark, Metropolis teaches that the majority needs firm and fair supervision by rational individuals. And instead of challenging the idea that only some are rational individuals, it teaches those happy few that they depend on the services of the masses.

Metropolis is thus a film that opted for social compromise, at the same time calling for compassion with those who were suffering the consequences of status quo. The film rushed to endorse the crumbling compact between capital and labor, codified in the Stinnes-Legien agreement of November 1918, in which the employers offered social policy in exchange for the workers’ renouncing socialization, at the very time when support for the agreement had started to erode.⁴¹

For my purposes, what is most important is the film’s function as a “sponge” to use an expression of Thomas Elsaesser, which sucks up all the ingredients in the dominant social and political imaginary of Weimar Germany.⁴² In this imaginary, the masses loomed large as an unstable and potentially dangerous agent at the depth of the social world. It is as though Fritz Lang tapped into all the period’s fears and fantasies of the masses and invented the visuals that matched them. The fame of Metropolis is in no small part attributable to its innovative experiments with film’s ability to render masses in motion. It set the standard for cinematographic depictions of crowds, showing how the rhythms and physiognomies of the collective vary depending on its location in street, church, factory, dance hall, political meeting, or the like. According to many commentators, however, Lang’s experiments with perspective, superimposition, projection speed, editing, and special effects only tended to confirm established ideas of the masses as the underbelly of humanity.⁴³ The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel remarked in his review of the film that Lang had in fact forgotten one actor, “full of novelty and possibilities: the crowd” For despite the omnipresence of crowd scenes in Metropolis, the mass seemed present not for its own sake, nor to demonstrate some more specific social condition, but as a vindication of an authoritarian perspective according to which reason and agency were wholly on the side of the individual mastermind. As Buñuel stated, the multitudes of Metropolis “seem to fill a decorative role, that of a huge ballet; they aim to impress us by their beautifully choreographed and balanced movement rather than allow us to see their soul, their subordination to more human, more objective agencies.”⁴⁴ The same point was later elaborated by Siegfried Kracauer, who regarded Metropolis as a dress rehearsal for fascism, in which the masses were patterned into ornaments according to the directions of the leader. The workers’ “rebellion results in the establishment of totalitarian authority, and the rebels consider this result a victory.”⁴⁵ In this way, Metropolis illustrates how the main ideological problem in Weimar culture was most typically resolved. The masses were everywhere. And wherever they were, authority was called for.

The generation of sociologists and social scientists writing after the foundational moment of Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber often took issue with the predominant view of the masses in Weimar Germany that I discussed in the previous section. They tried to purge the notion of the mass of its ideological and psychologistic traits and turn it into a rigorously scientific concept. This was true for Alfred Vierkandt and Leopold von Wiese, influential thinkers in the nascent discipline of academic sociology, and even more so for a younger generation of scholars who began their academic careers right after World War I, among whom we find von Wiese’s student Wilhelm Vleugels, and brilliant intellectuals like Theodor Geiger and Gerhard Colm. They all identified the masses as an urgent area of research, and they soon discovered that the terrain was overgrown with half truths and vulgarizations.

In a major attempt at theoretical clarification in 1924, Gerhard Colm remarked that “the mass” and “the masses” showed up everywhere in contemporary literature, but the terms carried so many different meanings that they had become a source of confusion.⁴⁶ Social scientists of the period despaired at the ambiguous meanings attributed to “the mass” in ordinary language. Their frustration only increased as they realized that scholarly usage was equally messed up. “It is not only the case that different authors tie different concepts to the word ‘mass’; even in the same author the word often refers to different concepts,” wrote Wilhelm Vleugels in one effort to determine the precise meaning of the “mass”⁴⁷ Theodor Geiger also lamented the fuzzy terminology,⁴⁸ and Leopold von Wiese, professor of sociology in Cologne, went so far as to ask if social scientists should not simply drop the word and invent new terms for the social formations under analysis. In order to avoid the dubious connotations evoked by “the mass” perhaps the sociologist would better employ Greek letters and simply speak of “delta-formations” or the like, he said.⁴⁹

Sociology nonetheless retained the mass as a principal category. It is not hard to see why. The word reeked of confusion and prejudice, to be sure. Yet it asserted itself as the inevitable rubric for investigations of a social issue that was fundamentally important, to the extent that many saw it as the cardinal feature of modern society. Were sociology to avoid “the mass” and instead opt for the clinical language of science, the public would continue to be misled, these sociologists feared, by the questionable explanations offered by mass psychology, notably Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, or by the deceptive ideas on “the age of the crowd” and “the rebellion of the masses” promoted by cultural philosophers like Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset, and Max Scheler, or else it would fall prey to demagogues of even worse brands. The mass, therefore, was a word and a subject not to be ignored. Objecting to the minority of social scientists who excluded “the mass” from their list of relevant topics, Wilhelm Vleugels simply proscribed that the mass was “an important object of sociological knowledge.”⁵⁰

German sociologists thus shouldered a tough job of terminological laundry. Seeking to obtain a supposedly scientific conception of the mass, they exposed the term to two cycles of clarification. First, an inventory of the meanings of the mass in ordinary language was drawn up. Even after excluding all references not pertaining to social phenomena, these sociologists still had their hands full of contradictory and partly overlapping categories. We have already in the previous chapter encountered Alfred Vierkandt’s list. According to him, “the masses” referred to all of the below: followers as opposed to leaders; average people as opposed to those above the average; lower strata as opposed to higher strata; uneducated people as opposed to educated people; temporary aggregates of people as opposed to groups; professional associations, classes, social strata, races, or the like; and, finally, temporary associations of people in states of strong emotional excitement.⁵¹

In a more rigorous effort to disentangle the use of the term, Theodor Geiger argued that despite the word’s ambiguity, a semantic core persisted. The mass evoked “the image of an undifferentiated complex of uncountable, or at any rate uncounted, similar part-units.”⁵² For the purpose of sociological analysis, Geiger went on to abstract four main inflections of the general idea of the mass in contemporary discourse about society. Its first meaning was neutral: great numbers and quantity, any amassment of objects and people. This is how we still today speak of mass communication, mass meetings, or the like. The second meaning referred to human groups and collectives held together by common sentiments or emotions. The mass here emerged as a psychological phenomenon, and it was in this sense that it had caught the interest of mass psychology. In order to examine how the emotional life of an individual is transformed when he or she becomes part of a crowd, mass psychology had construed an antithesis between individual and mass which has been a “source of many misunderstandings,” Geiger maintained.⁵³ He then identified a third meaning of the mass, since long ingrained in ordinary language. In thousands of figures of speech “the mass” was negatively colored as a designation for those lacking the refinement, cultivation, wisdom, genius, skill, or courage by which putatively superior men and women distinguished themselves. Geiger defined this conception of the mass by describing it as a human residual (“Auslese-Überbleibsel” or “Auslese-Rückstand”): the mass were the human leftovers or left-outs who remained once the more valuable members of the population had been selected for their tasks and positions in society.⁵⁴

But the mass also carried a fourth meaning that had been neglected, Geiger submitted. The activity of the revolutionary masses and their relation to their political leaders demanded to be studied as a sociohistorical phenomenon in its own right.

Geiger then went on to argue that these four distinct ways of speaking about the mass had been mixed up. For the most part, the negative associations ascribed to the mass in the second and third case—the mass as acting in emotional excitement or as constituting a human residual—had immersed social commentary and sociology in an atmosphere of anxiety and fear. Geiger was probably the first sociologist to expose the hidden assumption behind this manner of speaking about crowds. Since everyone took the sovereign individual as a firm point of reference, the mass had to appear as a force of decline, corrupting whatever qualities people had in their allegedly natural state as autonomous individuals. Most statements on the mass, Geiger asserted, presume that a person who joins a mass has his or her true ancestry and authentic being outside it, or, as he put it in German, they postulate “die außermassische Herkunft der im einzelnen Fall vermassten Individuen.”⁵⁵

How to gain a clearer view of the matter? Geiger argued that the mass must be posited as a social Gestalt in its own right, rather than being judged as a deviation from some unquestioned idea of individuality: “A sociological investigation of the mass must grasp the mass as a specific kind of social association of objective character.”⁵⁶ Here we enter the second cycle of clarification proposed by German social scientists. Once the misconceptions of common language had been purged, the mass must be repositioned as an objective social entity. But how? According to Weimar sociology, knowing something sociologically amounted to finding its right place within a “general sociology,” “pure sociology,” or “formal sociology” (allgemeine Soziologie, reine Soziologie, formale Soziologie). For this enterprise, the social relation was the primary object of scientific inquiry. Analyzing the social relation entailed a radical abstraction of the elementary forms of interhuman life from their geographical, cultural, historical, and political embeddings.⁵⁷ As in Simmel’s concept of sociation, the forms of social interaction were separated from whatever content they held, and these forms were conceptualized as theoretical entities in their own right, pinned to a conceptual grid made up by so many allegedly transhistorical modes of human interaction.

The great system builders of Weimar sociology would thus analyze various aspects of human interaction, as it could be studied as an ongoing “process,” as a “relation” between social agents or as resulting in some more or less stable “formation” The mass was typically analyzed as a phenomenon of this kind, for which the Germans used names such as Gebilde (formation), Verband (association), Körperschaft (body), or, indeed, Gestalt.

This is to say that Weimar sociology put great emphasis on the correct way of classifying social units. To begin, Theodor Geiger saw the “group” as the principal form of social association, with “the couple” and “the mass” at opposite ends of a wide spectrum. Leopold von Wiese, for his part, identified three principal “formations”: groups, masses, and abstract collectives (Gruppen, Massen, and Körperschaften/abstrakte Kollektiva), each of which, in turn, contained a number of types. In von Wiese’s system, groups were thus divided into couples, trios, small groups, and large groups. Masses were divided into abstract masses and concrete masses. Abstract collectives (Körperschaften), in turn, were classified according to an impressive taxonomy, consisting of social bodies of primary order: family, clan, tribe, people, state, church, estate, class, economic associations, and intellectual and artistic communities; in addition to a number of social bodies derived from the primary ones and hence constituting collectives of secondary rank: army and navy; associations of industry and technique, political parties, schools, and so on.⁵⁸

Gerhard Colm proposed a less complicated system as it fell on him to codify the authoritative definition of the mass in interwar German sociology.⁵⁹ He spoke of “group formations” (Gruppengebilde) and presented a typology divided into four categories. These four types never exist in pure forms, Colm stressed. But depending on the historical situation, social formations would be more or less patterned on one of them. The first group type was defined by its communal way of living. People were here organic parts of a social totality, their values and identity determined by life and work shared with one another; Colm linked this type to Tönnies’s concept of Gemeinschaft. The second type was characterized by communal aims, values, or interests, and the group existed in order to fulfill, realize, or embody these. For Colm, this conformed to Tönnies’s Gesellschaft. A third type was simply called “Bund,” defined as a union involving one’s entire being and exemplified by groups founded on enduring relations of love. The fourth and final category in Colm’s system was “the mass” constituted by the shared emotions or sentiments of its members.

It is easy to imagine extending these different typologies until all conceivable forms of social activity are exhausted. Similar inventories were compiled by Vierkandt, Sombart, Geiger, the Swiss sociologist Hans Töndury, and others, with variations in terminological and classificatory procedure.⁶⁰ Many sociologists also added transitional or intermediary social bodies, thus accounting for social change. For instance, Wiese described how loose masses became bounded groups via intermediary formations such as “troops” “bands” and “gatherings”⁶¹

To put all this differently, Weimar sociology aimed to establish the very architecture of the social world. Its starting point was society as it actually existed; its methodological tools were devised for observation, analysis, and abstraction; and its goal was a conceptual system with a set of elementary sociological categories fit to describe any society. Gerhard Colm and Alfred Vierkandt emphasized that the concepts discovered by sociology constituted purely theoretical possibilities never truly realized in history since actually existing societies were always mixtures of the ideal types that analytic science described in pure form.⁶² Their point is an interesting one, for it implies that Weimar sociology produced a theoretical system from which it could derive a full inventory of all theoretically possible societies.

This stunning feature of Weimar sociology—the search for a theory accounting for virtually all possible social formations—offers unexpected insights into Elias Canetti’s enigmatic work on the mass. Once we reinsert Canetti’s Crowds and Power into its original proximity with this now largely forgotten corpus of formal sociology, today treated as dead weight in the history of science, the reasons for Canetti’s comprehensive ambition and peculiar method are partly clarified. Excelling in detailed enumerations of various kinds of masses and different phases of crowd behavior (Hetzmassen, Festmassen, Fluchtmassen, Umkehrungsmassen, etc.), and listing a great number of “mass symbols” (“Massensymbole”), Canetti betrays an affinity with the sociological syntheses—Vierkandt’s Gesellschaftslehre, Leopold von Wiese’s System der Allgemeinen Soziologie, Theodor Geiger’s Soziologie, and perhaps also Max Weber’s uncompleted Economy and Society—that were eventually dwarfed by his own giant undertaking. These works aimed straight at the essentials of society, seeking to calculate the combinations of various modes and forms of human interaction, the crucial difference being that Canetti’s conception of the mass usurped the sovereign concept of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) around which the Weimar sociologists built their systems. What for interwar sociology were social processes, social relations, and forms of sociation became for Canetti modalities of the mass drive or crowd instinct (der Massentrieb). Conversely, whereas Canetti viewed all social formations as subspecies of the universal phenomenon of the mass, Weimar sociologists held on to the view that the mass was one social formation among others.

When “the mass” was established as an object of knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century, the question arose as to which scientific branch it belonged to. Psychiatrists and psychologists claimed the masses as their territory, and the founders of sociology addressed the mass as a form of social interaction that could not be accounted for by psychic mechanisms. The debate continued throughout the interwar era, as is evidenced by the animated engagement of Weimar sociologists with French mass psychology or their disputes with Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse.⁶³ For the sociologists, “the mass” constituted a field of research where they could assert the superiority of their own approach over against psychological explanations of social behavior.

I have already discussed one strategy through which Weimar sociologists challenged the “psychology of the masses” Instead of taking the idea of the masses at face value, they retreated to semantic analysis, arguing that mass psychology had mixed up a number of contradictory conceptions of the mass. The only common denominator of these conceptions was that they all referred to “process-complexes” involving a great quantity of human beings, as Leopold von Wiese dryly put it.

Rather than taking the mass as an a priori psychological category, sociological inquiry defined it, as we have seen, in relation to other social formations—group, organization, or the like. In this context, the mass was almost always a chosen denomination for social formations lacking the internal organization and differentiation typical of other collective units, and whose cohesion could therefore be attributed only to the emotional investments of its members, for instance, the sense of sharing a common predicament or adversary. This general conception of the mass was in turn split into two. The first component was the mass in action, an agent of unrest, protest, and rebellion. Leopold von Wiese referred to it as “the concrete mass”; Vleugels called it “the active mass” (“die wirksame Masse"); and Theodor Geiger spoke of “the actual mass” (“die aktuelle Masse”). In order to understand how the active mass emerged as a collective agent guided by shared emotions, social scientists then postulated the existence of a complementary modality of the mass. They spoke of the “latent” “abstract” or “passive” mass, indicating human collectives consisting of atomized individuals detached from traditions and without organization, internal differentiation, and discipline. The absence of organization gave the emotions all the more freedom to influence the lives and ignite the spirits of the members of the abstract mass. In certain circumstances the influence would be strong enough to turn them into a raging, active crowd.

Explaining the mass in action, Weimar sociologists pretty much agreed that it was a proper object for psychological analysis since it was mainly constituted by emotional bonds. Leopold von Wiese’s definition of the concrete mass is representative: “A loose inter-human structure or formation of relations …, which for short duration, and if the circumstances trigger the appropriate and more or less dominating affects in all participants, transforms itself from a multitude into a unified chain of collective actions.”⁶⁴ Such definitions salvaged key elements from the doctrine of mass psychology: the masses were seen as acting in affect; the affects expressed by its members were those that everybody shared with his or her fellows; in the explosive movement of mass action, collectively shared emotions therefore occlude the individual personality and govern the behavior of each member of the mass. Interwar sociological theories thus revisited the territory claimed by Scipio Sighele and Gustave Le Bon, critically reviewing all the familiar topics discussed by them: the existence of a collective soul, the importance for the masses of a leader, the primitive character of the masses, the leveling of intelligence and morality in a crowd, the heightening of emotions, and the criminal leanings of the masses. With the crucial exception of Theodor Geiger, Weimar sociologists confirmed that mass psychology gave a fairly accurate idea of the emotional mechanisms within the active mass.⁶⁵

For all other purposes, however, mass psychology gave an insufficient picture, Weimar sociologists argued. Where, when, how, and why do mass actions occur? What are the historical causes and social consequences of crowd behavior? Addressing such questions, these sociologists claimed that answers be provided by sociology alone. Many followed Georg Simmel’s example as they maintained that the mass was a particular form of sociation and that the active mass—all the crowds flooding streets, public spaces, and political discourse of interwar Germany and Austria—was an expression of a more abstract social phenomenon: great numbers of loosely connected human atoms sharing roughly the same emotions, habits, sensations, loyalties, and social positions. In stipulating the existence of abstract masses, sociology confirmed that society was increasingly transformed by human collectives far too shapeless and anonymous to be classified as organizations, groups, classes, associations, parties, or the like.

The abstract mass thus obtained its identity only in relation to social formations of firmer identity. “The ideal type of the abstract mass is related to the group as Chaos to Cosmos,” Leopold von Wiese stated. He continued: “It is characterized by seething and undifferentiated forces…. The major aspirations of the humans of the mass are as yet too undecided and unshaped; the unconscious and the vegetative stand in the foreground” In less pejorative language, Wiese defined the abstract mass as “a disorganized, vague, interhuman formation of long duration, which is held together by the unclear fantasy of its members of being united in fate or feeling.”⁶⁶

It is sometimes hard to decipher what social phenomena the sociology of the mass actually addressed. Who was implicated by its discourse? On the surface, the sociological analyses of the mass of the interwar period seem preoccupied with theoretical clarification and conceptual analysis. The abstract mass is always defined as a transhistorical social formation or as an ideal type. However, in illustrations of the abstract mass a certain segment of society always comes to the fore: the working classes. On the one hand, then, Weimar sociologists argued that the abstract mass was a formal category, a social Gebilde, as abstract and timeless as, say, the group, the couple, the clan, and the organization. On the other hand, the mass seemed to be a theoretical category containing only one item, for when exemplifying the abstract mass, sociological language was always invaded by well-worn metaphors that had been in use since the French revolution to describe what nineteenth-century discourse knew as “the dangerous and laboring classes [les classes dangereuses et laborieuses]”

Theoretically, the distinction was thus clear. The mass named a specific type of sociation or social formation, not to be mixed up with any empirically identifiable social phenomena. Leopold von Wiese went as far as stating that no fundamental difference pertained between the community of feeling of the proletariat and certain other collectives such as the high bourgeoisie. “Good society” too, constituted an “abstract mass” because of the shared habits of the ladies and gentlemen constituting it. The same applied to a “community” of moviegoers or a sports audience. In defining the abstract mass, Wiese evoked a range of faceless and boundless human collectives, loosely brought together by a shared experience of the culture of modernity.⁶⁷

The question as to whether the proletariat was identical with the mass was thus usually answered in the negative. Rather, the proletariat was taken to be an example of the mass. However, this was a question of secondary importance that concerned only the historical application of the concept whereas the primary issue always was the proper definition and systematization of all forms of sociation. Among Weimar social scientists, there was a strong tendency to avoid discussing the social and political implications of their theory or to disregard the conflicts that pressed hard onto the walls of their academic enclaves. When the German Association of Sociology reconvened for the first time after the war, in Jena in September 1922 under the direction of Ferdinand Tönnies, the subject for the two-day conference seemed to invite reflection on the immediate past and contemporary politics. Just three to four years before, Germany and Austria had experienced revolutionary upheavals. Parts of the population of both countries were still engaged in political violence and revolutionary movements. And now sociologists from both states gathered to discuss nothing less than “the nature of revolution [das Wesen der Revolution]” As elsewhere in the social sciences, however, impartiality reigned supreme in Jena, banning all historical, political, and ethical considerations. What the members of the sociological association were discussing in Jena was thus neither the recent past nor the revolutionary situation of the time. As the rubric made clear, they were interested neither in the causes nor in the consequences of the German revolution but in its “essence” (Wesen). There was general agreement that sociology’s main task was to provide a general definition of what a revolution was.

In his keynote address, Leopold von Wiese maintained that the crucial problem was to find a pure concept of the revolution, that is, to determine the specific relation between social differentiation and social integration, thus enabling the sociologist to assess a revolution’s function in the larger schema of social entities.⁶⁸ Explicit references to the recently crushed revolution in Germany were absent also in the second keynote address, by Ludo Moritz Hartmann. In the ensuing discussion, the Austrian sociologist Max Adler intervened from the floor, confessing how odd it felt sitting through an entire day of discussions about the revolution without anyone even mentioning the name of Karl Marx, and he added that this confession would probably be received as an expression of party politics and cost him his scientific reputation. Adler then went on to reject Wiese’s and Hartmann’s numerous remarks about the role of masses in the revolutionary process: “With this objection, the sociologically useless concept of ‘the mass’ completely disappears from sociology and what is revealed instead is the new concept of a community of interests [Interessengemeinschaft], the specificity of which remains to be examined more closely and which in regard to the history of revolution turns out to be that of class”⁶⁹ Adler thus identified a peculiar trait of Weimar sociology. Among all social formations contained in its seemingly exhaustive list of classifications, “class” was conspicuously absent, or at best thrown in as a subspecies under major formations such as group, mass, and abstract collective.

Another example of sociology’s phobic relation to contemporary affairs is Vilhelm Vleugels’s Die Masse, completed in the fall of 1927. Vleugels signaled the urgency of his book by vague hints of the recent uprisings in Vienna (the burning of the Palace of Justice on July 15, which I discussed in chapter 1). But precisely because of this urgency he then retreated from contemporary matters, explaining that for the sake of scientific credibility one must avoid being affected by “one’s own political passions” Instead of testing his theory of the mass against the contentious reality of his present, he collected evidence from accounts of the slave revolts in ancient Rome.⁷⁰

The conflict between history and theory in Weimar sociology never comes to full expression but is detectable in gestures of closure—the striving for scientific rigor, the credo of impartiality, the commitment to formal analysis—that mark the Jena discussion on the revolution as well as Vleugel’s remark on the Vienna uprisings. This makes clear that the sociological concept of the mass was not primarily shaped through an empirical encounter with the surrounding social world but through a critical encounter with mass psychology, on the one hand, and through a theoretical derivation of social formations, on the other. Following Ferdinand Tönnies’s narrative about the slow change from tradition to modernity, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, German social theory of the period was organized around an axis stretching from social cohesion and homogeneity to atomization and heterogeneity. The sociological concept of the mass would be determined by its allotted place in that framework. It was a residual category, associated with decline, decadence, and pathology and defined by the absence of the organization, cohesion, duration, differentiation, or rationality that pertained in comparable social formations. No longer the antithesis of the qualities associated with individuality, the mass became the antithesis of the qualities ascribed to complex social formations.⁷¹

The irony, of course, was that those actually existing mass movements that sociology dared not approach, for fear that it would lose in objectivity if venturing too close to history, would in the next step be invited to illustrate the lack of rationality, organization, and differentiation that sociology imputed to its concept of the mass. The sociological description of the “real” mass of laboring people was thus largely deduced from the theoretical concept of “the mass” Consequently, the habits, mentality, and ways of living of the proletariat and the lower classes’ masses were painted in gloomy colors: they all emerged as an embodiment of the lack, absence, emptiness, and mediocrity that sociology attributed to their theoretical concept of the mass. An abstract and scattered collective consisting of countless people identifying with one another on the basis of their shared emotions toward society—such was the “latent mass,” which seemingly corresponded to the situation of the proletariat. As it was loosely organized and poorly anchored in established associations, the latent mass was easily mobilized by the pressure of external events or powerful leaders so as to be transformed into a concrete and active crowd, united by common motifs, hatred, or resentment—and on this point, too, the rebellious segments of the proletariat provided the main example.

That Weimar sociology kept looking at the working classes to verify its theoretical concept of the mass is hardly surprising. There was no other social formation at hand to exhibit the stipulated connection between the abstract mass united by common sentiments and the concrete mass translating these sentiments into violent demands. But if the working classes were the only empirical phenomenon conforming to the sociological concept of the mass, why not simply identify the two with each other? And why not simply speak of the working classes instead of the mass? On this point, as we have seen, most sociologists stood firm: for scientific reasons their concept of the mass must not be historical but formal and objective, describing a general modality of sociation that could be used to describe many particular social formations throughout human history.

Ultimately, it is therefore the formalist intention of Weimar sociology, rather than simple political prejudice or ideological bias, that explains why the mass remained such a mysterious term in its systems—an empty signifier introduced for whatever social agents and events that threatened to escape the vast system of social representations that sociology threw out as it tried to tabulate the proper name and place of every social grouping and relation. As Helmut Berking observes, the more painstakingly mass sociology sought to delineate the analytical contours of its founding concept, the more these contours became diffuse since the mass could be determined only as a deviation from this or that other class or group of more structured composition.⁷²

The mass became a sociological denomination covering everybody not sufficiently organized by hall-marked social associations and everybody not represented by established political institutions. Leopold von Wiese captured this by saying that the mass is not “vergeistigt,” thus literally casting the mass as matter not yet mastered by mind, untouched, as it were, by the power of logos. The mass lacks a guiding idea. It is not pulled by tradition, nor is it motored by ideology, Wiese submitted. This accounts for the difficulty of describing the mass in positive terms. It seems to resist cultural representation and scientific conceptualization; the mass is “far too difficult to circumscribe, far too disorganized, and far too difficult to grasp through legal statutes and official protocol”⁷³

Contrary to many other accounts that described the mass as incendiary or explosive, Leopold von Wiese emphasized the inertia of the mass. Having positioned the mass as the opposite of intellect or consciousness (Geist), it is only logical that he ended up positing the mass as materiality, animality, and, indeed, flesh. “The mass is always primarily flesh. It forces the noble ones to make compromises, or else it exterminates them…. [I]t has the task of tearing down the superhuman to the level of the human, all too human…. It supports a creaturely and earthbound life, and resignation to what is transient and ephemeral; it defends muscles, spine, and belly against brain.”⁷⁴

Belly is to brain as the mass is to the national elite, just as hand is to mind in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Perhaps we need not ask to which camp Leopold von Wiese counted himself. For all the scientific rigor that he summoned to support his general sociology, it obviously could not keep the stereotypes from rolling in, drowning his scientific theory of the masses in jargon typical of his time. No wonder that later scholars have concluded that, in practice, German mass sociology worked “like one great effort to prevent the masses and the anxieties fed by them from getting at one’s throat.”⁷⁵ For if we were to believe Wiese’s account, we must also take seriously its suggestions that large sections of the German people and humanity in general were equivalent to meat.

Of course, the tragedy is that such suggestions were taken seriously, although few dared spell out what political consequences they could have. The art of the Weimar Republic was an exception to this rule. What was only insinuated in academic discourse on the masses, or shrouded in silence, comes into view at the theater or in the visual arts, usually through the revelatory force of caricature or with a pitch of the grotesque. In The Threepenny Opera Bertolt Brecht unintentionally picked up Leopold von Wiese’s idea and took it all the way. The broad masses as meat? This is exactly what is echoed in the “Cannon Song,” where the two war veterans revel in sweet memories of their careers in the service of the Queen’s empire, fighting the colonized peoples all across the earth:

What soldiers live on

From the Cape to Cooch Behar.

If it should rain one night

And they should chance to sight

Pallid or swarthy faces

Of uncongenial races

They’ll maybe chop them up to make

some beefsteak tartare.⁷⁶

In German sociology of the 1920s, too, the masses guide the scholarly gaze toward the secret origins of communal life and social organization. Leopold von Wiese made a bizarre impression, to be sure, when he suggested that scholars cease speaking about the mass and instead invent some neutral term, like delta formations, to designate the phenomena under study. However, the intuition behind his suggestion was rational, for what shines through sociology’s copious attempts to cut out a neutral definition for “the mass,” with all the semantic disputes that ensued, is a nagging sense that this object constitutes the undetermined and undeterminable factor X, or formation Δ, of history, asserting its presence outside the more intelligible social formations in which sociology anchored its theoretical systems.

Sociological assessments converged on this point: the mass is a border phenomenon clouded in uncertainty. For some, the mass meant not just the border of the social world but the end of it. To approach the mass was to experience the dissolution of social order, morality, and culture. Abandoned by spirit and by God: that was the predicament of the mass, according to Werner Sombart, who went on to define it as a “dead multitude of mere particles … a disorganized and amorphous population heap.”⁷⁷ Is the mass always a symptom of decline? Wilhelm Vleugels asked at the end of his long investigation. He responded, predictably, that it all depends on which mass we are speaking about.⁷⁸ However, if some scholars argued that the mass spelled the end of the social world, others remarked that it was the origin of society.⁷⁹ Thus, the mass spelled both doom and rebirth, it was apocalyptic and at the same time a source of rejuvenation: a wellspring of society.

Were the masses the beginning of society or its collapse? The question signals the extent to which the “the mass” functioned as a liminal concept, a terminological placeholder for social matter that sociology reached for but could not fully grasp. Leopold von Wiese observed that the institutions making up the core of a nation—political organs, judiciary, business, institutions of culture and learning, arts and sciences—had barely taken notice of the abstract mass. The abstract mass is so shapeless and latent that it may appear as if it was not really there at all, he stated.⁸⁰ Sociology, by contrast, did take notice of the mass. Yet for all the discourse it produced, the mass remained at the threshold of visibility, a flickering image of social substance resisting sociological classification and representation, not so much an image of something perceived in external reality but a mirror image of formal sociology and its failure to account for social processes and change.

We have already seen that the objectivist spirit of Weimar sociology prevented it from approaching this forbidden territory. What would have been the result, had sociology proceeded in the opposite way? What if it had developed its concept of the mass by actually studying the collective movements in the Weimar era rather than ascribing to these movements a lack of qualities that it deduced from its theoretical concept of the mass? The question would be purely hypothetical were it not for Gerhard Colm’s and Theodor Geiger’s efforts to actually test the sociological concept of the mass against the brute facts of history. Their books—Colm’s Beitrag zur Geschichte und Soziologie des Ruhraufstandes vom März-April 1920, published in 1920, and Geiger’s Die Masse und ihre Aktion of 1927 as well as Die soziale Sichtung des deutschen Volkes of 1926—are remarkable for what they reveal about interwar mass sociology.

Only weeks before his death, Max Weber inspired Colm to embark on a sociological interpretation of the proletarian uprisings in the Ruhr area in March 1920.⁸¹ Colm’s book is a rare test case involving a young, talented social scientist using contemporary theories of crowd behavior to shed light on social and political conflicts in his present. Given Colm’s adherence to Weber’s ideal of impartiality, or Wertfreiheit—nicely summed up in the epigraph from Spinoza, “non ridere, non flere, sed intelligere” (not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand)—his initial reservations about using the crude category of “the mass” is hardly surprising. One conclusion emerging from his analysis is that “the mass” loses its analytic value if used in isolation or defined as the opposite of individuality. In Colm’s work we thus find the same progressive thrust as in the general social sciences of the period: the semantic ambiguities and ideological bias infiltrating most accounts of the masses is checked by defining the word in relation to other social formations rather than seeing it as a simple negation of normative individuality.

Colm investigates how in March 1920 workers’ militias battled openly against the regular German army and won control of industrial centers of the Ruhr area. The background of the insurrection was the so-called Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch, an attempt by high-ranking officers and nobility to liquidate the young republic and seize control of the state. After the coup, military garrisons in the Ruhr area raised the flag of the fallen empire, symbolizing support for the coup. Fearing that the army would betray the democratically elected government, left-wing unions and other groups of labor then rose to defend themselves and the democratic republic. Armed workers carried sweeping victories, forcing the Reichswehr to retreat and leaving villages, towns, and cities of central Ruhr under the partial command of a newly constituted Red Army. Colm’s book chronicles these events in great detail, informing the reader about the insurrection’s key battles, movements, meetings, facts, figures, and protagonists, thus providing a wealth of detail that contributes to making his book a history of current affairs with a powerful streak of investigative journalism.

However, as Colm ventures to explain the Ruhr uprisings he shifts to a different register. Instead of subjecting the empirical documentation to proper historical analysis, sorting out the causes and factors contributing to the insurrection, he treats the event as a case study to prove a sociological theory of the masses. What results is a rather speculative explanation. Colm notes that in response to the coup, the unions across Germany declared a general strike. He asserts that this sealed the unity among the workers: from now on they constituted “a unified mass, animated by a single will and emotion. In everybody lived the same hatred for the Reichswehr and the will to annihilate it.”⁸² Colm goes on to explain how this volatile situation offered an opportunity for unscrupulous individuals. The war and its dire aftermath had prevented such characters from making conventional careers in established economic, political, or religious institutions. In the Ruhr rebellion, however, they could now realize their desire for recognition, their need for distinction, or their hunger for influence and power by stepping forth as spokesmen translating the furious passions of the masses into revolutionary action.⁸³

According to Gerhard Colm, this was the Ruhr insurrection: a mass united by shared hatred for a common enemy, giving rise to demagogic leaders knowing how to transform emotions into actions. Put differently, his interpretation is patterned on standard ideas of mass psychology. But this analysis is then framed by a sociology of the mass, and in this context the Ruhr rebellions come across as an example of “the mass” as a social formation arising when alternative social formations are either weak or absent. The mass, defined as a community of affect, is thus the result of circumstances under which human agency is socially mobilized, but without being bounded by more stable social forms, or what Weber would call “organizations” This is Colm’s sociological explanation in a nutshell: where organizations fail, the mass erupts. He does not see the mass as a negation of individuality, yet he still defines it as a negative phenomenon: the mass comes to designate social formations deviating from the examples of normality set up by institutionalized social bodies. Relying largely on Le Bon, Colm concludes by making a comparison between the mass and the organization: “The foundation of the ‘mass,’ and thus also of the demagogic leader, is affect; in the ‘organization,’ by contrast, deliberation rules”⁸⁴

Gerhard Colm’s early study of the Ruhr insurrections thus speaks of both the insight and the blindness typical of Weimar mass sociology. The active mass is analyzed on the model inherited from mass psychology, but it is no longer seen as a negation of individuality but as a social formation in its own right. As a social formation, however, it emerges only in situations where the more regular apparatuses of sociation fail. Set loose from the integrating powers of communities, associations, and organizations, the human subject will feel connected to his or her fellows only through whatever emotions they share, and these emotions are at once so vague and unpredictable that they escape organized means of political representation while they at the same time lend fuel to any leader who might give them a proper expression and target. This is why, in Weimar sociology, the mass would be posited as a symptom of historical crisis and social instability. Codifying this view in a 1931 dictionary of sociology, Colm asserted that “the action of the mass is an alarm bell of history.”⁸⁵

In its fourth sense, however, the mass did in fact count as a specific and objective social formation, Geiger argued. He here spoke of the revolutionary mass, devoting to it an original analysis that still stands out as the most advanced attempt in Weimar sociology to conceptualize the mass as a historical phenomenon with its own proper value and function.

Unlike other mass sociologists and mass psychologists who were satisfied to dwell on the general nature of crowd behavior, Geiger asked why “the mass” had become a sensitive topic. The reason, he stated, was of course that collective movements filled the streets and squares of Weimar Germany, usually appearing as agents of unrest, challenging the status quo and the political system. For Geiger, it was this mass that deserved sociological inquiry: “Let us thus call ‘mass’ that social entity, which is driven by the destructive-revolutionary and mobile multitude [Vielheit], and for which there is as yet no name.”⁸⁸

Geiger went on to firmly link the mass to the proletariat. What characterizes the proletariat? he asked. He argued that the proletariat was the product of what he called a destruction of value in modern society. A universal value, granting social cohesion by insuring that everybody felt part of the national community, was missing, and the proletariat was the social stratum in which this absence of shared values was made manifest.

In relating the emergence of the mass and of the proletariat to the transformation of values, Geiger relied on an influential mode of thought developed by Max Scheler and Heinrich Rickert that was also highly relevant for Max Weber. Diluted versions of this “philosophy of value” (Wertphilosophie) circulated throughout literature and public discourse. In this view, communities and cultures crystallize around the values shared by their members, which also explains why it is difficult for an outsider to understand and appreciate any society but his own. Values were here taken as objective phenomena, and since they were accessible primarily through emotional experiences, they served as the organizing nodes of human action and feeling. In any given society there is thus a set of core values, usually objectified in certain ideas, artifacts, and texts, that makes sense for all its people and that gives sense to social life in general. In its strongest form, this theory implied that the whole vast network of human relations, traditions, symbols, and experiences that shape social life eventually derives its meaning from a structure of values, of which all concrete social phenomena constitute so many objectivations.

In a stable and harmonious society, Geiger went on, social formations tend to correspond to a dominant value. This dominant value is represented or embodied by a ruling group in such a way that most members of the community are able to experience it as a source of meaning for their activities.⁸⁹ Periods of conflict and stress, by contrast, are typically caused by a mismatch between values and social institutions. It may be the case, for instance, that the elite or ruling classes have established political policies, hierarchies, and cultural habits that suppress the values of the majority. Or it may be the case that, because of social upheavals, great parts of the population simply lose belief in the values upheld by society’s dominant classes. Periods of revolution are illustrations of this, Geiger argued. A revolution entails the destruction of a social formation that has lost its social legitimacy and is now blocking the realization of emergent values, and the revolution also brings with it new formations that structure society around values adequate to new historical conditions.⁹⁰

This implies that revolutions are motored by social forces that are in touch with emergent values and that precisely for this reason find themselves in an antagonistic position vis-à-vis the social system that prevents their realization. In modern society, or at least in Geiger’s own present, this is the proletariat’s position. It stands in a negative relation both to the nation as idea and to those groups that uphold the ever more hollow values around which it is organized. Geiger thus derives his definition of the proletariat and the mass from his analytics of value: “As long as the lower strata appear as carriers of the national union of value [nationale Werteinheit], the term proletariat has no meaning. It gets that meaning only with the decomposition of the national community of value [nationale Wertgemeinschaft], that is, with the shattering of the validity of the national value contents [nationale Wertgehalten]”⁹¹

In Geiger’s theory, the proletariat consists of those who are excluded from experiencing and influencing the values around which society is organized. He asserts that the proletariat can be divided into three distinct forms: “(1) the proletariat as such—as an oppressed class—; (2) the organized proletariat; and (3) the proletarian mass. The oppressed proletariat stands in passive opposition to ruling social formations, the organized proletariat struggles constructively against them, while the mass, by contrast, terroristically-destructively rejects them”⁹²

Why is “the mass” necessarily destructive? This follows from Geiger’s idea of the revolutionary function of the proletariat. It has a dual task: to destroy existing social formations and to erect new ones that embody the emergent values around which a future community may be organized. Geiger’s definition of the organized proletariat, on the one hand, and the mass, on the other, is thus a reflection not of reality or of empirically observed political events but rather of a preconceived concept of the revolutionary process as its dual modality of value destruction and value construction makes him assume that there must be a corresponding two-faced agent behind it.

Of course, it is not self-evident that “the mass” must be restricted to the dirty work of demolition; why could it not also have a constructive function? However, given Geiger’s intellectual context, with its broad agreement on the minimum definition of “the mass” as a temporary social formation held together by emotions and manifesting itself through spontaneous action rather than organized political deliberation, the destructive task was really the only one that could come into question.

Previous analysts of the masses had identified crowd behavior as such. They had tried to disentangle the psychic mechanisms involved and to explore what caused them. Geiger’s decisive contribution was to identify the specific historical and sociological meaning of crowd behavior, demonstrating that “the mass” never emerges without reason but because social circumstances call it into being to fulfill its task in the revolutionary drama: “Its revolutionary function is destructive, its spirit is a spirit of annihilation” Or again: “The mass, through the collective ‘no’ by which it objects to existing formations—be it only in the form of non-cooperation—is the destructive factor of the revolution” Indeed, “the mass means eternal struggle, an eternal No to all social reality”⁹³

Geiger thus recognizes the historical necessity and social inevitability of the mass while at the same time depriving it of political intentionality. Or rather, it owns an intentionality, but one that is entirely negative. “Every mass is anarchistic,” he states:

Despite the differences between Geiger’s and Colm’s efforts to relate the theory of the masses to the revolutionary present of Weimar Germany, they eventually reach the same conclusion. “The spirit of the masses is a great No” says Geiger.⁹⁵ The mass signals emergency, says Colm. To both, the mass is, above all, absence of organization. At the outset amorphous and unknown, the mass remains what it always was: a social phenomenon impossible to define in other than negative terms. A figure of otherness, the mass as seen by Weimar sociology is thus comparable to the otherness examined by sociology’s sister discipline of anthropology, which sought to shed light and impose structure on the cultural Other. The critique of early-twentieth-century anthropology here applies to mass sociology as well. Both are, as the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe argues, “prisoners of [their] epistemological frames” and they “only unfold the consequences of their own postulates”⁹⁶

In interwar Germany, the “mass” was therefore a word without denotation. The function of the term was predominantly indexical: it named and it pointed. It named a savage part of humanity, and it pointed toward the wilderness, territory uncharted by the social scientist. To shift metaphors, the mass was a matter constantly out of focus, and once it was brought into focus, it ceased to be a mass and became a group or formation like any other in the table of formal sociology. Geiger spoke of “optical masses” calling to mind those situations where one is led to speak about masses only because one is too far away to discern people individually; they appear as masses in the field of vision. Yet he never ventured to ask whether the mass as such, that entity on which Weimar social theory spent so much research and reflection, was not in itself an optical illusion, a product not so much of history and society as of a certain manner of doing social analysis, which presupposed a perspective too far removed from the realities of the present.

Interestingly, Geiger also made a completely different attempt to approach the broad masses of the new German republic. In a pioneering effort of statistical sociology, what today is called sociometrics, he broke down the adult population of Germany into its constituent parts according to criteria of income, education, sex, profession, class, and the like.⁹⁷ No investigation of the masses can match the sense of detail and rigor that Geiger displayed in this effort to seek out each human unit in the population and insert his or her data in a tabulation that eventually provided a picture of the people as such. Surprisingly, the concept of “the mass” is never mentioned in this work. Despite this, or perhaps we should say, because of this, this work gives a far more nuanced and complex image of the so-called masses than any other sociological account of this period. The lesson is a paradoxical one. The most successful attempt to gather knowledge of the masses is found in a work of sociology in which the concept of “the mass” is absent. The best way to know the masses, it turns out, is to stop knowing them as masses—and this may at least partly explain why Geiger’s early sociometrics is one of the few works of Weimar sociology that continues to be read and studied in our own day, as a classic of interwar sociology.

Geiger’s study of the stratification of the German people is in this sense isomorphic with another path-breaking work of Weimar culture in a completely different genre, August Sander’s photographic atlas Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts. In this project, by now well known and often exhibited, Sander attempted to document all the professions, classes, and groups of the German people. He photographed individual human beings, on their own or in small groups, each placed against the background of his or her class, profession, ethnicity, or place of origin (see figures 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5). The different portraits were then sorted into types, and each portfolio of types was ascribed a particular place in a general table that was supposed to give a general overview of all groups and subgroups of Germany’s population. As Sander explained, the project “moves from earthbound men to the highest peaks of culture in finest differentiation, and then downwards to the idiots.”⁹⁸ Sander’s encyclopedic project was more ethnological than sociological and more inventorying than analytic. Perhaps precisely because of his organic and somewhat premodern approach, however, he shed light on the inevitable imprecision of sociology’s attempt to classify the rich and variegated collectives of modernity into a limited number of predetermined slots.

From Sander’s example we learn that the greatest strength of the sociological approach to the mass was also its decisive weakness. In line with the legacy of Simmel, sociology saw the mass as a particular form of sociation that should be understood as a social entity in its own right. This was a step forward from the mass psychologists, who tended to see masses wherever people gathered in groups and who always regarded such gatherings as a danger to the psychic sanity of the individual. However, when describing the mass as a specific form of sociation, sociology nonetheless tended to see it as a symptom of crisis, a social formation consisting of all who had been disconnected from more established social formations, or had never been successfully socialized by the ruling systems of values. Mass sociology thus failed to account for its object in other than negative terms. As Leon Bramson has argued, it was preoccupied with ideas of “social disorganization” and “social disintegration,” and the mass was the predictable outcome of such stories of atomization and decline.⁹⁹ Moreover, but with the exception of Gerhard Colm and Theodor Geiger, mass sociology also failed to account for its object as a historical agent. Rather, the mass was typically seen as a reservoir of people left behind, usually at the bottom of society, or as the broad segments of the population who took no active part in political and cultural life. Ultimately, the academic social sciences used the mass as a term for social life as it was lived at the margins of society. Since this life apparently threatened to disrupt or to evade the political system and its established ways of representing the interest of the nation, the mass was associated with social disintegration. To be more precise, the mass was not just associated with social disintegration; frequently, the mass was simply another name for chaos.

In the arts and literature of interwar Germany and Austria the masses were as dominating a concern as they were in sociology, psychology, and cultural philosophy. What writers and artists found so challenging, or even attractive, were the two aspects of the masses that sociology was unable to handle: the mass as an agent of social rejuvenation and of social collapse—or in a word, the mass as an agent of transformation. As we have seen, this phenomenon was beyond the reach of formal sociology and hence conceived of as the opposite of social rationality.

Literature kept exploring this borderland. In most aesthetic representations we find largely the same idea of the mass as a negative and destructive element as was typical of mass sociology, and they resonate with the apocalyptic overtones found elsewhere in Weimar culture. At the same time, however, they are counterpoints of sociology, for they bring us face to face with the groups and collectives that sociology kept at a distance. Here I will look at two highly influential literary accounts of masses and mass action, the first one by Hermann Broch, the second by Ernst Toller. Both deal with the German revolution of November 1918. As we have seen, sociologists like Wiese, Vleugels, Cohn, and Geiger approached the German revolution through figures of evasion and abstraction. Broch and Toller, by contrast, post themselves in its midst in order to diagnose the concrete experiences that it spawned.

If fire is the main “crowd symbol,” as Elias Canetti argued in Crowds and Power, Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is a truly awesome manifestation of the crowd. In the climactic chapter of the novel, four buildings are set ablaze. Just as Canetti watched the burning Palace of Justice in Vienna on 15 July 1927, Broch’s protagonists are spellbound by the sight of the collapsing dome of the medieval city hall as the building founders in a sea of fire. Sensing the sharp smell of smoke and turning his gaze toward the burning townscape, one character starts hallucinating about the last verdict. The title of the chapter—“‘Nobody sees the other in the darkness.’ Events of 3rd, 4th and 5th November 1918”—is an exact historical reference to the German Revolution, which was the breakthrough of democracy in Germany.¹⁰⁰ Broch, by contrast, regarded the revolution as the collapse of European civilization. The crisis had been in the making for a long time, in fact, ever since the Renaissance, at which point the erosion of social and existential values set in that subsequently accompanied the process of modernization and ended in the “mass insanity” of the interwar period, according to the Austrian novelist and critic.

In order to understand what Broch had in mind when analyzing the turmoil of 1918 and why he blamed the masses for it, it is instructive to relate his work to Simmel’s sociology, especially to Simmel’s analysis of how urban modernity had transformed mental life. The German sociologist detected a growing gap between what he called the individual level and the social level. A process of social rationalization gradually stripped the human subject of his or her traditional ways of relating to the surrounding community. The specialization of life and work tended to rob the individual of “all progress, spirituality and value,” Simmel contended, to the extent that the human being was ultimately reduced “to a grain of dust as against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces.”¹⁰¹

The undoing of the relation of individual and society was Broch’s major topic, too, but his analysis differed from Simmel’s. In order to clarify the causes of the disintegration Broch developed not a sociology but an idealist philosophy of value, or Wertphilosophie, that is distinctive of The Sleepwalkers, the trilogy of novels that he published from 1930 through 1932, and that he then continued to develop in a long academic treatise throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, posthumously published as Massenwahntheorie (Theory of mass insanity). In this work, the decomposition of values in modern society is directly linked to the rise of the masses and the emergence of fascism. However, when tracing Broch’s ideas of the masses back in time, we discover that they were triggered by the revolutionary events in the fall of 1918. His first text on mass insanity was an open letter published in December that year. Entitled “Die Straße” (The street), it expressed deep disgust not only for the mass manifestations that by then were a dominating factor in German and Austrian social life but also for the organized workers’ movement as such.¹⁰²

In The Sleepwalkers, Broch’s theory is presented by one of the minor characters, Bertrand Müller, a philosopher who delivers an essay on “the disintegration of values” that serves as a running commentary on the historical events related in the narrative. The remaining characters embody the existential and social consequences of this process of erosion. We can easily relate these consequences to the historical paralysis that, in Broch’s view, characterized modern European society and that he saw as the first signs of mass insanity, and he endorsed such an interpretation of his work. However, the novel depicts and symbolizes the everyday signs and acts of civilizational change and psychic deterioration in such richness and intensity that the narrative by far exceeds the theory of value that it was supposed to illustrate. The Sleepwalkers thus presents a story of decline and fall, and it does so from several points of view and in a variety of genres—philosophical discourse, historical chronicle, bildungsroman, psychological introspection, lyrical ballad, drama, small-town farce, and journalism. Each genre offers a different perspective on the cultural collapse culminating in 1918. But the different strands of the story never fall into line. What results is a heterogeneous narrative that mirrors the incoherence of modern life, its fragmentation into several different value spheres without any organizing value that would bring unity to the world and meaning to existence.

Simmel and his heirs had put their trust in conceptual clarification and sociological inquiry. Broch, by contrast, shunned sociological explanations of historical events and human actions. He looked to the arts, especially the novel, as the sole remaining hope of integrating the chaotic elements of the present so that they could be understood, their causes clarified, and their consequences avoided. Moreover, Simmel and the sociologists of Weimar Germany had investigated various forms of sociation, recognizing that modernity entailed new forms of social interaction that they all associated with the masses; Broch, for his part, invented a literary language able to register what happens inside a mind that is slowly disconnected from communal horizons of meaning and left to its private ruses, until it finally succumbs to the plague of mass insanity.

Broch went so far as to state that a culture or epoch proved its vitality by its capacity to express itself in a certain symbol, aesthetic style or manner of ornamentation. Only in this way could the people of an epoch establish the inner coherence of their value system, demonstrating that each being and object belonged to a totality, for which the single ornament—the detail sealing the formal unity of a building, a poem, or a painting—served as the ultimate symbol. Sometimes, this idealism led Broch to remarkable conclusions, as when he argued that the power of the Habsburg Empire was entirely dependent on the symbolic power of the crown.¹⁰³ That modern European culture was incapable of creating a persuasive aesthetic style, or that the modernist architects of Austria and Germany rejected the ornament as empty decoration, was a sure sign of the disintegration of values, according to Broch. He established a firm link between the aesthetic level and the political level, arguing that an epoch “that can no longer give birth to ornament” is also one that is “completely under dominion of death and hell”¹⁰⁴

It appears that Broch, when writing these lines at the beginning of the 1930s, never recognized the possibility that the modern epoch had perhaps already created its own art of ornament. Siegfried Kracauer had argued as much in his landmark essay of 1927, “The Mass Ornament” in which he showed that the mass itself gave rise to a new kind of ornament. As I will discuss in a later chapter, Kracauer described how at great gatherings human bodies could be turned into ornamental patterns that could be manipulated and viewed from a distance, in ways that corresponded to how people where drilled and rearranged according to the needs of the capitalist economy and the modern state. There is nothing in Broch’s work, however, to suggest that he had digested Kracauer’s argument. While it is true that Broch proclaimed that people without connection to values became particles in a great human mass, he did not follow Kracauer’s hint that these mass particles may well be reorganized into some new pattern. Broch insisted on the sheer formlessness and lack of expressivity of the mass.

Explaining the intentions behind his novel, Hermann Broch stated: “What we experience is the destruction of the great rational systems of value. And the catastrophe of humanity that we experience is most likely nothing but this destruction. A catastrophe of muteness.”¹⁰⁵ The Sleepwalkers is conceived as a novel about the catastrophe and the forces causing it. It begins in the 1880s among the aging nobility in the Prussian heartland, and it ends with the November revolution of 1918, in which the old ruling class is defeated and the working classes assert their power, although the only ones gaining from the upheaval are ruthless individualists like Wilhelm Huguenau, the main character of the third part of the trilogy, who participates in the social and political events only to reap individual profit. As Broch’s narrative takes us through four decades of history from the booming 1880s to the chaotic postwar period we come to share the characters’ anxiety as they experience the unmaking of their social fabric. Among the members of the older generation, personified by Pasenow, the protagonist of the first novel, values are internalized and function as a source of motivation. In the turn-of-the-century generation, represented by Esch, the bookkeeper turned newspaper editor at the center of the second part, the same values are seen as oppressive conventions that one must break or escape from in order to realize one’s own millennial ideals in Nietzschean fashion. As for the members of the postwar generation, they learn from their experiences in the trenches that they better adapt to a world without any values other than those serving their own needs.

As told by Broch, the history of European culture thus inevitably approaches a stage where men and women lose touch with all systems of value. Gradually and imperceptibly, they are deprived of that inner sense of orientation that had previously enabled judgment and behavior in accord with ethical standards and social norms. Instead, human action is increasingly guided by primary impulses of self-preservation. The rationale for action and communication becomes, in Broch’s language, “individualistic” Wilhelm Huguenau, the antihero of the last part of the trilogy, personifies this spirit. He is immune to ethical and political values yet prepared to support any value that can be converted to private riches, and hence happy to benefit from the misery of others. Broch presents Huguenau as the archetype of individualism.

What makes Huguenau important for our purposes, however, is not that he embodies individualism but that he is also, and because of his individualism, a man of the masses. Huguenau’s triumphal moment arrives in November 1918, which unleashes his individualistic character. The novel describes him as “the passive revolutionary” indifferent to the revolution’s political goals yet actively taking advantage of the moment to further his own interests.¹⁰⁶ Eternal deserteur from collective efforts and model entrepreneur of his own future, Huguenau is a personification of the Weimar zeitgeist. Had Weimar sociologists looked for an example of their notion of the latent mass, none would have suited them better than he.

Of course, it seems paradoxical that the moment of individualism is also that of the masses and that both coincide with the revolutionary turning point of German history. For Broch, a firm logic underlies this process. “The final indivisible unit in the disintegration of values is the human individual” states Bertrand Müller as he sums up the action of 1918. He goes on to spell out the ominous consequences of this triumph of the individual:

The final product of the historical process chronicled by Broch is a human being “liberated” from all communal values, “der wertfreie Mensch” who accepts no gods except those endorsed by his or her “private theology” In short, it is the individual. At the same time, however, the final product is the mass. For in Broch’s theory, the mass is the sum total of all those who truly have become individuals, a social aggregate made up by everybody who has been disconnected from the value systems that once regulated human life and who must now live according to their own instincts. Hence, the masses are defined by an immunity to rational values and a willingness to act irrationally.¹⁰⁸

“The mass” served Broch as an objective designation of the condition of Wertfreiheit. A social world structured by transcendental values assigning to each being a specific position and function within the whole was now replaced by a world of disconnected singularities existing in a state of immanence without organizing pattern. Society turned into its opposite: that is what the mass was about. Broch’s notion of the mass was thus not devised as a historical or social concept. Although his conception was influenced by observations of postwar conditions—unemployment, starvation, social conflict, demobilization of armies, mobilization of militias, the rise of populist demagogues—he was careful to point out that the mass was the result of processes affecting the human condition in general. In his theory, then, the mass is a metaphysical notion, designating a thoroughly atomized world, the end product of the decomposition of the value systems that once provided for community. Although people without material and social security are the first ones to be swallowed by the mass, the mass is not restricted to the proletarian condition. It consists of all people, no matter what their social rank, who are placed at an existential Nullpunkt characterized by anxiety and fear.

Anxiety and fear? Yes, because without connection to any system of values, people have no ability to make sense of the irrational side of human existence. The world appears as hostile, silent, and devoid of meaning—sinnlos. Everybody stands face to face with his or her own lonely being. All are turned into strangers to one another and into outcasts vis-à-vis the social world they once knew.

Now we see why Huguenau, the triumphant individualist, is also a creature of the masses and why he comes into his own in the destructive phase of the revolution, where he is free to commit any act without sensing the consequences. In the midst of revolutionary turmoil, Huguenau first pays visit to the wife of his antagonist, Esch, and violates her on the living-room sofa. “Save my husband” she cries as he is leaving. Huguenau shouts back, to comfort her, “I’ll look after him” Soon enough he finds Esch and follows him down an alley, only to stab him in the back with his bayonet. A few days later, he swindles the widow, whom he has just raped, of the inheritance from her husband, whom he has just killed. Having committed these atrocities, Huguenau concludes, like the Lord on the seventh day of creation: “All was well [Es war alles gut]” The narrator adds: “Huguenau had committed a murder. He forgot it afterwards; it never came into his mind again”¹⁰⁹

Broch renders the November revolution of 1918 as a monstrous event. Revolutions, he asserts, are “insurrections of evil against evil, insurrections of the irrational against the rational, insurrections of the irrational masquerading as extreme logical reasoning against rational institutions complacently defending themselves by an appeal to irrational sentiment”¹¹⁰ The agent of the revolution, or rather, the tool that revolution uses, is not the masses as a collective agent but the masses as atomized and agonized individuals. As Broch explains in The Sleepwalkers, the instrument of the revolution is “the isolated human being, stripped of values, [der einsam wertfreie Mensch] … and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values [der wertfreie Mensch] who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence”¹¹¹

In this sense, the revolution is the social form—or formlessness—adequate to great numbers of people placed at the zero-degree level where all values are voided. It is their only remaining way of mastering the world, so as to force everybody and everything to comply with their own irrational instincts. The revolution is ultimately an event marked by destruction, aggression, and violence, for it stems from an inability to see self and others as subjected to one overarching ideal and instead posits the self as the only remaining value. In Broch’s diagnosis, the revolution was thus akin to the new spirit of objectivity that characterized the culture of Weimar Germany, “die neue Sachlichkeit.” It was a culture that rejected values in the name of sobriety, concreteness, and objectivity. It implied a mechanical attitude to the world and an instrumental treatment of fellow human beings. Everything and everybody had value only insofar as they contributed to the individual’s self-preservation and self-assertion. At least, this is what Broch claimed, as he let Huguenau, a man liberated from all values, occupy center stage of the third and final part of his novel, entitled “Huguenau, oder die Sachlichkeit”

In his theory of mass behavior, Broch coined a word for this predicament: Dämmerzustand. It was a condition of twilight in which the light of reason was extinguished. The condition is evoked by the title of the culminating chapter, “Nobody sees the other in the darkness” and also by the title of the novel itself: Sleepwalkers. Darkness has fallen; men and women are alive but live as though they were asleep, groping their way without light to guide their actions, reacting on instinct to preserve themselves in a world filled with hostile powers, and fearing every signal from the external world. Marguerite, one of the characters, is an example: “The sleepwalking of the infinite has seized upon her and never more will let her go”¹¹²

Broch attributed great explanatory value to his notion of Dämmerzustand.¹¹³ The term has the advantage of evoking the dozy state of an individual on the verge of succumbing to delusions while at the same time it conjures up a twilight atmosphere of some more epochal doom, as Oswald Spengler had prophesized in his best-selling work The Decline of the West. In this condition, people sink into a dreamlike state where unconscious instincts dominate their behavior and social norms lose validity. The ego, or the I, disintegrates along with the values that are supposed to keep it in place as an organizing center of control and rationality. The person becomes “ego-less” (ichlos), as one commentator puts it.¹¹⁴ In this condition of “sleepwalking” people are prone to be afflicted by “mass insanity” as they easily come under the spell of irrational value systems.¹¹⁵

Broch spent the greater part of his later career developing an analysis of this collective disorder. It was an urgent task, he insisted. In their twilight predicament, masses of disconnected human atoms desperately sought to escape their atomization and the ensuing disorientation by intoxicating themselves with any consoling idea that was offered or by subjecting themselves to authorities showing a way out of their misery and loneliness. “Remember how gloriously drunk we all were in August 1914,” says an old military physician in The Sleepwalkers, alluding to the nationalist enthusiasm released at the outbreak of the war. “It seems to me as though that was the first and the last time that people felt a real sense of fellowship” The doctor longs for “some new drunkenness, … morphia or patriotism or communism or anything else that makes a man drunk … give me something to make me feel we’re all comrades again”¹¹⁶

Elaborating his theory of the destruction of values and the rise of the masses into ever finer detail and greater complexity, Broch came to develop a political theory of fascism. He looked upon the Nazi government and World War II with wide-eyed terror, observing how the 1930s turned into a far more powerful illustration of mass insanity than the situation of 1918 that he had rendered in his novel. In the mid-1930s he set to work on a new novel in which he told the same story about ethical and social disintegration as he had done in The Sleepwalkers, but this time with explicit references to Hitler and fascist mass hysteria.¹¹⁷ The novel was not completed, partly because Broch despaired about literature’s possibilities to capture the historical situation. By the end of the 1930s he turned away from fiction and devoted himself to an ambitious study on the psychology of politics. Unlike Weimar sociologists, Broch never disavowed the critical relation of theory and history. On the contrary, every fiber of his oeuvre—and especially Massenwahntheorie, which he was never able to complete—is marked by a sense of political responsibility that turned his career into an act of defiance against the totalitarian regimes of his time.

On Hermann Broch’s own account, his major achievements belonged to the areas of ethics and political psychology, and he placed his novels in the service of his ethical convictions. He construed an idealist discourse about the disintegration of values in which he never ceased believing; in addition, he developed a theory of the mass and mass hysteria by which he sought to account for the consequences of that disintegration. An idealist, Broch had no other cure for mass insanity than powerful ideals. If the masses longed for guidance and had been spellbound by false authorities, they should be offered true and rational ones instead. Whence would they come? Broch first placed his hopes in the wisdom of poets and writers; then in the League of Nations, which he sought to provide with a new resolution that would revitalize its mandate; and finally in the liberal ideas of the United States. He demanded that these powers deliver “global peace” and “total democracy” according to numerous proposals that he drafted toward the end of his career. These drafts remained utopian blueprints, disconnected from the brute realities of power and economy.¹¹⁸

The main weakness of Broch’s theory is this idealist foundation, the Platonic conviction that social order presupposes the existence of universal values to which all citizens pledge allegiance by second nature. Did such an order ever exist? Broch regarded medieval Christianity as a golden age in which compelling religious values along with the scholastic system of rational deduction offered men and women a centralized system of value (Zentralwertsysteme), which enabled a “harmonious cultural development where the individual was given the attainable maximum of material and psychic security”¹¹⁹ Like many other thinkers of interwar Europe, Broch regarded the contemporary situation as one of steep decline, the greatest symptom being the emergence of fascist mass delusions. Broch understood these delusions as collective somnambulism and explained it as the consequence of the disappearance of a central value system. Being the end product of a process that had destroyed all universals, the mass now emerged as a new universal condition of valuelessness.

Having identified the mass as the universal human condition in modernity, Broch went on to examine its psychological, ethical, aesthetic, and political consequences. In this effort, he relied heavily on existing mass psychology, copying into his own theory most of the weaknesses and prejudices of the discourse founded by Gustave Le Bon.

Broch’s theory of the mass is thus based on a philosophy of history that was fairly common among intellectuals of his period. They posited modernity as a protracted period of decline and human alienation, and to prove that their story was right they pointed at the catastrophe of World War I, the mechanization and instrumentalization of capitalist society, and the depravity of modern life in general. Among conservative thinkers this view led to a nostalgic longing for the old times. Among radical thinkers, it bred a utopian urge to reestablish social harmony by inventing a socialist system, or what Michael Löwy has termed a revolutionary romanticism.¹²⁰ The revolutionary right, for its part, hailed Hitler as a leader able to reestablish political authority and guide the Germans toward a future beyond social strife.

Broch no doubt belonged to the utopian flank, and he worked harder than most for an international community based on justice. What set him apart from ordinary liberals and leftists, however, was his Platonic faith, according to which history and human action were meaningful only insofar as they were enveloped by a horizon of fixed values. To him, it was indisputable that the basic problem of modernity was the disintegration of values, which had reduced men and women to mere particles in a crowd. It was just as indisputable, therefore, that the right solution was to construe a new system of values, which would restore a sense of coherence and belonging to the disintegrating polities of Europe.

Broch’s postulation of the mass as a universal predicament proved more original and fruitful in the aesthetic area than in the ethical and political domains. By bringing ideas of the mass and mass insanity in proximity with narrative writing, Broch attained two goals. First, on the formal level, the suggestion of the Dämmerzustand as the pervasive mood of German society allowed him to bring unity to his complicated narrative, integrating all the discrepant parts of the historical panorama into a comprehensive narrative totality. The organizing mechanisms of this totality were the notions of the Dämmerzustand and mass insanity, which allowed Broch to construe every mind, action, or person as a particular instance of the same historical condition. In order to probe deeper into history, Broch’s novel could keep inventing new situations and characters, without the narrative ever losing the panoramic feature that ensured that its events and characters would refract the same catastrophic light, in which all objects and beings stood revealed as members of one single species doomed for extinction. If Broch’s mass theory failed as theory, it proved all the more fruitful as narrative, that is, as an aesthetic device making disclosed layers of the psyche available for literary representation.

For the second and more important goal that Broch attained was the discovery of a mode of writing able to adequately render how each human being experiences “mass insanity” in his or her own particular way. This could not be done by bringing in psychological models and general categories, for that would have turned the novel into a mere illustration of theory. In order to compellingly show how the disintegration of values and the onset of mass insanity had transformed the human condition, Broch had to stay within the bounds of individual experience and perception. He resolved this problem by positing a new object of aesthetic exploration and by inventing a prose to capture it. The object in question is the state of being that he called “sleepwalking” and, later on, in his theoretical work, “Dämmerzustand.” Both terms name an area of interference between the human psyche and politics, a juncture of history and psychology. In the words of Ernestine Schlant, “Sleepwalking can be viewed as an individual psychodrama on an unconscious level played against the social and historical background. It is a state of openness in which the desires and fears of the protagonists are enacted without inhibition. Due to its sheer irrationalism, sleepwalking can never become the basis for a new integration of values. Unless it can be channeled into rational structures and larger systems, it remains an unbound, value-free, anarchic force”¹²¹

In Broch’s view, the novelistic rendering of these unconscious yet historically conditioned states of being served the purpose of elucidating the more general phenomenon of mass insanity. Sleepwalking and Dämmerzustand were the proper mode of existence for humans that had turned into mass. However, once these modes of existence were given literary form, they exceeded the ideological or theoretical figure of the mass, which now appeared as a mere pretext for a far more rewarding enterprise. Broch’s theory of mass insanity should thus be recognized less as systematic doctrine or theory than as narrated mass psychology, in which transformations of human subjectivity and affect are registered and conveyed and explained as effects of social stress and historical danger.¹²² No theory of the mass can contain the infinite variations in which Broch explores the psychology of sleepwalking. At the same time, he would perhaps never have felt compelled to probe the psychic reactions on German history with such precision, had he not been convinced that his exploration served a more general purpose, the establishment of the laws and qualities of mass behavior.

Interestingly, Broch’s metaphors of Schlafwandel and Dämmerzustand resonate with terms Walter Benjamin chose to account for the same historical predicament. In his Arcades Project from the 1930s, Benjamin compared the human predicament under capitalism, especially after its totalitarian turn in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, to the state of sleeping and dreaming. His theory of history, as well as his critical writing more generally, aimed to serve as an alarm clock for this collective, or society of sleepwalkers. With Broch’s picture of how historical events actuate a sensory deprivation, which sends everyone into a twilight world where they lose sense of time, place, and direction, we should juxtapose Benjamin’s concept of “Awakening” as the only proper way of emancipating oneself from an oppressive history. Yet the similarity of metaphors also demonstrates the points at which their interpretations of the interwar period diverged: where Broch saw an unleashing of irrational political passions that would eventually explode in the night of fascism, Benjamin observed political passions capable of igniting a revolution.

In Hermann Broch: social destruction and death. In other writers: social destruction and rebirth. In all literature of the Weimar era, the mass is an image of society’s border zone, whence ominous signs of social change emerge. A strange phenomenon, this mass—neither included in society nor fully excluded from it, it elicits deep anxiety among interwar European intellectuals, who yet fail to describe it except through negations. If we want to understand the position of the mass in mainstream culture and discourse of the 1920s, Ernst Toller’s drama Masse Mensch offers a final lesson.¹²³

In this masterpiece of politically committed expressionism, Toller attempted to sort out the reasons for the defeat of the socialist republic that governed Munich and Bavaria for some months in 1918 and 1919, part of that time under Toller’s own leadership. He drafted the first version of his play in October 1919, at the beginning of his five-year term in the Niederschönenfeld prison to which he was condemned for high treason because of his involvement in the government of the red republic. He did not seek only to show the reasons for the failure of the revolution. His self-proclaimed aim was to work through his lingering sense of guilt for having engaged in an armed struggle that had proved unfruitful and had caused the death of innocents.

Immediately after its successful staging at the Volksbühne in Berlin in the fall of 1921, Masse Mensch stirred controversy. Many saw it as a powerful example of an emerging socialist theater. Everybody also recognized that under Jürgen Fehling’s directorship the play inaugurated a new tone on the German stage. The Berlin premiere counts as the birth of German stage expressionism.¹²⁴ Meanwhile, Toller’s left-wing and communist admirers were skeptical. Did not Masse Mensch exalt the virtues of individual conscience and spirituality over collective forms of political organization and action? The play showed that Toller was lost for Moscow, these critics argued.¹²⁵

To be sure, Masses Man, as the title is translated into English, dwells on none of the obvious historical circumstances that doomed Munich’s peasant, worker, and soldier republic from its first morning. A glance at the real historical situation would reveal a frustrated and exhausted population divided between a nervous bourgeoisie and an impatient working class, all of them suffering from a severe shortage of food and supplies and many of them distrustful of their new leadership, which harbored conflicting views as to the aims of the revolution and was never able to organize a proper defense, and which was therefore fated to be crushed by the enemy’s overpowering military might. Masses Man disregards these facts, however, as it seeks the reason for defeat in a metaphysical conflict between two protagonists: man and mass, Mensch and Masse. The revolution fails because these two are at odds.

As Toller’s drama depicts human history as a struggle between Man and the Masses, it cannot but conclude that human history is an unnerving and tragic affair. The individual cannot take part in mass politics without betraying his or her ethical standards, and as the suffering masses seek to realize their vision of peace, justice, and community they must first undo its oppressors in a violent struggle that undermines those very aims. Putatively a play about “the social revolution of the twentieth century” Masses Man thus transforms the concrete events and agents of German history into an agonistic struggle between opposing ethical principles.

This abstract view was in line with Toller’s conception of expressionist drama. In 1929, looking back at the situation after the war, Toller discussed the expressionist form of his first plays, Die Wandlung (Transformation, completed in 1918) and Masse Mensch. Expressionism, he argued, wanted “to change the surrounding world by giving it a more just and luminous face. Reality should be reconceived and reborn in light of the idea”¹²⁶ This is why expressionist theater had to discard realistic characters, seeking instead to depict universal human beings in all their nakedness. Expressionist theater presented types, not individuals.

True to the ideas of expressionism, Masses Man avoids particularity and identity. The roles contain no lifelike people but characters such as “Woman” “Man” “Worker,” “Soldier,” “Banker” “Priest” “Guard” and “Prisoner” (131/66). Toller’s depersonalization of history goes even further as he also populates the stage with “shadows” and, above all, that supremely paradoxical personification of anonymity who is the mouthpiece of the masses, “The Nameless” Furthermore, the drama is set in a dreamland of abstraction where each situation and statement is pressed for some timeless truth. We are faced not so much with a specific description of the social revolution, much less with an account of the Munich events, but with a dramatization of la condition humaine. The air of universality is heightened by a series of expressionist special effects, masterfully developed in Fehling’s production. In the rotation of scenes, dream pictures interrupt the scenes of the main action, which themselves have the atmosphere of a nightmare. Most scenes are set in late evening or at night, eliciting the impression that the spaces where the workers prepare to strike are oppressive and impenetrable by daylight. In one of the dream pictures, stage directions instruct that the room be “boundless” (“unbegrenzt”), stressing the transcendent thrust of the story (172/99).

Toller creates what Hermann Broch called a Dämmerzustand. In Masse Mensch action takes place in a twilight world without firm boundaries or contours, where no one discerns the right course of action or the true motifs and identities of the agents seeking charge of the revolution. The decisive actions and turning points of the drama take place off-stage and are often reported third-hand by messengers who enter and exit at high pace, leaving the main protagonists to argue about the meaning of the history that unfolds around them, but beyond their control. Gradually, two alternatives emerge, one embodied by The Woman, the other by The Nameless. Neither one is a human being of flesh and blood. Both personify principles and both remain nameless throughout the drama. True, The Woman is also listed as Irene Sonja L in the list of roles, but not in the script’s main text.¹²⁷ The wife of a government official and from a bourgeois family, The Woman crosses the class divide to join in the spontaneous protests of the proletariat. After six years of war we have had enough, she declares. While The Woman dismisses both capitalism and communism, she also hesitates to support the revolution as it inevitably implies violence. A humanitarian and pacifist, her preferred path to progress is one of social reform and education. The Nameless, for his part, thinks her naive and calls for armed struggle against the ruling classes.

Who is the agent of the revolution? Which values emerge from the struggle? What are the legitimate means through which these values may be furthered? These questions, raised in the dialogue between the antagonists, ultimately converge in one enigma: Who are the masses, and what do they want? The conflict between The Woman and The Nameless, which first appears as a conflict between ethics and politics, is ultimately translated into a conflict between the human and the mass.

According to The Nameless, “Masses are revenge for the injustice of centuries. Masses are revenge!” To which The Woman responds: “Halt, you’re crazy from the struggle. I have to make you stop. Masses should be a people bound by love. Masses should be community” (167/95). The Nameless is of a different meaning:

THE NAMELESS: How far you are from the truth!

Masses are strength! …

Largely, but not completely, the opinions voiced by The Woman conform to those of Toller, who rejected violence as a political tool and embraced a humanitarian and pacifist program of social improvement, while the ideas expressed by The Nameless correspond fairly well to the Bolshevik leader Eugen Leviné, who competed with Toller for the leadership of the central council of the red republic.¹²⁸ A member of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD), Toller had agreed to join the central council in the hope that all elements of the progressive majority could be brought together to peacefully collaborate toward a socialist commune. However, when it became clear that the social democrats in Bavaria’s regional assembly and Berlin’s central government disproved of red communes—or “soviets” as they were often called—the republic had no real prospect of survival as sections of the regular army approached Munich, along with private militias paid to crush the rebels. Having entered the revolution as a socialist pacifist, Ernst Toller ended up as commander in a ferocious military combat.¹²⁹ His memoirs, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (I Was a German), recount his involvement in the republic all the way to its defeat in May 1919. “I felt at odds with myself. I had always believed that Socialists, despising force, should never employ it for their own ends. And now I myself had used force and appealed to force. I who hated bloodshed had caused blood to be shed”¹³⁰

According to Toller, then, what demanded aesthetic depiction and analysis was not the historical and political crisis as such but rather the upsetting ethical dilemma into which the crisis threw him: “What awaits a person, I ask myself, who wants to intervene in the course of the world, who thus becomes politically active, if he wants to realize the moral idea which he considers just in the struggle of the masses?”¹³¹ Was Max Weber correct, he asks, in saying that those who are unprepared to meet evil with violent resistance must live like Francis of Assisi and withdraw from the world into the realm of the divine? Toller’s self-questioning brings him to address the nature of the masses:

Must the man of action always be dogged by guilt? Always? Or, if he does not wish to be guilt-ridden, must he be destroyed? Are the masses impelled by moral ideas, are they not rather driven by distress and hunger? Would they still be able to win if they renounce force for the sake of an idea? Is the human being not individual and mass at one and the same time? Does the struggle between individual and mass take place in society only, and not inside the human being as well? As an individual, he acts according to the moral idea that he finds just. He will serve that idea, even as the world is wrecked. As a mass he will be driven by social impulses, and he wants to reach the goal, even if he must renounce the moral idea. This contradiction appeared irresolveable to me, as I had been experiencing it as a man of action and was attempting to shape it. This is how my drama Masse Mensch came into being.¹³²

What is remarkable here is not primarily the ethical dilemma outlined in the passage, which is real enough. In a famous address by Max Weber in 1919, the sociologist had argued that the man of politics must carefully weigh “an ethics of intention” against “an ethics of responsibility” and must be prepared to use both compromise and—when judgment proscribed—violence, although this would “endanger the salvation of the soul.”¹³³ Toller found it hard to accept Weber’s position and sought for a line of political action in harmony with the Kantian command—always do in such a way that your act may be upheld as universal law—which, however, ran up against its limits as soon as the question of violence was posed.

Yet what is even more remarkable is that this ethical dilemma so overwhelmed Toller that it came to structure his entire view of “the social revolution of the twentieth century” As some critics immediately remarked, this tendency to transform the political struggle into an ethical dilemma distorts the historical process, to the extent that Masses Man takes a reactionary turn, discarding political strategy of any kind and instead celebrating the martyrdom of The Woman, who sacrifices her life in order not to compromise her ideal.¹³⁴

More remarkable still is that Toller’s depiction of the mass radiates the same anxiety and terror that pervaded most other representations of the masses in Weimar culture. The masses are rendered as amorphous, boundless, impulsive, and violent. The masses assault the ethical qualities that the drama poses as its ideal. They are thus explicitly posited as the negation of everything that the drama associates with humanity, der Mensch. At once unhuman, nonhuman, ahuman, and prehuman, Toller’s masses may be posited as an agent of destruction but also as a source of becoming or as a depository of the will to power. Fuel and engine of the revolution, the masses may move in any direction, crushing any obstacle in their way. Needless to say, they therefore need someone to guide, steer, and lead—a chairman, a comandante, a Führer.

Should we be surprised to find such a negative view of the masses in a prominent left-wing writer and revolutionary activist who is often seen as the very model of politically committed literature?¹³⁵ Perhaps. But it also demonstrates the omnipresence of the fantasy of the irrational crowd in this period. Yet precisely through its aesthetic transformation of the real historical event, including all its particular groups, personalities, events and controversies, into an abstract conflict involving a fixed set of “types” and “ideas” battling one another on the dream stage of expressionism, until they all eventually line up for a great showdown between the principle of humanity and the principle of the mass, we begin to see what the masses ultimately were in Weimar culture. The masses were an allegory, in the strong sense of the word: an allegory or screen image evoked by the need to mark powers of change that appeared to govern the world of modernity and that at the same time resisted both symbolic and political representation.

Put differently, the masses connoted a dimension of social existence that caused fear and anxiety precisely because it disrupted the horizon of values and meanings through which class and gender identities had until then been affirmed, cultural hierarchies secured, and social order constituted. In this sense, “the mass” could be taken as a term for what in Weimar society was experienced as the real in some Lacanian sense. The mass referred to phenomena that could not be assimilated into the symbolic order. An even better explanation of the function of the mass allegory in Weimar culture is perhaps provided by the theory of allegory that Walter Benjamin, of the same generation as Toller, developed toward the end of World War I. In his work on the German play of lamentation, or Trauerspiel, Benjamin claimed that all elements of baroque theater ultimately could be posited as signs in a metaphysical text, to which poets and playwrights appealed as they tried to make sense of a historical period marked by instability and warfare, the seventeenth-century Europe of the Thirty Years’ War. As Benjamin argued, the death emblem and other elements of baroque theater, including the court feuds and savage wars of succession that dominate its intrigues, should all be read as a message concerning the vanity of worldly fame. No matter what signs of success, and no matter what aspirations and achievements the tragic drama put on stage, they would soon disclose their rotten core, thus displaying death and decay as the ultimate telos of human history. Behind each living being, a rattling skeleton and an empty skull; behind each dwelling, palace, or castle, a desolate ruin or a gravestone, sunk down in the mud and covered with vine. The more the baroque drama seemed to exalt a life of action, the more it proved the power of death to undo all worldly achievements.¹³⁶

In Benjamin’s view, this traffic of meaning was regulated by baroque allegory, which converted all signs of life and growth into implacable proofs of decomposition. The skull was an allegorical representation of death, but so was the battling chevalier as he eventually served to remind the audience of the brevity of human conquests. But Benjamin’s main point was not that the baroque allegory showed the futility of worldly action. Precisely in showing a world under the spell of vanitas, baroque allegory proved the necessity of the divine as the sole redeeming power. As Benjamin wrote, the allegorical “intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.”¹³⁷ Allegory said: if human history has any meaning, this meaning is granted only by the divine because human history in itself has but the meaning given unto it by death.

If the function of baroque allegory was to support belief in divine resurrection in a world that piled corpse upon corpse, we should ask what meaning to attribute to the mass as the preeminent allegory of interwar modernity. Benjamin’s dialectical approach offers an insight into this process as well. For if baroque allegory portrayed life as death in order to prove the possibility of heavenly redemption, so it may be argued that the mass allegory portrays society as ruled by the masses in order to prove the necessity of some authoritarian intervention, which would reinstitute organization and discipline in social life.

These descriptions, jammed into the simple, denominative clauses typical of Toller’s expressionist style, imply that “the masses” allow for virtually any kind of definition and interpretation. It is logical, then, that the only interpretation of the identity of the masses that remains stable throughout Masse Mensch is the one that posits the mass as a negation of identity. “Foules sans nom!”—“Masses without name!”—exclaimed Charles Baudelaire and, after him, Victor Hugo, in different poems.¹³⁸ Its echo resounds in Toller’s drama: “Masse ist Namenlos!” (88). The only true representative of the masses is therefore that figure of namelessness who serves as mouthpiece for the revolutionary uprising and as the antagonist of “The Human” A peculiar figure, The Nameless is both a character acting in the play and a representative of others whose lives he enacts. He is both singular and plural, both mass and its representative, both an individual “I” and at the same time a “we” or “they.” The culminating point, where these incompatible modalities fuse, comes as The Nameless exclaims: “I am Masses!” [“Ich bin Masse!”]. A linguistic form used to profess an identity (“I am … so and so”) is inverted into a confession of the absence of identity. In saying “I am masses,” The Nameless actually says that he is “a nameless namelessness.” A singular collectivity, or a plural individuality? The point is that both he and the mass prefigure social formations for which no terminology or categories exist. The Nameless is the allegorical personification of the mass, but this mass is in its turn the great allegory of the Weimar republic.

In sorting out the logic of Ernst Toller’s drama we begin to understand how dense and mobile the semantics of the mass was in Weimar culture. Yet although the semantics was complex, the logic was as simple as the logic of allegory, which allowed the mass to be interpreted in many ways while still retaining its ability to signify some terrifying “truth” about society and history as it was lived in this epoch. This also explains the common conviction that the person who was able to interpret the mass allegory, who was in touch with the deeper sentiments of the masses, would also know the right way of representing, organizing, or even mobilizing the social body. Solving the riddle of the masses was no less than solving the riddle of society. “The masses” thus come across as the dominant signifier for the political as such, and the person able to understand the masses would be seen as somebody possessing authority to speak for society as a whole.

For Weimar intellectuals, politicians, and artists, the meaning of the masses was indeed as variegated as in Toller’s drama—as open and indeterminate as change itself. The masses were the empty signifier of revolution, of times a-changing, of old powers falling and new ones rising. Anyone embracing revolutionary change would then affirm, along with The Nameless, “I am masses!” The far greater number who feared instability would draw the opposite conclusion, thinking that the masses were always the others. Or, as it is also written in Toller’s drama, “They are masses!”

How come the detached sociologist and the committed writer ended up with almost identical depictions of the masses? Perhaps because the tangible presence of the masses reminded intellectuals and theorists of their inability to grasp the social totality and direct its history, thus forcing them to confront the limitation of their powers of representation. Who were the masses? In dominant Weimar culture they usually remained hidden behind the very models that sought to conceptualize their essential features, or they were covered by the images that wanted to delineate their contours. In rare instances, however, they suddenly leapt into view. Rainer Maria Rilke also visited the revolution, mixing with the masses that alarmed Weimar sociologists and influential intellectuals like Toller and Broch. In a letter to Clara Westhoff-Rilke, his former wife and lifelong confidante, he reported from the Bavarian revolution. His impressions of the first days of November 1918 deserve to be quoted at length. They throw the flaws of dominant mass theory into relief: