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

The same year as Vienna’s crowds set the Palace of Justice on fire, in 1927, Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy offered a graphic illustration of the idea of the masses that many Europeans subscribed to in this period. The image has come down with two alternative titles: Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) and In the Name of the Law. It is one of Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastics, a mixed-media form he developed while he was teaching at the Bauhaus school of architecture and design (figure 4.1).¹

Moholy-Nagy emphasized that the photoplastic image portrays “concentrated situations” that can be developed instantaneously through associations.² An Eskimo would be unable to understand a photoplastic sheet, he claimed, because the image speaks to viewers accustomed to an urban world characterized by the compression and simultaneity of objects and events.³ The photoplastic image teaches such viewers to perceive the relationships structuring their world. The image, Moholy-Nagy said, “is directed towards a target: the representation of ideas.” To this end, the title is crucial. “By means of a good title a picture’s grotesque or absurd entirety may become a sensible, ‘persuasive truth.’”⁴

What’s then the truth revealed by the title of this image, Massenpsychose or In the Name of the Law? Moholy-Nagy stated that the photoplastic scene is a condensation of an idea. He asserted that whole acts of theater or film could be compressed into a photoplastic scene.⁵ Following his hint, we may see Massenpsychose as a diagram of the influential theory of mass psychology. By implication, the image also addresses the general discourse on “the masses.”

The relationships in Massenpsychose are hierarchical. The pool player masters the female swimmers. The female gunslinger controls the Africans in her own cylinder and the male figure in the adjacent one. The general stands at the peak of the pyramidal structure, governing the field as a whole. The positions of dominance are thus occupied by individuals with recognizable faces. The positions of subordination, by contrast, are held by faceless females and Africans. Moholy-Nagy portrays the latter in accordance with the principles of mass psychology: human subjects who form a crowd lose their individual identities, claimed the founders of mass psychology, Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, as well as Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, and their followers in the interwar period. This is because people in a crowd are eager to conform, obeying the laws of “imitation” as Tarde argued, or “contagion” which was Le Bon’s term for the same concept. What results from this psychic chain reaction is a collective agent behaving like a “decapitated animal,” as Henry Fournial argued, or a “wild beast without a name” which was Gabriel Tarde’s expression.⁶

Moreover, we see that the individuals occupying the positions of dominance are carrying phallic objects. These objects signify the traits that characterize a leader. Metonymically linked to the king’s scepter and the magic wand, the cue, the sword, and the rifle are signs of the leader’s charismatic power, the instrument of suggestion with which he manipulates the sentiments of the masses. “A crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes” Le Bon stated. The crowd is “the slave of the impulses it receives” or “a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master”⁷ Apparently, Massenpsychose offers a view of a social world split between ruling leaders and subjugated collectives. The image also shows the manipulatory nature of the relation obtaining between the two.

The bonds that bind persons to a crowd are always emotional in character, argued the theoreticians of crowd behavior. The affects that govern a crowd scrape off the individual’s layer of cultivation and reason, making him or her conform to the lowest common denominator of the group, the base instincts of the unconscious. This process is also captured by Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastic. Consider the man with the giant shadow at the bottom of the second cylinder, locked at the intersection of the trajectories of the bullet, the billiard ball, and the thrust of the sword. What remains of his civilized being is just the hat. The rest—his entire body—has lost the skin of cultivation that shelters individuality. A shadow is a conventional symbol of the subject’s unconscious passions. This may be the accurate reading here, for it conforms to the central thesis of mass psychology: in the crowd, the subject is subdued by his impersonal instincts. His individual identity is overshadowed, and he merges with the faceless bête humaine represented by the females and the Africans, who would thus correspond to Freud’s primal horde.

Finally, the transparent cylinders, resembling test tubes of a chemical laboratory, suggest that Massenpsychose also portrays the methodology of mass psychology.⁸ Gustave Le Bon stated that the transformation occurring in a crowd is comparable to what happens in chemistry as certain elements such as bases and acids are brought into contact and combine to form a new compound.⁹ The French historians and sociologists who inaugurated the analysis of the crowd modeled their studies on the natural sciences, branding their newly parceled out domains with names such as “social physics,” “social statics,” and “social dynamics.” They understood the social field in terms of psychological charges of interacting social atoms that could be measured by a neutral scientist. Hippolyte Taine, the first true historian of the crowd, wanted to explain the evolution of French society through such a chemistry of passions. Just as the chemist analyzed the contents of his test tubes, so Taine examined society. In this spirit he concluded, famously, that the psychological forces manifested in history are comparable to chemical compounds: “Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.”¹⁰

With just a few carefully organized images and lines, Moholy-Nagy’s work thus captures the idea of the masses underpinning the disciplines of mass psychology and mass sociology. By revealing the nature of this idea, Moholy-Nagy’s image asks the viewer to take a closer look at it. In representing the way in which the discourse of mass psychology represents society, Massenpsychose thus exhibits the ideological message of this discourse and invites the observer to pass judgment on it. By extension, the image discloses the oppressive agency operating “in the name of the law,” being, of course, the same oppressive agency that operates in the name of “mass psychology.” It would therefore be wrong to call Moholy-Nagy’s Massenpsychose a representation of the psychology of the masses. Rather, it is a representation of mass psychology as a discipline of knowledge and power.

How should we understand that Moholy-Nagy’s Massenpsychose features a rifle-woman taking aim and a group of women in swimsuits? Portraits and narratives of collectives in the 1920s entailed a reshuffling of the gendered categorizations of the crowd, a topic I have so far only evoked but now must elaborate in some detail as it partly explains the emergence of what I have called the post-individualistic notion of the masses. In its early versions, for example, in Le Bon, mass psychology asserted that the masses are of feminine nature, a subservient and malleable matter, in relation to which the leader exercises his powers.¹¹ Similarly, Werner Sombart stated in 1924 that the masses “have an ‘irrational,’ feminine predisposition”¹² By rejecting the conception of individuality as a subject position that is external to the masses, many of the writers I have discussed also refuted the sexual ontology that ascribed masculine qualities to the leader-individual and feminine ones to the masses. This transformation may be related to the conferral of suffrage to women in November 1918 and the general consolidation of the women’s movements in the interwar period as die neue Frau (the new woman) became symbol of a constituency that was not reducible to any of the conflicting classes in the social struggle.¹³

The women’s movements pressed for a more multilayered interpretation of society than conventional class analysis could offer. In this context, the figure of femininity was often evoked as a political subject or an ideological and aesthetic fantasy able to transcend the dualistic framework that split the social body in individual citizens and proletarian masses. Interestingly, two emblematic Weimar dramas, Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch (1919), which I discussed in chapter 2 (section 18), and Bertolt Brecht’s Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1927; translated as Saint Joan of the Stockyards), follow this pattern, and it applies to the heroine in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as well (also discussed in chapter 2, section 12). All three stage a violent antagonism between the anonymous masses and a group of capitalist individuals. All posit a female hero as a mediatory figure in this struggle: in Toller’s play she is called Die Frau (The Woman); in Brecht, Johanna; and in Lang, Maria. These heroines are personifications of the dehumanized collective. Their solidarity is without limits. In her prophetic dream, Johanna sees herself at the head of all the protest marches and uprisings of human history.¹⁴

Mediating between the dehumanized masses and not yet existent institutions of political representation and citizenship, these female leaders seem to be symbolic manifestations of the real dilemma of constituting the gendered female subject as a citizen of the democratic republics of interwar Germany and Austria. As the women’s movement triangulated the political struggle, it constituted a force that was assimilable neither with the disenfranchised proletarian masses, nor with the stereotypical individual Burgher. Johanna, Maria, and The Woman thus reflect a collectivity that becomes visible if we attend to the gender dimensions of the opposition between the figure of the masses struggling to attain citizenship and the figure of the individual citizen struggling to retain his power to represent society. Always partly occluded and suppressed by this dominant axis in the social and political struggle, female agency as embodied by these heroines offers a third alternative of representing the social body, one that we must not identify either with the proletarian revolution as envisioned by the communist parties nor with right-wing authoritarianism.

Yet Johanna and The Woman—and the alternative they bring to life—are somehow too good for this world, as Brecht would have said. They are utopian figures, symbols of a social-democratic reformism, egalitarian republicanism, or humanist universalism that bears no relation to the fractured political reality of Weimar Germany. This lack of firm anchorage in the real political sphere may explain why both dramas have recourse to the nineteenth-century practice of allegorizing the nation and the people as a feminine figure. Like Marianne, the allegory of the French people, or Germania, her German equivalent, Johanna and The Woman appear as the corpus mysticum of the people, redeeming the antagonisms that destroy the corpus politicum of male society. On a structural level, then, Lang’s, Brecht’s, and Toller’s heroines, notwithstanding their socialist convictions, are akin to “the great German mother,” the allegorical mother of the nation through whom conservative segments of the women’s movement and fascism itself sought to represent the German tribe. This is by far most evident in the case of Lang’s Maria. Explicitly identified as the “heart” mediating between the “hands” of the working masses and the “brains” of the elite, she comes across as a hyper-idealization of this figure of femininity—while her bad double, the robot-Maria, comes across as a caricature of the female rabblerouser.¹⁵

Unlike the fascist figure of femininity, however, these heroines fail to represent the collective. By foregrounding these failures, Brecht’s and Toller’s plays problematize the inherited principle of representation, according to which the masses is a force of potentiality that must be mobilized by the leader or the vanguard party. While Maria, as we have seen, is split in two, embodying the dual nature of political passions, or what Theodor Geiger saw as the destructive-constructive couplet of the proletariat, Brecht’s Johanna and Toller’s Woman shift positions as the revolution unfolds—now assuming the role of the individualized leader, now embracing the anonymity of the movement, now emerging as negotiators between the struggling classes. Yet they always end up betraying the collective they wish to serve, which is also the case as the evil Maria usurps the leadership of her good double and destroys what she has accomplished. Such is also the tragic kernel of Toller’s and Brecht’s dramas: although The Woman and Johanna are initially situated as mouthpieces of the people, neither dispose of the forms—that is, the rhetoric, the organization, the revolutionary strategy, the institution—by which they could represent the people politically. If we read these texts as efforts to address the critical problem that haunted Weimar society—how to represent society politically and culturally—we must conclude that they fail to project an image of democracy, that is, a form of representation that does not define itself in opposition to an excluded majority branded as “the masses.” However, it is precisely through this failure that they disclose their truth as political dramas, in the sense once summarized by Heiner Müller: the task of political theater is not to invent new possibilities but to demonstrate the impossibility of reality.¹⁶ The political truth that they express is precisely what Kathleen Canning has identified as the real predicament of women’s problematic and incomplete accession to citizenship in Weimar Germany. Political reality—notably, the articles on marriage and property in the new Weimar Constitution—made it impossible for them to acquire citizenship on the same terms as men.¹⁷

However, what turned out to be politically impossible was at the same time aesthetically productive and revealing. Masse-Mensch and Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe each stages a collective that blurs the distinction between individual and mass, at the same time questioning the gendering of society in terms of masculine and feminine qualities. Placing a woman at the head of the revolution, the dramas illustrate the post-individualistic figuration of the masses that characterized a crucial part of Weimar culture. This figuration entailed a conception of political and cultural representation that went beyond the sterile opposition of individual and collective, as well as the false political alternatives of authority and anarchy, issuing instead in a republican egalitarianism in terms of both class and gender and a public sphere consisting of neither (feminine) masses nor (masculine) authority.

The Weimar artist Marianne Brandt also visualized a woman placed at a vantage point of historical insight and vision. Brandt was a coworker of László Moholo-Nagy at the Bauhaus school, where she enrolled as a student in 1923 and four years later was hired as leader of the metals workshop, and in the art of photomontage she showed exceptional compositional skills. One of her montages, made in 1928, is called Es wird marschiert (On the March) (figure 4.2). It depicts a mundane, modern, and emancipated young woman—an allusion to the stereotype of the urban Garçonne—who is leaning her head in her hands while the whole world appears to be spread out on the café table on which she is resting her elbows. This world is represented by press photographs of masses, carefully cropped and crammed together or piled on top of one another in the picture—masses of boats, masses of buildings, and masses of human bodies, most of which are marching and demonstrating left and right across a cut-up panorama containing elements from Europe and Asia. The woman is poised above this bustling historical momentum and is contemplating the mass movements that occupy the social space she surveys. Her gaze appears at once analytical and melancholic, and the composition of the montage turns this gaze into an extension or representative of a public gaze, which is able to survey and critically assess contemporary world affairs. The title, On the March, indicates the content of her assessment: everything in the world that she contemplates from her elevated position suggests that politics and history are increasingly dominated by uniformed masses and militarism.¹⁸

Brandt invites her viewers to behold the world through the eyes of a personification of the new woman. These eyes see a world dominated by crowds, a world that is comparable to what was put on display in the image by Brandt’s colleague László Moholy-Nagy, Massenpsychose, to which we may now return. Using Brandt’s montage as interpretative key, we understand how Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastic also draws on and subverts a preexisting coding of masses as female and social authority as masculine. Curiously, Massenpsychose places the figure of femininity at both sides of this opposition: it is linked both to the subdued masses (the faceless female swimmers huddling together in their circular collective) and to the sovereign leader (the armed woman is a picture as good as any of dictatorial potency). Needless to say, these figures do not add up to one coherent feminine ideal but rather belong to contradictory registers.

By consistently employing such a dual focus, Moholy-Nagy’s image thus turns into a condensation of the entire discourse on the masses, from its inception in France in the 1880s and 1890s to the transformations it underwent in the Weimar Republic. His image contains the trajectory traversed in this book, from the view proposed by mass psychology, that the mass was the opposite of individuality, organization, Bildung, masculinity, reason, and other laudable human qualities, to a variety of views according to which the mass possessed its own internal dynamics and rationality. If there had once been a relative consensus as to what the mass was, how masses were shaped, and why masses dominated society, it had disappeared by the 1920s.

What such culture entails may be roughly gauged in another interesting image by Moholy-Nagy from the late 1920s (figure 4.3). It is provisionally named Up with the United Front (Hoch die Einheitsfront), a title borrowed from one of the banners carried by the people in the crowd that is shown in the photograph. Unlike the carefully calculated compositions of Massenpsychose and Es wird marschiert, this picture gives an impression of rawness and incompletion: it comes across as a snapshot taken from within the crowd. Are there any individuals in this photograph? Are there any masses? The image depicts something else, a many-headed social agency that cannot be reduced to any of the two categories and which is neither disorganized, nor fully organized. Rather, this collective agent is abiding in a state of frozen mobility. The title evoking a united front is paradoxical, for if there is anything missing from the depicted crowd, it is unity. A disunited unity? What Moholy-Nagy shows are people conquering the public square and the social stage, instituting, as for the first time, a vocal and multifarious public culture.

In this way, the visual works of Moholy-Nagy and Brandt trust the viewers’ ability to undo the dichotomy of individuals and masses and to project themselves in a utopian direction, beyond those mechanisms of power that split the social field into a set of individual leaders and a faceless mass. They thus help outline the contours of a new public sphere of political and cultural representation while at the same time conjuring up the collective subjects and the subject of collectivity that are needed to make this arena a truly democratic one. This is also why Moholy-Nagy’s and Brandt’s works, along with the photoplastic technique they illustrate, are exemplary cases of Moholy-Nagy’s general constructivist program. As he argued in his article “Constructivism and the Proletariat” constructivism “is the socialism of vision—the common property of all men.”¹⁹

Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household…. More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.²¹

The public spaces of the city serve as interieur for the masses, and the exterior walls are their writing desks. The same idea motivated Marianne Brandt’s and László Moholy-Nagy’s theory of the photoplastic image, launched as a visual language addressed to urban crowds who would find enjoyment in this new public art while at the same time digesting the messages posted onto walls and façades. Benjamin, Brandt, Moholy-Nagy, and a number of other intellectuals of the interwar period sought to define spaces for cultural and political representation through which the masses could appropriate the productive forces that so far had served to control them. How to turn these instruments of oppression into means of liberation? In answering this question, they attributed great importance to two phenomena: first, the architecture and technology that made up the material infrastructure of the modern life world; second, new media technologies such as photography, film, radio broadcasting, the newspaper, and the illustrated magazine, which circulated in these new channels. These phenomena were considered as constitutive of urban modernity, reflecting the rapid development of the productive forces of capitalism and, at the same time, generating new modes of private and public life, along with corresponding forms of sociation, both individual and collective.

Whereas most thinkers of the Weimar era argued that the masses heralded the destruction of culture, the intellectuals highlighted in this final chapter argued that the masses prefigured progressive forms of art and cultural production. Sometimes, the masses were even seen as the covenant for a more advanced community that would turn human labor and technology into means for achieving truly human ends. Primary among these new forms of cultural production were the new visual media. Reviewing a photography book by Karl Blossfeldt, Walter Benjamin argued that photography provides the language of the future: it allows people to look deeper into the material realm and to uncover its underlying patterns, thus “altering our image of the world in as yet unforeseen ways” Benjamin also quoted Moholy-Nagy, whom he called “the pioneer of the new light-image”: “The limits of photography cannot be determined. Everything is so new here that even the search leads to creative results. Technology is, of course, the path-breaker here. It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future.”²²

Benjamin argued that the camera provides for collective vision as its lens detects images and forms indecipherable to a pair of individual eyes: “unfathomable forms of the creative, on the variant that was always, above all others, the form of genius, of the great collective, and of nature”²³ Seeing beneath appearance, seeing differently, seeing deeper, the camera takes stock of organizational designs stored in the oldest sediments of the human collective. In a later essay, Benjamin would describe it as the “optical unconscious.” Making these designs conscious amounted to a renewal of the political imagination. Camera pictures could therefore serve political emancipation.

Of course, they might just as well serve purposes of objectification, oppression, and manipulation. Cases in point are what Siegfried Kracauer described as the mass ornament and what Theodor Geiger called the optical mass, in which the lens is so far removed from social reality that people inevitably appear as compact and anonymous masses. Most images, ideas, and theories of the masses in interwar Europe employed this strategy, either literally or figuratively, thereby making human beings comparable to ants. “And what can we say about an ant-heap?” Alfred Döblin asked in 1929, characterizing the remote viewpoint of historians, sociologists, and economists. “There may be some five hundred ants moving across a path, coming from a root, or from a pile of stones, in a fast and conspicuous movement. A hundred yards away there is an even larger crowd of them at work.” As with ants, so also with humans, Döblin concluded: “Viewed from a certain distance, distinctions vanish; from a certain distance, the individual ceases to be”²⁴

The major question emerging from this context was whether the masses were best comprehended from afar or from nearby, from the outside or from the inside. What if the photographer’s camera, the sociologist’s gaze, or the writer’s vision ceased to distance itself from the crowd and instead planted itself in its midst? No longer seen as colored dots against the pavement or as a black wall on the horizon, the social body would then appear as faces and bodies in motion surrounding the sociological gaze or seeping through it, just as the subject in Robert Musil’s novel was transformed into a rock washed over by a stream. Walter Benjamin’s theory of modernity hinges on a reversal of this kind, which in his view amounted to no less than a cultural revolution. No longer separated from society, no longer surveying the masses from above or from afar, the aesthetic work would “be absorbed by the masses,” as Benjamin put it in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”²⁵ Once the aesthetic work, or the medium of representation, disappeared into the crowd, the image of the mass was inverted and turned into a collective imagination in its own right. Benjamin speculated about a dialectical reversal of the subject and object of representation. Where there was once an unknown “Delta formation” an object of fear hovering at society’s outermost border, there would now be a self-conscious subject of history occupying the central square. Where there was once an objectifying representation of the mass as inert human matter, there would now be a self-performing collective.

The crowd was the subject most worthy of attention for nineteenth-century writers, Walter Benjamin asserted in his last essay on Charles Baudelaire. Through the spread of literacy, the masses were taking shape as a reading public. They became customers of culture and wanted to be portrayed in the novel. Victor Hugo, according to Benjamin the most successful writer of the century, went so far as to acknowledge the demands of the masses in the very titles of his novels: Les misérables, Les travailleurs de la mer. Even in an esoteric poet like Baudelaire, Benjamin detected urban crowds swarming inside the sonnet stanzas and prose poems: “In Tableaux parisiens the secret presence of a crowd is demonstrable almost everywhere”²⁶

Judging from Benjamin’s essays of the 1930s, the crowd was an even more adequate topic for the early-twentieth-century intellectual and one that, with the emergence of fascism, was of utmost political importance. When Benjamin corresponded with Theodor W. Adorno about his work on Baudelaire, Adorno described “the notion of the mass as a secret code,” the deciphering of which would afford fundamental insights into the historical relation of art and politics.²⁷

Benjamin’s Arcades Project is usually seen as an investigation of the emergence of modernity and the cultural forms corresponding to it. Central to this project is Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, which Benjamin extracted from Marx’s analysis of capitalism and redefined as the determining factor of the culture of modernity.²⁸ Benjamin approached nineteenth-century France by studying the nodes and hubs in the system of circulation and consumption of commodities: shopping arcades, boulevards, railway stations, factories, world exhibitions, and department stores, among others. In these locations Benjamin detected the formation of a new kind of collective: aggregations of men and women acting as vendors or buyers of things and services and thereby instituting a social life organized by the elementary yet mysterious reality of exchange value. When referring to this new collective, Benjamin spoke of the masses.

Benjamin did not summarize his theory of the mass in a single essay or book, although there is much to suggest that the Arcades Project would have contained a comprehensive treatment of the masses had it been completed. In order to reconstruct Benjamin’s notion of the mass we must therefore stitch together his main essays and drafts of the mid- to late 1930s: “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938), “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940), “Central Park” (1939), “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), “The Author as Producer” (1934), “On the Concept of History” (1940), as well as the Arcades Project, which furnished a reservoir of ideas and motifs that was later tapped and refined in the essays.

Allusions to crowds, masses, and collective behavior and action abound in these writings, to such an extent that it is safe to say that this is one of their main concerns. Miriam Hansen goes as far as stating that Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” posited the masses as “the problem of modern politics.”²⁹ However, the immense literature on Walter Benjamin does not contain any consistent attempt to reconstruct his theory of the masses. The notion of the masses is also virtually absent from the standard reference books on his work.³⁰ Hansen’s work is an exception, yet she, too, fails to seize the content and intention of Benjamin’s notion of the masses as she concludes that it “ultimately remains a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction.”³¹ As I will demonstrate, it is more plausible to see in Benjamin’s analysis of the masses his discovery of the concrete mediation between culture and economy in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalist society. He traced the transformation of this mediation up until the 1930s, at which point he would identify the masses as the key political problem that had to be resolved in order to create a democratic, which for Benjamin translated into communist, society.

One reason that no one has bothered with this exegesis is that it is hard to decipher what Benjamin actually means by terms such as mass (Masse), crowd (Menge), collective (Kollektive), people (Volk), class (Klasse), proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, and bourgeoisie.³² This conceptual obscurity derives mainly from the fact that Benjamin uses these terms in three different ways: either colloquially, as in everyday speech, or as theoretical concepts or, again, as dialectical images elucidating the social function of art and culture. This being said, there is no doubt that the terms form a coherent conceptual structure. A sentence in “Central Park” proves Benjamin’s awareness of the terminological choices involved: “On the concept of the multitude and the relationship between ‘crowd’ and ‘mass’ [Über den Begriff der Multitude und das (Verhältnis) von ‘Menge’ und ‘Masse’]”³³ As we shall see, Benjamin’s theory of modernity hinges on careful distinctions between “crowd” “mass” “proletariat” “petty bourgeoisie” and “people.”

Once we look closer at Benjamin’s analysis of these categories we notice that his first impulse is often to treat the mass as a simple matter of fact. His twin essays on Baudelaire and Paris immediately establish the crowd as the most conspicuous feature of urban modernity and take it as a point of departure for a diagnosis of the arts, literature, and culture of modernity. What do we mean by “the masses” that put their stamp on Baudelaire’s lyric poetry, Benjamin asks? These masses, he contends, “do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street.”³⁴

Benjamin here uses “the mass” as a descriptive term designating the urban crowd as it appeared to nineteenth-century metropolitan writers, and for this purpose he usually employs the word “Menge.” The amorphous city crowd was a new and overwhelming phenomenon, a creation of mid-nineteenth-century industrial society, which caused concern among writers and painters who would seek to render this new aspect of their city in words and images. Benjamin’s main examples are Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” and Friedrich Engels’s report The Condition of the Working Class in England, but he mentions a whole range of other books, artworks, and genres that took the crowd as their primary object. Charles Mercier’s city panoramas, Balzac’s catalogs of urban physiognomies, and Daumier’s and Grandville’s caricatures are all to be seen as different attempts to describe and decipher the urban masses. According to Benjamin, they introduced new metaphors and topics as the expanding city was compared now to wild forests, now to terra incognita, while the crowds inhabiting it were portrayed as internal savages and barbarians. The crowd was described as a milieu in which all sorts of promiscuous and criminal behavior were not just concealed but also actively cultivated. Crowds became objects of fear and suspicion, sheltering crime, conspiracy, and depravity. The detective story was a product of this environment. It invented a new kind of hero endowed with the eyes and ears needed to track down criminals and conspirateurs who used the dense and changeable crowd as a protective veil or hiding place. Dwelling on the origins of the detective story, Benjamin shows how the crowd offered a space that allowed a person to disguise his identity but also to protect it or to liberate himself from it. As Benjamin then moves on to discuss Baudelaire’s poetry, he shows that although Baudelaire rarely depicts the crowd en face, it remains the medium and external force that give meaning to the poet’s characteristic oscillation between self-celebration and self-effacement.

Walter Benjamin thrives as a cultural historian mining the archives for items related to Paris’s crowds. Why does he devote so much attention to the masses? According to him, the masses were closely linked to the emergence of an economy centered on the mass production of commodities. Here’s an example from the notes covering “Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks”: “For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was only scarcity which taught them that.)”³⁵ Another instance is found in his file on “Saint-Simon, railroads”: “The historical signature of the railroad may be found in the fact that it represents the first means of transport—and, until the big ocean liners, no doubt also the last—to form masses”³⁶

In these remarks the mass is no longer a colloquial description of “people in the street” but a theoretical category designating a new collective that corresponds to a particular economic and technological domain. If the city of modernity invented urban and architectural technologies geared to optimize manufacture, transportation, and marketing of commodities, and if this architecture amounted to a new environment for the urban population, it also created forms of sociation and individuation adequate to the new milieu: “The most characteristic building projects of the nineteenth century—railroad stations, exhibition halls, departments stores …—all have matters of collective importance as their object…. In these constructions, the appearance of the great masses on the stage of history was already foreseen”³⁷

A stage prepared for the arrival of the masses: such is Benjamin’s congenial description of the modern city and its commercial infrastructure. This also explains why he argues that the mass is a secondary phenomenon, a symptom of historical change rather than its cause:

As a theoretical concept, then, the mass is the social expression of the capitalist logic, which constitutes the essence of the urban crowds gathering in arcades, galleries, and department stores designed for the new cult of the commodity. In addition, and precisely by virtue of being the dominant social form of cultural modernity, the mass constitutes the visible social context of human experience and artistic and literary production in nineteenth-century France. In other words, the mass is a category of mediation: it allows Benjamin to link his economic analysis of the commodity form to his analysis of Baudelaire’s poetry, Hugo’s novels, or other great crowd scenes found in nineteenth-century culture, and also to a vast number of nineteenth-century social types (collector, flâneur, bohemian, prostitute, gambler, idler), architectural inventions (arcade, boulevard, winter garden, railway station), political movements (Fourier, Saint-Simon, the June insurrection of 1848, the commune of 1871), visual technologies (photography, panorama), cultural institutions, notions, styles, objects, and genres (museum, interieur, mirror, automaton), all of which are indexed in the convolutes of the uncompleted Arcades Project. Most if not all of these phenomena derive their ultimate importance as either producers of masses or as reaction-formations vis-à-vis the masses.

Benjamin’s conception of the mass thus differs from most others we have encountered so far, except, possibly, from those of Bertolt Brecht and Siegfried Kracauer. He does not approach the mass deductively, as did sociologists and cultural philosophers of Weimar Germany, who defined the mass by negation as a social aggregate lacking organization, individuality, and rationality, and hence as an agent of disorder. He also does not approach the mass as a psychological category, as did Freud and the mass psychologists preceding him, who defined the mass as a temporary or permanent gathering of people whose psychic identifications and passions are turned toward the same external stimulus. Benjamin also branches off from most post-individualistic accounts of the mass, according to which the mass was made up by people lacking means to represent themselves coherently as individuals with firm identities and positions. Deviating from these theories, Benjamin defined the mass by identifying its material condition of possibility, which he located at the economic level, in a system of production that put out saleable goods in great quantities and in a system of marketing that attracted customers in large numbers. In “Central Park,” he stated the matter straightforwardly: “The masses came into being at the same time as mass production.”³⁹

However, the definition of the mass as a social effect caused by the city’s accelerating circulation of commodities is only the first element in Benjamin’s theory of modernity. For the metropolis does not only form masses as a by-product of an economy centered on commodity production. It also supplies these masses with compensatory environments, allowing them to escape the commodification of their existence and to fantasize about themselves as authentic individuals and independent agents of civilization: “As soon as the production process began to draw large masses of people into the field, those who ‘had the time’ came to feel a need to distinguish themselves en masse from laborers. It was to this need that the entertainment industry answered”⁴⁰

We may extrapolate Benjamin’s argument: the masses are not just consumers of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods but also a collective whose members fulfill their dreams of social harmony and existential wholeness through the historically new activity of consuming mass-produced stories and images. In this sense, the mass is what Benjamin called a “dreaming collective,” which attributes powers of magic and healing to the commodity. This mass lives and moves in an urban environment constructed so as to prolong this dreaming: “All collective architecture of the nineteenth century constitutes the house of the dreaming collective,” Benjamin writes.⁴¹ He draws up a list of some of these “dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations.”⁴² Had Benjamin written about the 1920s and 1930s, he would have added the movie theater to his list. In such spaces, the newly emergent urban crowds contemplate images of themselves as masters of nature and history. Benjamin’s notion of the mass thus has at least two sides. On the one hand, the mass is a social formation instituted by the capitalist commodity economy and shaped by the architectural and commercial infrastructure corresponding to that economy. On the other hand, the mass is a vehicle for a new culture—patterns of social interaction that ignite sensations, fantasies, and dreams, thus becoming a source of what Benjamin calls collective phantasmagorias: dream images of the past, present, and future that are constantly rekindled by the circulation and display of commodities. In both senses, Benjamin’s masses show strong traits of what he and other Marxists called the petty bourgeoisie.

However, it is not as simple as that. By examining how the relation of economy and experience was expressed in the masses, Benjamin was also able to account for the emergence of a social idea that remained dominant in his own era: “the individual,” which he regarded as the supreme phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century.

Benjamin explained that the individual was an effect of the mass by analyzing two phenomena typical of early urban culture, the flâneur and the interieur. Both emerge as figurations of the nineteenth-century conviction that the individual is the basic unit of reality. In Benjamin’s analysis, however, both the interieur and the flâneur are products of the mass, in the sense that the urban crowds constitute the raison d’être of both. The bourgeois interior, for its part, is in Benjamin’s view a sheltered space where the individual seeks refuge from a society that is becoming increasingly compartmentalized into specialized professions and activities. It is a compensatory realm, where “man” estranged from the world of commodities that he has produced and that now begin to produce him, can preserve an “authentic” relationship to the world and continue to believe in his own unique individuality.

As for the flâneur, we saw already in the previous chapter how for Siegfried Kracauer the flâneur was equal to a new mode of apprehending society that could be approximated to the very subjectivity of the masses. The main theorist and historian of the flâneur, Benjamin explores the history and political potential of this new collective subjectivity. He starts by showing that the flâneur is the very opposite of the bourgeois subject cultivating his individuality in the interior. For the flâneur it is the street itself that that serves as a living room. The flâneur’s arrival on the historical stage is anticipated by a number of other historical figures, all of them moving at the margins of urban life and ranging from the conspirateurs of early revolutionary sects, to radical students and all kinds of bohemians, all the way to the artists and writers who are forced to make a living on the marketplace. People without strong class affiliations and as yet without strong ties to the bourgeoisie, the flâneurs are free-floating intellectuals: eyes, ears, pens, and painters of public life, of streets, taverns, and cafés. In short, they are those who wrest a living by recording their impressions of public life in the growing public mass media such as the newspaper feuilleton and the serialized novel.

The city’s dense concentrations of people constitute the medium through which the flâneur perceives reality, writes Benjamin. For the flâneur, the masses fulfill several functions: “They stretch before the flâneur as a veil: they are the newest drug for the solitary.—Second, they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript.—Finally, within the labyrinth of the city, the masses are the newest and most inscrutable labyrinth.”⁴³ What characterize the flâneur’s perception are sensations of movement, density, quantity, anonymity, collisions, and adventure, and these sensations are all generated by the crowd. Like Kracauer, Benjamin argues that the flâneur represents a historically new way of apprehending reality, one that is marked by quick sensations rather than enduring experiences and by a vulnerability of self that forces him to continuously reinvent his identity and redefine his position vis-à-vis others. Richly orchestrated by writers and artists of the period, the flâneur’s experience of crowds is marked by a tension between the observer’s wish to master the masses with his gaze and mind, thus providing a heightened sense of self, and his simultaneous temptation to lose himself in the collective. The flâneur turns this tension into his modus vivendi.

As I already stated, however, the presence of the masses was not always explicit in the art and literature of the nineteenth century. Writers and artists were far more preoccupied by the individual, narrating or depicting his path of personal cultivation, the education of his feelings, or the disillusion he suffered as he ran up against the powers of the establishment. Still, the individual’s attitudes and actions were nonetheless conditioned by the subject’s proximity to the urban crowds, Benjamin argued. In a crucial passage he asserts that the increasing valorization of individuality was the result of the increasing dominance of the masses. “Individuality, as such, takes on heroic outlines as the masses step more decisively into the picture.”⁴⁴

Therefore, the paradigmatic emotions of modernist art, solitude and ennui, which are experienced by virtually all literary heroes of the period, from the protagonists of Gustave Flaubert (L’éducation sentimentale) to those of Knut Hamsun (Sult), only make sense once we picture these heroes uneasily rubbing themselves against city crowds. Baudelaire is Benjamin’s primary example: “The mass has become so much an internal part of Baudelaire that one seeks in vain for any descriptions of it in his work.”⁴⁵ A page or so further down, Benjamin remarks about Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante” that “the crowd is nowhere named in either word or phrase. Yet all the action hinges on it, just as the progress of a sail-boat depends on the wind”⁴⁶ This was Benjamin’s discovery: the mass, nowhere named or described, yet omnipresent, to the extent that it could be posited as the first obsession and primary content of the culture of modernity. Or, to put it differently, this was Benjamin’s discovery of the critical relation of nineteenth-century experience to its exterior. Crucially, it was a dialectical relation, insofar as what appeared to be a relation to an external phenomenon—the crowd—was also an internal tension within the individual subject and the work of art itself.

Benjamin uses Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante” as an object lesson on the dialectics between individual and mass (which Baudelaire, remaining firmly inside the patriarchal order of his era, depicts as an encounter between male gaze and female body). The poem relates how the flâneur sees a woman coming toward him, their eyes meeting for a moment, after which she again disappears. Baudelaire mentions that the woman is dressed in mourning, “en grand deuil” and Benjamin seizes on this detail. The veiled woman appears like a revelation, her figure emerging from the crowd in the same way as a face comes unveiled. Benjamin uses the image of the veil innumerable times. Things and objects are unexpectedly “unveiled” as they detach themselves from their embeddings to excite the senses of the flâneur. The veil is a source of fascination, and so is the secret it hides. “The masses [die Masse] were an agitated veil, and Baudelaire viewed Paris through this veil,” Benjamin explains.⁴⁷ In a different context, he states that “the crowd [die Menge] is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into a phantasmagoria”⁴⁸ In yet a different entry, already quoted above, he remarks that the masses (die Masse) “stretch before the flâneur as a veil.”⁴⁹

In the above quotations, crowd and mass (Menge and Masse) are obviously synonymous; both refer to the impression of people moving in the street, the anonymous and unknown inhabitants of the metropolis. However, a fourth entry increases the complexity of the image: “For the flâneur, the ‘crowd’ is a veil hiding ‘the masses’ [Die ‘Menge’ ist ein Schleier, der dem flaneur die ‘Masse’ verbirgt]”⁵⁰ Whereas the mass previously was likened to a veil, it is now, strangely enough, described as reality hidden by the veil of the crowd. How to understand this sudden shift of meaning? What remains constant, throughout these entries, at least, is the image of the crowd (Menge) as a veil. To see the city and its inhabitants as through a veil obviously implies that reality is partly concealed: the city crowd appears as a phantasmagoria filled with secrets. But the veil does not just entice and agitate. It also puts a filter on reality and prevents something from coming into view. “The ‘crowd’ is a veil hiding the ‘masses.’” Remove the veil, remove the spectacle of the urban crowds, remove its fascinating heterogeneity and variegation, its endless stream of shimmering appearances, and what comes into view is “the mass” (Masse) in the more theoretical sense of the term: a world ruled by a quantitative and repetitive accumulation of exchange value, that is, by a capitalist logic piling humans and things onto one another as commodities while turning the people that are exposed to this logic into a new class of petty bourgeois retailers, shopkeepers, and consumers whose life, work, and thinking are objectively delimited by their position vis-à-vis the production, marketing, and consumption of commodities.

In this more theoretical sense, Benjamin clearly states that the individual flâneur is himself an embodiment of the logic of the commodity that turns all things and all humans into replaceable units in a mass. The flâneur, he explains, is someone abandoned in the crowd. This places him in the same situation as the commodity, for it, too, appears on the store shelf without trace of its origins or of the hands that produced it. “The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers.”⁵¹

Individual and commodity here turns out to be made of one piece; both are creations of the implacable laws of the market. Separate, unique, independent, sovereign—these qualities attributed to the hero of modernity, the individual, are also characteristics of the commodity as it is perceived as a fetish with a soul of its own.⁵² The individual feels himself or herself as the very opposite of the mass—and most nineteenth-century culture helped tailor that feeling into a firm conviction. As Benjamin argues, however, individualism and massification are governed by the same historical logic through which the human being is atomized, turned into the isolated monad celebrated by individualism and then joined to other such human units into the great aggregate of the mass. Massification, individualization, commodification: all are facets of one single process.

If the mass functions as a secret code in nineteenth-century culture, and if it was Benjamin’s great discovery to establish the presence of that code inside virtually every piece of art, literature, architecture, and popular culture created in that period, it remains to be seen what this code ultimately meant. As a dialectical image, the mass expressed an undividable constellation of economic life and mental life, of commodity production and collective dreaming. The mass revealed that the commodity is the soul of the culture of modernity, in which social life and historical progress are identical to the process by which everything and everyone are transformed into commodities and subjected to the logic of capital. The mass, in Benjamin’s analysis, represents the reduction of history, society, nature, and life itself to an eternal sameness produced on the conveyor belt.

As a cultural phenomenon, then, the mass is a collective of petty-bourgeois character organized around the cult of the commodity. The social relations within the mass are constituted by the participants’ position in the circulation of exchange values. As commodity circulation assumes fetishistic qualities, however, it is perceived as a source of historical, cultural, and aesthetic values, through which the members of the collective construe a sense of authenticity and individuality. Such is the phantasmagoric quality of the mass, preventing the members of the collective from apprehending the impersonal, economic powers governing their world while at the same time convincing them that they are themselves independent individuals living and acting in accord with their own free will.

Benjamin saw the similarity between the sleeping collective of the nineteenth century and the fascist communities of the 1930s. In both cases, the collective was held in spell by alluring utopias, which prevented it from perceiving its actual enslavement. The mass was thus not just the secret code with which Benjamin unlocked the relation of nineteenth-century culture to the realities of industrial capitalism. In addition, it was a code that offered an understanding of Benjamin’s present, which had fallen under the rule of fascism’s successful mobilization of the masses and their subsequent transformation into a nationalistic people’s community, or Volksgemeinschaft. This is the moment to look at the continuation of a passage that I quoted above:

The appearance of the mass yields to the reality of class. Yet in order for this to occur, the proletariat must “dispel the illusion” that prevents people from seeing the true origin of the commodity without distortions. The phantasmagorias emitted by the commercial and cultural institutions of bourgeois society would then dissolve. The inhabitants of the metropolis would realize that their position in society is not primarily determined by their role as consumers but by their position in a system of production that divides humanity between those who are forced to become commodities, selling their labor, and those who can buy that labor and extract a surplus from it. According to Walter Benjamin, this is the “undistorted reality” that, once the veil is torn, underlies the exhilarating panorama of the urban crowd.

As Benjamin judged the historical drama: whereas fascism obtained the ideal community according to the conventional prescriptions of mass-psychological doctrine, that is, through obedience and aesthetic glorification of the leader, socialism would achieve its ideal community through human liberation and political self-representation of the collective, enabled by a leader whose “great achievement lies not in drawing the masses after him, but in constantly incorporating himself into the masses, in order to be, for them, always one among hundreds of thousands.”⁵⁵

Benjamin’s analysis thus moves from the crowd (as the collective expression of cultural and visual phantasmagorias offered by urban life), to the mass (as the collective expression of the commodity economy, and often identified with the petty bourgeoisie), and onward to the proletariat (as the collective expression of capitalist exploitation and of revolutionary resistance), which “is preparing for a society in which neither the objective nor the subjective conditions for the formation of masses will exist any longer.”⁵⁶ These three analytical steps also mark the progression of the gradual awakening of the collective. Benjamin’s objective for the Arcades Project was thus to extract from the dreaming collective of the masses, which he identified with the petty-bourgeois collective, the awake and self-conscious proletarian collective. “Wouldn’t it be possible,” he states in an early entry, “to show how the whole set of issues with which this project is concerned is illuminated in the process of the proletariat’s becoming conscious of itself?”⁵⁷

Benjamin never investigated the concrete historical preconditions for the emergence of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent. It is clear, however, that he perceived such a scenario as the only alternative to fascist mass politics. As the Second World War continued, his belief in revolutionary change became increasingly militant—and, one should add, increasingly abstract and utopian. In his last piece of writing, the theses “On the Concept of History,” the revolution flares up as the universal solution and sole hope in times of darkness. The proletariat, we are told, is capable of “a tiger’s leap” into the future: this “leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.” The proletariat figuring in Benjamin’s theses on history is the virtual equivalent of the Messiah. “What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode.”⁵⁸

Adorno criticized Benjamin for giving the proletariat the role of deus ex machina in the historical drama.⁵⁹ His objection was to the point. Benjamin’s texts are not the place to look for sociological arguments concerning the actual motivations of the working classes to become the subject of history. Rather, the proletariat’s revolutionary calling was in his view an ontological idea. A self-proclaimed “constructivist” Benjamin believed that the truth of history is accessible only to those who actually construct the historical world with their own labor.⁶⁰ In his diary, he approvingly noted a conviction of Brecht’s: “The sense of reality of the proletarian is incorruptible.”⁶¹ Thus, rather than examining the proletariat’s sense of reality, Benjamin took it as pregiven.⁶²

But are there any workers at all in the arcades? asks Jacques Rancière in an article on Benjamin’s philosophy of history. He observes the striking disparity between Benjamin’s rich commentary on the arcade as the embodiment of petty-bourgeois modernity and the rare notes, most of them raw excerpts, that he devoted to laboring people of nineteenth-century Paris.⁶³ One entry in the Arcades Project seems to admit as much. “It is a very specific experience that the proletariat has in the big city—one in many respects similar to that which the immigrant has there”⁶⁴ Apparently, the working classes do not belong in the crystal palace of bourgeois modernity. Still, Benjamin is convinced that they hold the key to progress. The social function of this class is thus the opposite to that of the masses. Masses were formed by the capitalist market and the circulation of exchange values. The proletariat was brought into being by capitalist production. To step from the appearance of the mass to the reality of class was thus to step from the sphere of consumption to the sphere of production—in a way corresponding to Karl Marx’s analytical move in the first volume of Capital, where the reader, having just been taught everything he should know about the circulation of money and value, is suddenly invited to enter “the secret workshop of production, above the gates of which is posted a board saying: No admittance except on business”⁶⁵

Marx actually entered the capitalist sweatshop, carefully analyzing the power relations, business organizations, capital investments, factory work, and wage systems at the basis of European capitalism. Benjamin’s step toward the sources of production ends up elsewhere, in a materialist cosmogony, or a myth of creation. The secret of production may be beheld not by describing the relation between worker and owner in the capitalist system but by studying the timeless relation between the human organism and nature, especially the skill and vision with which somebody transforms matter. In other words, Benjamin’s model of production is based on an idea of nonalienated labor, where working ideally involves play, creativity, self-expression, existential fulfillment, and community building. In utopia, work would be conducted on the model of children’s play, Benjamin states: “All places are worked by human hands, made useful and beautiful thereby; all, however, stand, like a roadside inn, open to all.”⁶⁶

Benjamin always paid particular attention to the world makers—peasants, artisans, children, and workers—who know how to make the world inhabitable by transforming matter with hands and minds. His recurring references to the world of artisan labor and craftsmanship and his keen interest in toys and children’s theater are all part of his notion of authentic production as the foundation of human experience and its various cultural expressions.⁶⁷ To make the world is thus to know the world, and in capitalist modernity the proletariat is the class that makes the world.

For the system of capitalist production does not bring into being only “masses” of people ready to buy and consume what the factories deliver, and not just the immaterial know-how and technology needed for the production of these commodities. Crucially, capitalism also brings into being a social class whose sensory apparatus is profoundly shaped by these new technological forces of production. And this is why Benjamin can claim that the worker’s hands are somehow better adapted to handling the world of modernity, just as the eyes and ears of the working classes are superior to the dulled senses of the bourgeoisie when it comes to understanding modern society.

For instance, the worker’s eye is thus on a par with the technical eye of the camera, Benjamin argues. Both see beneath appearance, both see differently, and both see deeper. There is also a parallel between the proletariat and cinema because film is produced, edited, and narrated according to a cutting technique similar to what obtains in factory work. Moreover, both cinema and factory work rely on a rational division of labor. In the production of an automobile or a film, no single individual is skilled enough to run the production process as a whole, in the way an individual craftsman controlled the manufacturing of an object. Rather, the manufacture of commodities as well as the creation of artworks takes on a collective character, which makes the idea of the autonomous individual and the artistic genius obsolete. However, manual work and spiritual work do not just become collective. They are also increasingly determined by a common logic or a common mode of production characterized by a strong reliance on machinery and technological devices. Benjamin’s designated this logic as one of “technical reproducibility,” arguing that it radically changes the function of art, the nature of political representation, and the properties of knowledge.

Benjamin stressed that large-scale dissemination of images enabled by camera and reproduction techniques had for the first time in history given common people access to reproductions of artworks as well as images of distant places and unknown parts of nature. Moreover, new techniques of reproduction had given these people a possibility to represent themselves for what they were—as the true producers of history. The collective itself, or even work itself, was thereby given a voice.⁶⁸ Having previously been forced to rely on a class of sages who protected their own privileges of seeing and describing, people had now attained the means to present and represent themselves by using the camera. The transformation was already under way in Soviet Russia, Benjamin wrote: “Some of the actors taking part in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves—and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe today, the capitalist exploitation of film obstructs the human being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced.”⁶⁹

Benjamin concluded that technology would be rationally employed at its highest potential only if placed under the control of the masses. Of course, this is standard Marxism: the full realization of society’s productive forces requires the abolishment of private ownership. Benjamin’s contribution to the Marxist doctrine was to develop a corresponding analysis concerning the forces of cultural production. Just as machine technology served as a way of exploiting factory workers, so was media technology used to subject the masses by disseminating phantasmagoric messages and images naturalizing their subordination. Fascism raised this use of media technology to a new level.

Technical development had brought the masses into being and turned them into consumers of the phantasmagorias made available by mass media. But the same technical development also offered the masses an opportunity to place themselves at the center of the historical stage and to present themselves as the conscious subjects of history. This is a decisive step in Benjamin’s analysis of the collective. As many commentators have pointed out, it is also a questionable, if not doubtful, move—the utopian tiger’s leap into the future.⁷⁰ By using new media technology to represent themselves and to fabricate themselves in their own image, people would put an end to their own existence as masses at the margins of the polity, transforming themselves into the constituent subject of society. The very principle of “technical reproducibility” that instituted the masses—as consumers and obedient political subjects—would thus “dispel the illusion of the masses with the reality of class.”

This self-transformation of the masses into a historical subject would also entail a profound change of the function of the artist and the writer. Adapting to new modes of cultural and aesthetic production that were collective in nature, they would relinquish their status as individual or autonomous creators placed at a distance from society. Instead, they would engage in collective production, as facilitators and experts in the effort to bring all parts of a variegated and heterogeneous society into representation and expression, a task entailing no less than the awakening of the collective.

Ultimately, it is this whole process of social and cultural transformation that Benjamin encapsulates in the first sentence of the final section of his artwork essay: “The Masses are a matrix from which all customary behavior toward works of art is today emerging newborn.”⁷¹ Art is no longer placed above the masses as an object cherished for its cult value. Instead, it is valorized for what Benjamin calls its “exhibition value” No longer founded on ritual, the social function of art becomes based in politics: the artwork serves to display the social community. Benjamin contrasts the old relation to art to the new one by comparing the attitude of the connoisseur of master painting with that of the distracted film spectator: “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it [versenkt sich darin]; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves [die zerstreute Masse dagagen versenkt das Kunstwerk in sich]”⁷²

But—how can the masses “absorb” the work of art? Benjamin put great faith in the combined effect of new technologies of reproduction and representation, new forms of collective self-organization, and new forms of communal or communist ownership. The result would be what Bertolt Brecht called an Umfunktionierung or functional transformation of all art forms in accordance with emerging socialist forms of production.⁷³ In his writings from the late 1930s, Benjamin always contrasted this ideal, to his great disappointment already partly betrayed in the Soviet Union, with that in fascist Europe. For fascism, too, allowed the masses a space within the field of representation, but only for the purpose of consolidating the hierarchy between rulers and ruled. The only way to avoid this development was to transfer the new means for cinematic and photographic production into the hands of the masses. If in traditional bourgeois culture the beholder was absorbed by the work of art, and if in fascist culture the masses were absorbed by a society turned into an artwork painted by the leader, then in Benjamin’s ideal communist society a third possibility was realized, in which the work of art was absorbed by social life itself.

The work of art being absorbed by the masses—and the “functional transformation” of the very conception of art: this is precisely the role that Brandt and Moholy-Nagy attributed to the photoplastic image. It was designed to be placed at the center of the public square, in the midst of the city crowds, the members of which would all be counted on to decipher its visual language and be enlightened by its message. As the work of art was thus absorbed by the masses, it provided these masses with a new medium in which their own experience was at once reflected and represented. This program presupposed aesthetic media that were able to view the masses from within and also to see society with the very eyes of these masses. The aim of the program was to transport the lens through which the social body represented itself closer to the ground; to enable these masses to represent themselves politically, culturally, and aesthetically without intermediaries; and to turn arts and culture into a genuinely democratic enterprise. In Moholy-Nagy’s and Brandt’s photoplastic posters the mass is therefore no longer an object of fear hovering at the margins of the social world but the subject of its own means of representation. The mass is no longer seen from the outside but from the inside, at which point it ceases to be a mass and turns out to be a collective that is far more heterogeneous and differentiated than what is evoked by that word. Benjamin speaks of the “loosening” of the proletarian masses, which occurs “when it becomes conscious of its social position and political role and takes up the struggle for liberation” He continues: “The loosening of the proletarian masses is the work of solidarity. In the solidarity of the proletarian class struggle, the dead, undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished”⁷⁴

In this sense, Moholy-Nagy’s and Brandt’s aesthetic inventions and Benjamin’s theory also indicated a more general feature of Weimar modernism. For it seems that the deconstruction of the dichotomy of individuals and masses presupposes a cultural or aesthetic medium that would dissolve the opposition between aesthetics and politics or aesthetics and public culture. In Brandt’s and Moholy-Nagy’s case, this new medium was the photoplastic technique itself, which is hard to locate in any conventional system of aesthetic genres. In the case of Bertolt Brecht, epic theater served the same function, as the newspaper feuilleton did for Kracauer and, as we shall see, the documentary drama for Erwin Piscator, to mention just a few examples. Also, we may recall that Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz appeared not only as a novel in 1929 but also as a Hörspiel in 1930 and a year later as film; or that Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera was produced as opera, novel, film, and then as a book documentation that addressed precisely the tensions among these media. In these cases, the presence and pressure of the masses determined the very forms of artistic and intellectual labor, eroding the distinction between high and low. The negation of the distinction between individual and mass lead to an interrogation or transgression of the distinction between art and its other—whether we call it mass culture, primitive culture, folk culture, propaganda, proletkult, or constructivism. For a long time, all dominant views of art had presupposed a conception of the authentic and creative individual. By thinking through the phenomenon of “the masses” Moholy-Nagy and Brandt followed Benjamin as they eventually undercut the individualist foundation of aesthetics and robbed art of its conceptual and institutional autonomy. No longer anchored in the private sphere or the bourgeois interior, art and literature were “absorbed by the masses” and subsequently redefined as forms of social production, with the artist and author as producers. When Walter Benjamin in the last sentence of his essay on the work of art calls for the politicization of art, it was a process of this kind that he probably had in mind.

The problem of the masses turns out to be a veil hiding the problem of democracy. This is to say, then, that my investigation of the interwar discourse on masses has now reached a different level, at which the object of the discourse disappears into the historical landscape, and all we encounter are numberless ordinary people of various kinds. In the late 1970s, Jean Baudrillard called them silent majorities, though they could not be called silent in the rebellious 1920s. Siegfried Kracauer called them “those who wait” (“Die Wartenden”).⁷⁵ What were they waiting for? To file their “legitimate claim to being reproduced,” as Benjamin argued? To become recognized as human beings, rights-bearing political agents, and citizens? To see themselves truthfully reflected in the representations of people and community offered by the politicians?

In the preface to this book I mentioned Kracauer’s contention that Weimar imagination was caught by a false dilemma. Political debate was set up as a choice between tyranny and anarchy. The dominant discourse on the masses in interwar culture reflected this dilemma, and most ideas, theories, and images of the masses served to amplify the fear that the population in general and the lower classes in particular were a dangerous force that had to be confined and controlled by some unyielding authority. Tragically, the political and business elites of Weimar ended up resolving the weaknesses of the newly instituted democratic republic by abolishing democracy, opting instead for fascist authoritarianism. The promise of fair and equal representation to all stayed unfulfilled, largely because Germany’s elites abhorred the prospect of letting everybody into the political and cultural arena. In their view, that prospect amounted to the tyranny of the majority, as Tocqueville once called it, or what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset termed the rebellion of the masses or, again, what Joseph Goebbels derided as “asphalt democracy.”

Throughout this book I have been suggesting that the idea and image of the masses in interwar Europe is most adequately interpreted as actualizing the crucial problem of representation. The thinkers that developed the theories of mass psychology and mass sociology had a different understanding of their project, as do present-day social psychologists toiling with their conceptual tools. According to them, mass psychology remains a quasiuniversal theory about the emotional substance of collective life, and mass sociology is a theory about explaining and directing collective life. The point, however, is to rethink the problem posed by the masses according to the following formula: wherever masses are, there is also a crisis of representation.

“Power struggle has entered new forms” Ernst Jünger wrote in his introduction to a book of photographs published in 1933 by Edmund Schultz. Through an impressive selection of thematically arranged photographs accompanied by striking captions, Schultz groped for the zeitgeist. “The transformed world: a picture album of our time,” he called the book (Die veränderte Welt: Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit). Why was the world transformed? Because photography and mass media provided a new matrix to which politics and society now had to adapt. And politics, according to Jünger’s introduction, was always about power struggle.⁷⁶

Or as one caption in the book announced: “Intensification of optical and acoustic means provides the political will with unexpected possibilities.”⁷⁷ Underlying the statement was a conviction that current realities would soon be outdone by new “means.” Jünger argued that the advent of photography made a certain kind of politics obsolete. “Today, a reasonable objection against a politician is that he looks ugly on photo.”⁷⁸ He also implied that the parliamentary system was outdated because its reality could not be captured in a snapshot or because extended negotiations in the house’s subcommittees made for boring cinema.

Photographic media favored a different set of political forms. The pictures chosen by Jünger and Schultz left no room for doubt as to the kind of politics that harmonized best with optical and acoustic innovations. The captions, too, were unequivocal. One of them stated: “Disarmament? What the prophets of liberalism have not predicted: the voluntary entry into uniform.” This caption referred to two images, one featuring a “workers’ parade in Moscow,” the other one showing SA-militia hailing the swastika (figure 4.4).⁷⁹

Such were the new forms of mass power nourished by mass media. For Jünger and Schultz, there was an obvious relation between the media through which society was visually represented and the forms in which society was politically organized. Insofar as photography was a mass medium, it was also a medium that prompted the masses to emerge as the visible substance of society. According to Jünger, the camera reveals that history has already left individuality behind, and what emerges instead are new human types that have put on the masks of various kinds of masses. Their subjective action and facial and bodily appearance are wholly subordinated to a larger collective aim and perspective.

Die veränderte Welt is just one among many similar publications describing interwar society as dominated by the masses.⁸⁰ As I have suggested, the masses that we encounter in these works should be seen as fantasms or allegories expressing the difficulty of a coherent representation—scholarly, theoretical, political, narrative, visual, or other—of society in a situation of disintegration and conflict. Jünger and Schultz’s book is instructive precisely because it suggests how this difficulty could be resolved in two opposing ways, each corresponding to a certain social image or metaphor. In the case of Jünger and Schultz, the metaphor in question is simply “the face of the mass,” indicating that the mass appears as an object in the field of vision of someone perceiving it from a distance, which corresponds to what Theodor Geiger called the “optical mass.” In other texts or works of art, equally preoccupied with the masses, a different idea prevails, according to which the masses are endowed with a perceptual apparatus and subjectivity of its own, which was sometimes metaphorically expressed as the masses having vision, eye, and gaze.

One section of Jünger and Schultz’s album is thus entitled “The changing face of the mass [Das Veränderte Gesicht der Masse]” Photos display marching masses and working masses, masses in combat, in the factory, and on the beach, as well as sporting, playing, mourning, and parading masses (figure 4.5).⁸¹ In short, they show different types of human mass formations, each with its own pattern of appearance, its own facial traits. But the images also reveal how the camera is here far from a neutral medium and rather an active force in front of which people form themselves into new designs. What Kracauer called the mass ornament comes across as a product of the camera and related regimes of specular manipulation and expansion. Describing the relation between the camera and the crowd in the interwar period, Jeffrey Schnapp shows how illustrated mass media excelled in so-called mass panoramas. The photographer’s angle choreographed the crowd and made it fit “the frame, the grid, the geometry of the page, the edit and cut. Politically disciplined by the leader, the crowd [was] pictorially disciplined through photomontage.”⁸² The point was often to render the crowd as an oceanic force of nature, yet one that was dammed and controlled, and for this purpose traces of individuality and internal difference were erased. Through the distant camera lens, individual faces vanished, and the bodies of those now faceless individuals merged into a new composite face.

That the mass had a face and that that face changed as you moved from marching columns of soldiers, to workers lined up along the conveyor belt, to the passersby on Kurfürstendamm, or to spectators in a sports arena was a discovery of the 1920s. The faces of the masses seen in Jünger and Schultz’s collection vary from the amorphous multitude to the uniformed army. The face of the mass may thus be swarming, anarchic, and uncontrollable. But it may also be obedient and ordered, constituting a social resource prepared to follow any command issued by leaders who are cunning and competent enough to direct them. Two different faces, one firmly unified, the other with fuzzy contours—yet both are observed from, if not constituted by, a point of view far away from the men and women in the crowd. Thus, when Jünger and Schultz point at “the face of the mass,” they refer least of all to the faces of the individuals in the mass but rather to the greater collective face in which the face of the single human being is but a small component.

In a previous era, between, say, the French Revolution and World War I, the masses were usually described as faceless and anonymous or as a changeable horde, herd, or swarm. The most characteristic trait of the mass was its very lack of traits. Since the mass was described as a phenomenon produced by common affects, governed by passions and instincts, it was also seen as acting without volition or rationality. For the same reason, it was typically described as passive and reactive, owning no inherent principle of formation, no firm definition or identity. Jünger and Schultz affirmed the idea that the mass as such lacks form, but at the same time they emphasized that it could be given any form. Because of its reactive character, the mass was a perfect object of leadership and visionary guidance. That is to say, the masses attain form, their face is developed, their identity clarified, once they are viewed and organized by some external agent. In speaking of “the changing face of the mass,” Jünger and Schultz emphasized that the mass looks different depending on the regime that commands it and the optical means through which it appears.

Two years earlier, Edmund Schultz had published a similar book of documentary photographs. Interestingly, it was called “The face of democracy”: Das Gesicht der Demokratie: Ein Bildwerk zur Geschichte der deutschen Nachkriegszeit. The villain in Schultz’s book is liberalism and the system of parliamentary democracy, that is, the Weimar Republic as a political project. The hero is the German spirit, embodied above all by the so-called Kampfbünde, militias and paramilitary groups operating in uniform at the fringes of legality and organizing an extensive part of the nonunionized male population. A long introductory essay, this one written by Ernst Jünger’s younger brother Friedrich Georg, describes Weimar as an interregnum, a time of “Kaiserlosigkeit.”⁸³ Parliamentary democracy had resulted only in anarchy, Jünger claims. He and Schultz instead promote what they call “directed democracy,” by which they understand a form of quasi-mystical sovereignty invested in the nation and its leader or, in German: Führerdemokratie. In their view, the face of democracy is of two kinds. The first entails the politicization of the masses and the organization of the people into parties and voters, which is said to have weakened the state and the nation in Germany. The second one is Führerdemokratie, that is, the unmediated transubstantiation of nation and people into the authority of the state. Photos of chaotic crowd scenes and portraits of individual “betrayers” symbolize the first face of democracy, according to Jünger and Schultz. Photos of armed militiamen in columns—groups called Stahlheim, Wehrwolf, and Reichsflagge—show the second face of democracy.⁸⁴

It may seem strange that Schultz and the Jüngers, devoting so many pictures and pages to the “face of the masses” and “the face of democracy,” never once asked whether this face also had eyes to see with. Considering that all three endorsed a fascist worldview, however, it is hardly surprising. Those who trusted the mass to have perceptual capacities of its own were usually artists and intellectuals accustomed to viewing society from a point of view level with the asphalt. They recognized that the mass had vision and gaze. Consequently, the mass was able to assume its own perspective on the world and to judge and act as a political subject.

Can we picture a seeing collective? A mass equipped with optical gaze, perhaps even a complete apparatus of perception? A vast laboratory for aesthetic and ideological experiments, the Weimar Republic also fabricated complex designs of the perceptual machinery of the collective. Two historical conditions were necessary for this idea to emerge. The first had to do with the process of production and the division of labor: the factory system had taught people how to organize many individuals according to a common logic so that they all contributed to the same end. The second had to do with the new media situation, which made it possible to produce messages and images on a mass scale and to disseminate them to a mass audience whose members received and experienced them simultaneously. The first is a case of collective production of material things, the second a case of collective reception of signs and images.

If these two processes were connected, the outcome would be a comprehensive process of social representation, as envisioned by those who acknowledged that the masses had their own perspective and perceptual apparatus. The result, that is, would be a process in which the collective was author of the media and its contents and at the same time its recipient or addressee. In this process we encounter a collective representing itself in a form adapted to its own senses. Whatever the medium employed, it would be configured so as to record and transmit the contents perceived by the gaze of the masses and to do this in such a way that the masses would apprehend these contents as a truthful representation of their situation. Or, more simply put: society represents itself to itself.

The solution to these problems, Münzenberg gathered, was to create a pool of photographers supplying the magazine with the pictures it needed. In March 1926 AIZ arranged a competition among its readers for the best photographic depictions of working-class life:

The editors called for five categories of motifs: “1. Photographs typifying the workers’ revolutionary movement; 2. Photographs typifying the workers’ social conditions; 3. So-called genre-motifs, which provide good insight into all phases of the workers’ everyday life; 4. Photographs from work places which clearly reveal the conditions of labor and its environment; 5. Photographs demonstrating modern technology and its ways of functioning; industrial buildings and their construction.” AIZ concluded the instructions for its competition: “The task is not easy and not to be underestimated. You must courageously capture the beauty in your own work, as well as the terrifying aspects of social misery”⁸⁶

The response was overwhelming—so much so, in fact, that in the fall of the same year the magazine founded an amateur organization for the camera-owning part of the working class, Vereinigung der Arbeiter Fotografen Deutschlands, the German Association of Worker Photographers. Already in January 1927, Münzenberg reported that more than thirty local associations of worker photographers had been founded throughout Germany, and the initiative had spread to Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and Russia.⁸⁷ At its peak in 1931 the German organization counted 2,412 members divided into some 100 local branches. The association launched its own printed forum, which soon developed into an ambitious magazine in its own right, with the untiring support of Münzenberg.⁸⁸ It is in this magazine, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, that we may follow, issue by issue, how the mass grows eyes of its own, equipping itself with an apparatus of perception and photographic recording, which brings into being hitherto unexplored ways of representing society, as well as representations of social spaces until then unexplored (figures 4.6 and 4.7). The magazine amounts to no less than a new aesthetic education of its readers, who start to develop their own aesthetics of representation in order to transgress the boundaries of the public arena.

The process may be observed on several levels. First, as regarded basic practical skills, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf offered education and advice on the technique and equipment needed in order to produce photographs. The association negotiated discounts with camera and film manufacturers for the benefit of its members, and the magazine provided recommendations on which cameras to choose: Leica, Foth-Derby, Korelle, Mentor Drei-Vier, Pupille, or Kolibri?⁸⁹ The magazine also gave hands-on counseling on how to take pictures, develop film, and make copies, as well as on how to repair damaged negatives, retouch prints, and store developed film. It provided theoretical learning on the refraction of light waves, the laws of optics, and the use of chemicals in the dark room. It gave lessons on reproduction techniques, graphics, and printing (figure 4.8).

On a second level, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf provided its readers with a sociological inventory, naming the obscured parts of society that the worker-photographer should approach and capture. Most important were motifs and topics from the life of the working class for the simple reason that these realities were absent from the worldview of the bourgeois press, and the magazine did not fail to mention seemingly trivial topics such as the potato harvest and the playground. In February 1927, the magazine published harrowing photos of slums and shantytowns around the country, all of which had been sent in by local worker-photographers.⁹⁰ Of course, this ambition also demonstrated a political tendency: to show the unseen; and to depict what had for long been pushed outside the frame.

Der Arbeiter-Fotograf also contained articles on how proletarian photographers should try to influence politics in a more direct sense, for instance, by documenting police violence and the actions of right-wing militias. “The police must be policed” wrote Walter Nettelbeck in an article that outlined the principles for a new journalism.⁹¹ Nettelbeck explained how worker photographers should establish proper reporter teams and news organizations in order to get out the latest news before anyone else. Such an organization should consist of four groups, he maintained: Group One: a mobile troupe of carefully positioned photographers able to follow a demonstration or some other political event from beginning to end; Group Two: posted on the first floor in houses along the demonstration’s itinerary, making sure to occupy windows with a free view onto the street; Group Three: well-trained darkroom personnel; Group Four: bicycle couriers delivering film rolls from photographers to darkroom and developed prints from darkroom to the press. And all this in accordance with the slogan: “You are telling well, only by telling fast!” (figure 4.9).⁹²

On yet another level, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf also expressed an ethical thrust. An intention to humanize the worker by emphasizing his or her righteousness, beauty, and dignity was explicit on almost every page. Finally, the magazine contained an aesthetic didactic, most pertinently revealed in gallery sections featuring photographs taken by famous professionals such as László Moholy-Nagy, Tina Modotti, and John Heartfield, and exhibited as so many models to be emulated. Heartfield, it should be added, also did most of the covers for the parent magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung. In addition, the magazine included articles on the principles of photomontage and photograms and the relation between photography and painting, thereby seeking to explain how modernist techniques should be “functionally transformed” into weapons in the class struggle while also warning that technical experimentation could divert into futile aestheticism.⁹³

A recurring section was called “Picture criticism” (Bilderkritik) and consisted of illustrated analyses of good and bad photographs. In this context, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf also delivered instructions on how to photograph crowds and mass manifestations so as to avoid reducing the participants to anonymous bodies and swarming ants. The worker-photographers were encouraged to choose the camera angle, distance, and cropping techniques that reproduced the event and the protesting people in ways that were true to their own perspective. The photographer, the magazine stated, must attempt to reproduce the very rage and anger of the demonstrating masses, and this could be done either by seeking the panoramic view, in which case the photographer must not look down on the crowd but exalt it, or by capturing its most original or typical groups, symbols, banners, and participants. Of particular importance were photos of police retaliation, “pictures that show the strength and mobilization of the police forces, their heavy weaponry,” and even more necessary were photographs demonstrating police brutality, “armed police officers beating unarmed workers or demonstrators” for example.⁹⁴ The anonymous advice provided in the “Picture criticism” section usually stressed the importance of finding an angle that revealed the multiplicity of the masses, for instance, by moving close to the crowd and packing the visual plane with faces and bodies in motion. Emphasis was also placed on light conditions and shutter speed; it was important not to represent masses and collectives as a dark block.⁹⁵

A further step was taken in 1931, when Der Arbeiter-Fotograf asserted that worker photographers must appropriate the motion picture and start making films. Reasoning along the same lines that Walter Benjamin would later develop in his artwork essay, Karl Tölle emphasized the collective nature of filmmaking, its suitability for socialist organizations of labor, and the necessity to provide alternative worldviews to the one disseminated by bourgeois cinema.⁹⁶ Already in 1928 Willi Münzenberg established a separate magazine for the very purpose of promoting proletarian film, Film und Volk.

Der Arbeiter-Fotograf thus offered an entire curriculum for amateur photographers: elementary advice on technical issues and optics, a sociology of German society to help find the proper subjects, a call for political commitment, lessons in the ethics of photography, lessons in aesthetic composition of images, and outlines for efficacious photo journalism. “Preserve your old issues of the magazine,” the editors exhorted, for they make up “a universal manual in photography.”⁹⁷

Crucially, the magazine explicitly sought to depersonalize photography, always emphasizing the collective as author, transmitter, and recipient of the new images of society that it produced. This was done on several levels. Theoretically, the magazine tended to criticize or condemn exhibitions, images, and photographers that exaggerated their individual authorship and originality of vision. The vision that Der Arbeiter-Fotograf promoted strove for universality and generality, for a worldview that could be recognized by an entire class, and it also called for “collective reportage.”⁹⁸ According to this aesthetic, the worker-photographer was only secondarily an individual. Primarily, he or she was part of a production team, communicating what was true for a larger group. In practical terms, this tendency was manifested in the magazine’s policy of anonymizing the photographs it published, replacing the photographer’s name with his or her initials, or by attributing them to the local branch of which the photographer was a member. Moreover, the magazine invited its readership to transmit and publish critical views and articles of photographs published in former issues, thus inviting the worker-photographers to become critics of one another and of their own trade.⁹⁹ The August 1932 issue went one step further as its entire material—articles, pictures, headlines, layout—was collectively edited by the Berlin section of the worker photographers association. In this way, what was displayed in Der Arbeiter-Fotograf was related less to specific individuals than to an imagined—and often idealized—collectivity, whose members communicated to one another not as a set of autonomous minds or individual creators but as people sharing one and the same habitus and debating how to truthfully exhibit and represent it.¹⁰⁰ The publishers and editors of the magazine never really ceded their gatekeeping function, of course, but they appear to have striven for the realization of the ideal.

Such were the different steps in what Franz Höllering, editor of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, in 1928 called “the conquest of the machines of observation [die Eroberung der beobachtenden Maschinen]” (see figure 4.10). He mentioned that after the destruction of the Justizpalast in Vienna the year before, workers were brought before the courts on the basis of photographic identification. This demonstrated how the bourgeoisie used “the machines of observation” against the working classes and made it all the more important that the proletariat, “creator and champion of the future,” learn how to “master the machines,” Höllering argued.¹⁰¹ Once accomplished, this conquest would also yield a new eye, or mode of vision, which no longer observed “the face of the masses” from afar or transformed the working classes into what Theodor Geiger called optical masses but that was an organ of the masses themselves. For the proletarian and the bourgeois have different senses, argued Edwin Hoernle in one of his articles. The world looks different depending on what one’s eyes have been trained to perceive, and this training largely corresponds to one’s class affiliation. What the one registers sharply is hazy for the other. Hence the importance of technical and organizational apparatuses able to register, enlarge, and disseminate what the worker’s eye is able to see.¹⁰² Attaining its own instrument of visual perception, the mass would then cease being a mass and transform itself into a seeing collective. Hoernle exhorted: “We are the eye of our class and we teach our brothers to use their eyes!” (see figure 4.11).¹⁰³ This is how Der Arbeiter-Fotograf invented a collective vision, a social eye, what Hoernle called a class-eye, and what Moholy-Nagy called a socialism of vision. The result was a new mode of political and aesthetic representation.

The history of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf has usually been told as the contributions the magazine made to the development of early documentary aesthetics or as part of labor history and the emergence of modern working-class culture in Germany or even as the creation of a proletarian counterculture and public sphere.¹⁰⁴ However, the implications and legacy of Der Arbeiter-Fotograf go beyond the history of the documentary and the labor movement. The magazine and its photographic didactics is a concrete example of the process that Benjamin had in mind when speaking about the work of art as being absorbed by the masses or when speaking about the importance of attaining “literacy” in matters of photography.

Why is this so important? Because the magazine contributed to a transformation of what Ernst Jünger had called the forms of the power struggle. Unlike the transformation embraced by Jünger, however, the transformation did in this case emerge from below, from people themselves, who by expanding the field of vision of journalism and culture succeeded in representing those who had been without representation. Indeed, the Employers’ Organization of Germany recognized the threat—workers, “sneaking around with cameras,” documenting workplaces and police methods, were upsetting status quo—and it asked the state attorney to have the Association of Worker Photographers banned under pretexts of industrial espionage.¹⁰⁵ The police, too, felt threatened, and on several occasions police officers attacked proletarian photographers and destroyed their cameras and footage.¹⁰⁶ Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, then, symbolizes the conquest of optical means whereby ordinary people, or those referred to as the masses, could participate in the “power struggle.” This entailed unexpected possibilities, enabling an act of representation corresponding to what Benjamin had called for: the appearance of the mass gave way to the reality of class.

In Weimar culture the border between aesthetics and politics was transgressed in all art forms and literary genres but perhaps no more so than in the performing arts. In the midst of the rolling social and political crises following World War I a young generation of playwrights and directors rejected what they saw on European stages, especially the psychologically oriented naturalist drama with a bourgeois individual as hero. They wanted a new theater that would be able to intervene into the urgent problems of the day, from famine to right-wing violence and from capitalist domination to women’s rights, and with that theater they wanted to make a new world. Searching for dramatic forms adequate to the task, they looked back upon what they imagined to have been the situation in ancient Greece, in which the theater was the cultural center of society, an aesthetic prism reflecting communal tensions and concerns. No longer a temple of art separated from society, theater became a social and political arena, representing the social body of the nation, and in that respect as important as the parliament and the press.¹⁰⁷

In a memoir written in 1949 Béla Balázs recalls radical theater of the early 1930s. The stage: Friedrichstraße. The actors: a handful of anonymous actors from the group Die Ketzer (The Heretics) mixing with the crowd. The play: a young man standing in front of an upscale grocery store suddenly collapses and falls to the ground; another man comes rushing, kneels down, and starts unbuttoning his torn and soiled shirt to help him breathe.

That was all of it, and the rest was improvisation, writes Balázs.¹⁰⁸ As other passersby approached, a crowd soon gathered around the apparent victim, forming a half circle on the sidewalk against the backdrop of the store window stuffed with sausages, cheese, and caviar. “What’s the matter with him? What’s wrong?” someone asked. “You all know what’s the matter” said the man standing on his knees. “Hunger! That’s what’s the matter. Can’t you figure that one out for yourselves?”

It was theater in its crudest form, writes Balázs. Yet in the 1930s depression, theater of this kind was at one with the drama of everyday life. Ignited by the simulated collapse, the Friedrichstraße drama continued from its own momentum as onlookers started debating unemployment, social injustice, economic depression, malnourishment, and the cost of living, at the same time throwing resentful eyes at well-dressed customers entering the luxury foods store. “Of course” one man shouted. “Every day, that hunger. I’m also out of work.” If the situation grew tense police would arrive to disperse the assembly and start interrogating people. By that time, however, the actors would already be on their way to another street corner, another temporary stage on which to agitate for social justice.¹⁰⁹

Street theater was frequent in this period because local and regional authorities issued an increasing number of decrees and prohibitions against cultural events and manifestations said to disturb public order, to which agitation and propaganda, agitprop, groups responded by leaving their more permanent stages and initiating clandestine performances.¹¹⁰ The drama form itself was not new. Ambulating performances in streets and squares hark back to the origins of theater history in Dionysian festivals or medieval pageants in which the entire population would reenact the foundational moments of their community. Left-wing theater groups renewed the genre during the German revolution in 1918–1919, much inspired by the cultural politics launched by the Communist Party in the Soviet union. A common source of inspiration were the utopian ideas of the young Richard Wagner’s Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849) and Romain Rolland’s Théâtre du peuple (1903), which envisioned a revolutionary theater where the entire people would recognize and celebrate its unity.¹¹¹ Journalists and cultural workers formed touring companies for agitprop, staging recent political events in order to educate and agitate “the masses” By the late 1920s every town in Germany had its own agitprop companies, organized by an association called Arbeiter-Theater-Bund Deutschlands, loosely linked to Germany’s Communist Party and the largest theater organization in Europe outside Russia. Béla Balázs served for some years as the artistic director of its national office and as artistic leader of Die Ketzer.¹¹² What these performances looked like may be glimpsed in Slatán Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s film Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World from 1932. Documentary sections from a communist youth camp outside Berlin show athletic competitions, political songs and speeches, leisurely discussions, and distribution of pamphlets, as well as the agitprop company Das Rote Sprachrohr (The Red Mouthpiece), the members of which are dressed in red and perform on an open-air arena stage with their “Song of the United Red Front”: “We are the red mouthpiece / mouthpiece of the masses, that’s us” All is combined into a cinematic montage that offers a tour through the young proletarian collective.¹¹³

The aim was not to disseminate art and culture to the people but to agitate and instruct, wrote Erwin Piscator about the intentions behind his own Proletarian Theater, founded in 1920: “not theater for the proletariat, but proletarian theater.”¹¹⁴ Although Piscator’s Proletarisches Theater was short lived, its celebrated performances and the director’s subsequent productions—now organized within the framework of the so-called Piscator Collective or Piscator Stage—became points of reference for all attempts to use the stage as a political arena in the interwar period. Piscator’s theater became a motor for a series of efforts to rethink and remake the relation of aesthetics and politics, in which many of the best writers and artists of the Weimar Republic got involved, including Béla Balázs, Georg Grosz, Ernst Toller, John Heartfield, and László Moholy-Nagy. Some of them had been active in the Dada movement, which immediately after the war had proclaimed the end of art. For Dadaism, the only art conceivable was one that destroyed the institution of art, now depicted as a realm of dead monuments, hollow idealism, and dangerous delusions. If many soon came to abandon Dada, they did so in order not to proclaim a new and superior aesthetic but to use art as a means to political ends. Piscator’s choice was unambiguous: “What the leadership of the proletarian theater must strive for,” he explained, is “simplicity in expression and composition, a clear and unequivocal influence on the audience of workers, subordination of every artistic intention to the revolutionary goal: conscious emphasis on and propagation of the idea of the class struggle.”¹¹⁵ In Piscator’s view, theater could achieve this by investigating what he called historical truth, that is, the truth as expounded by Marxist theory. “By witnessing the unfolding of all problems in their larger context and tracing their ultimate effects, the masses will realize the inevitability of the fate that we depict and the only way to overcome it.”¹¹⁶

In another context, Piscator explained that in its most flourishing moments “theater was always something deeply bound to the community of the people; and today when the broad masses of the people have awakened politically, and when they justifiably demand to fill the form of the state with their own contents, the fate of the theater, if it is not to remain a pretentious occupation of the top five hundred, is for better or for worse tied to the necessities, demands, and sufferings of these masses.”¹¹⁷

Such a program presented formidable practical tasks. How to use theater to convey a true representation of capitalist society? How to make the masses, or the working classes, see that truth? How to get the working classes to the theater in the first place? Carrying out such ambitions would presuppose a successful method for turning the working classes into the major audience of the theater and also into its main actor. Piscator’s ambition was no less than this. “Theater wants the people and must go to the people, and nobody can forbid theater the experiments serving to discover the way that leads to the people.”¹¹⁸

In agitprop and street theater, this task had been resolved by leaving the theater house to perform in parks, fields, streets, workers’ halls, and other places where people gathered. This remained a possibility for political performances throughout the interwar period, but it imposed firm limits. The actors had to make do with simple means, small stages, few rehearsals, and tight budgets. Piscator soon tried other ways of expanding the stage to social and political areas that had received little dramatic attention or none at all. The result was a revolutionary idea of the performing arts—and new functions for dramatists, actors, stage directors, and everyone else involved, including the audience. At its boldest, Piscator’s idea manifested itself in his collaboration with Walter Gropius, resulting in their shared vision for what they called the Total Theater—at once a building and a conception—capable of housing mass audiences of several thousands and adapted to the technology and flexibility demanded by Piscator’s aims. What would be placed on stage in this theater, ideally, was society itself.

Piscator’s aesthetic had two foundations. The first one should already be clear: he wished to reconnect theater to the life of society, the people, and the proletariat, in other words, to the agent that in Weimar society was called the masses. The second pillar was technology, from moving images to stage lifts and conveyor belts, which Piscator deployed in his productions to create an entirely new multimedia experience. His ideas were based precisely on the two new realities—masses and media technology—that Benjamin some years later would identify as the determinants of modern works of art. By incorporating technology into art, Piscator’s theater wanted to liberate technology from its purely instrumental aspects and thus to undermine the two bourgeois notions of technology as progress and art as an autonomous realm separated from society and the tastes of ordinary people. In this attempt to close the gap between aesthetics and society, Piscator emerged as a major exponent of what Peter Bürger has called the historical avant-garde.¹¹⁹

The masses were significant in several ways for Piscator’s political theater. First, they were the audience that theater should address and influence and in whose interest it should operate. In an important article from 1919 Béla Balázs had outlined the principles for a Marxist dramaturgy, placing great emphasis on theater’s ability to further the class consciousness of its audience. Traces of mainstream crowd psychology are evident in Balázs’s argument. He valorized theater as a collective experience able to create “a mass-soul, a mass which is not formed from the isolated atoms of heaped-up individuals, but a mass that in its Dionysian enthusiasm really achieves a unified consciousness” Balázs stressed that “the crowd is the soul and the significance of stage plays.”¹²⁰

However, even though theater had a hypnotic potential, it must not manipulate the crowd nor speak solely to its emotions. Piscator balanced emotional impact against intellectual clarity in his productions. Enthusiasm or contemplation, emotional release or rational understanding: political theater would have to be a synthesis of both yet always calibrated so as to direct the audience’s passions toward rational and radical political action. To Sergei Eisenstein’s claim that the idea of film was to shake and electrify the masses, Piscator retorted that boxing matches and horse races would then suffice just as well—“we don’t just want to enthuse, we wish to transmit clarity and recognition”¹²¹ An example of Piscator’s way of combining faultless socialist pedagogy with electrifying entertainment was his Revue Roter Rummel (1924). All elements of cheap entertainment were present here, and much else as well. The form was borrowed from popular music-hall performances. The show consisted of fourteen separate episodes, or “pictures,” which featured music, song, slide-projection, action painting, boxing, acrobatics, film, dance, slogans, and statistics. This bewitching mix was loosely arranged around a common theme and framed by a running commentary in the shape of two actors impersonating the views and reactions of the typical bourgeois and proletarian. The enacted varieté of events, sketches, songs, and bravura numbers was thus used as a vehicle for addressing the ongoing exploitation of Germany’s laboring classes.¹²²

Piscator’s aim was to transform the audience into a thinking and arguing collective. To this end he constantly downplayed the role of individuality. This applied to the actors, who were advised not to portray individual characters but enact collective movements, social groups, and historical tendencies. It also applied to the author of the drama, who was asked not to deliver a finished script with detailed stage instructions and not to assert his individual authority in the interpretation of the drama but to deliver a material to be reworked and adapted by the director in collaboration with the production team. Finally, it applied to the audience, which was not addressed as a number of isolated people but as parts of a crowd sharing in the same experience and participating in the production of the performance.

Piscator’s achievement, and the reason for his lasting fame, was his successful invention of various ways to represent on stage what may be called the space-time of modernity and capitalism. The objective was to instruct the audience about the order of the world, to help spectators understand their common predicament, and to encourage them to joint action. In order to realize this, Piscator had to introduce into the drama not only the social classes but also the global context that determined their positions. Drama was transformed into a conflict between supra-individual forces, giving concrete theatrical expression to abstract realities such as class struggle, inflation, economic conjuncture, oil production, surplus value, jurisprudence, and imperial war and demonstrating how these were at the heart of social contradictions and local realities. Piscator here added advanced technology and mass media to the usual toolkit of dramatic special effects. The acting and dialogue of individual actors were cut down and combined with other dramatic elements into a new performative syntax. Placards and texts were blazoned to comment on the action on stage. Pictorial or photographic documents as well as entire film sequences were projected onto screens and gauzes to provide background or visualize alternative lines of action. Loudspeakers announced messages or transmitted speeches that further elucidated the plot. All this took place on a new, open, and flexible stage. Piscator abandoned not just the curtain wall, separating seats from stage, but removed the three other walls as well, thus allowing the stage to expand horizontally and vertically by way of a complex machinery of lifts and rolling bands, tiered scaffolding with ramps and platforms extending in several dimensions so as to suggest hierarchic and spatial divisions of society (figure 4.13).

This was the Piscator-Bühne which enthralled and infuriated Germany’s world of theater in the interwar period. A contemporary review of Piscator’s 1929 production of Walter Mehring’s Der Kaufmann von Berlin (The merchant of Berlin), deserves quoting for its remarkable characterization of the dauntless integration of technology and collectivity that transformed Piscator’s performances into multimedia spectacles:

Hanns Eisler wrote the music for Der Kaufmann von Berlin. Lázsló Moholy-Nagy did the stage design. His sketches for the stage decoration still convey an idea of the sheer complexity of the social imaginary behind Piscator’s productions (figure 4.14). In Moholy-Nagy’s huge photoplastic montages various collectives emerge into view as from nothingness, moving toward the focal point of the viewer and the center of the historical stage. Not all Berlin’s theater audience appreciated Piscator’s daring innovations; most were perplexed, some appalled. “Piscator stirs up civil war!” two reviewers complained.¹²⁴

Moholy-Nagy also did the cover for Piscator’s book Das Politische Theater, published in 1929 and dedicated to “the proletariat of Berlin.” The image consists of a photomontage set against red background (figure 4.15). The area in the lower left is covered by a cut-out photograph of a worker’s demonstration consisting of innumerable heads and bodies carrying red banners and flags. To the right is a circular structure made up of stairs, arches, and scaffolding, suggesting a perplexing arrangement of constructions and machinery. Moholy-Nagy used photographic images of Piscator’s so-called Globus-stage at Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz for this montage. The structure evokes the idea of a globe, and the masses emerging from the left seem about to enter into it. Some of them have already occupied the interior of the spheroid space. Piscator constantly stressed the need to level all barriers between audience and theater. In the cover image, Moholy-Nagy pasted the depicted collective to the scaffolds and stairs of the theatrical interior, suggesting that they are both the audience entering the global arena and the workers handling its complicated machinery. It is a congenial rendering of Piscator’s conception of theater as a fusion of masses and technology into a new conception of art, where the aesthetic form is inseparable from the self-representation of the people.

Eric Mühsam, veteran of the Bavarian republic, set down the working rules for the Piscator stage in Berlin. He envisioned a thoroughly collective organization at all levels. The theater staff would form a dramaturgical collective, and it was realized along principles of equality, communal responsibility, and companionship.¹²⁵ The acting, as already mentioned, would also be executed so as to evoke collective forces and conflicts rather than individual and existential ones. Most importantly, political theater wanted to transform a presumably passive and disengaged audience into an active producing collective. The collective that produced theater would thus be extended to the audience, which was no longer expected to just passively receive and contemplate the performance but to take part in it. Piscator’s own documentation shows what such a goal entailed. For instance, he relates the successful opening in July 1925 of Trotz Alledem! (In spite of everything!), a historical revue based on events from World War I to the German Revolution, which featured twenty-three historical episodes separated by short films (figure 4.16). The production also included documentary photography, stage decorations by John Heartfield, an arena stage encircled by the audience, a sixty-five-foot battleship representing British imperialism, and reenactments of political speeches by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.¹²⁶ “The dress rehearsal was utter chaos. Two hundred people ran around shouting at one another,” writes Piscator. He goes on to render the opening night. Every seat was taken; steps, aisles, entrances were full to bursting:

Similar impressions have been recorded from other performances. In Piscator’s 1929 play about women’s reproductive rights—§ 218: Frauen in Not (Paragraph 218: women in despair), written by Carl Credé, and one of the most successful productions of the Piscator Collective—the audience was encouraged to accompany the action with comments, shouts, and speeches. After the end of the performance, the audience was asked to hold a vote on section 218 of the criminal code (establishing the illegality of abortion and sentencing the pregnant woman as well as anyone who assisted in her abortion to a five-year prison term). The vote always resulted in rejection of the law. In this way, the completion of the play would correspond to a public meeting, or an ad hoc tribunal vested with the legitimacy of the popular will, or, in other words, a democratic assembly.¹²⁸

For Piscator, the secret of political theater was not primarily the creation of new acting techniques or dramatic scripts, and in this sense he was partly at odds with Bertolt Brecht’s aesthetic. Political theater had to be founded on the integration and proper use of technology, above all, media technology. A new stage and theatrical environment would then bring about new acting techniques, new scripts, and the sought-after involvement of the audience, Piscator argued:

According to this optimistic argument, technology would allow the theater to erase the division between audience and actors and allow for public participation en masse, thereby democratizing the theatrical arena. Once the invisible wall was torn down, technology would also be used to project the public into a simulated space of reality and history, a model space in which world-historical forces were rendered present by mediated sounds, signs, and images. Mass media such as photography, cinema, and press typography provided models and material.

Needless to say, existing theater houses could not satisfy Piscator’s ambitions. He called for a theater that could house three to four thousand spectators, and the machinery inside should be top of the line. “I imagine something like a theater-machine, as inherently technical as a typewriter, an apparatus that would be equipped with the most modern lightning-systems, with lifts and revolves in vertical and horizontal planes, with a multiplicity of film-projectors, with loudspeaker relays, etc”¹³⁰ Seeking to concretize these plans, Piscator in 1927 commissioned Walter Gropius, then director of the Bauhaus school in Dessau, to draw up plans for a theater building adequate to his needs. The plan was referred to as the Total Theater (Das Totaltheater).¹³¹ At once a dramaturgic and an architectural conception, the Total Theater would be completely flexible. Gropius conceived of machinery that made it possible to move the stage into the midst of the seats. The interior could thus be transformed into amphitheater, picture-frame theater, or arena theater, depending on the character of the production. Everything from Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Molière to Chekhov, Ibsen, Toller, Brecht, and modern documentary drama would thus be performed with equal ease, in addition to circus performances, political meetings, operas, cinema, and sports events.

If agitprop had abandoned the stage and moved out into society, the Total Theater sought to place society as such on stage. In the words of theater historian Stefan Woll, the projected Total Theater of Gropius and Piscator was an idea that perhaps for the first time would realize the role of theater as a constituting power of the social community and the cultural and political consciousness of the people.¹³² According to Piscator’s definition, Total Theater was “a building that is ‘totally’ performable, in which the spectator as the spatial center is surrounded by a ‘total’ stage and is ‘totally’ confronted by it. The simultaneity of historical events, the coevalness of social and political action and reaction may be represented simultaneously on this stage, on this stage-totality.”¹³³

Today, the design of Gropius and Piscator appears as the summa of the radical tendencies and projects that characterized the effort to renew theater as an institution after World War I. More importantly, the project encapsulates one of the more interesting ideas about collective self-representation produced in Weimar culture. Piscator’s theater was explicitly built as a house for the masses, in which technology would enable them to gain a true image and idea of their historical and social predicament. In transgressing or erasing the boundary between audience and drama, Piscator urges us to think of theater as encompassing society in its totality.

Gropius and Piscator’s project was thus conceived through what Benjamin called the matrix of the masses. It was to be built so as to invent a new form of art based on collectivity rather than individuality. Integrating modern media technology, theater would become a space in which the masses would also absorb the work of art. Stefan Woll emphasizes the collective character of this process, in which the art object is at once dispersed among and embodied by the collective. “Unfolding as a mass phenomenon, the theatrical event of the Total Theater should be turned into an event for the masses, thereby helping to found the reputation of the Total Theater as a genuine mass theater.”¹³⁴

It must be asked whether Piscator’s project really differed from fascist aesthetics through which Nazism later would allow the German people to enjoy itself in festivals and mass arenas.¹³⁵ Is not the Total Theater of Gropius and Piscator a totalitarian theater, with the director-genius operating the controls of his theater machine in order to produce the desirable reactions in the collectives under his command? The difference and similarity between Piscator’s aesthetics and fascist experiments in collective representation seems to duplicate the difference and similarity between communism and national socialism as such. However, in contrast to the mass ornament analyzed by Kracauer, or to later mass celebrations staged by Nazism, Piscator’s idea of the mass never presumed or sought to achieve an organic harmony and seamless unity of the people. Piscator’s ideal remained that of the rowdy democratic assembly, shot through with differences, not unlike the meetings taking place in the workers’ councils during the German revolution.

It should also be recalled that his theater was partly tuned to appeal to Berlin’s sophisticated theatergoers, who wanted to see the latest marvels of performance art. Often, it drew far more attention from Berlin’s segment of middle-class intellectuals than from the working-class population in Wedding and Neukölln. Nowhere in Piscator’s productions do we encounter the communion of leader and mass that was a standard feature when fascism was performed. While fascist aesthetics taught the masses to enjoy and draw meaning from their subordination under the leader, thereby transforming them into what Klaus Theweleit calls a “block,” or a “molar” mass, Piscator’s aesthetics had as its explicit objective to teach the members of a proletarian public to trust their own senses and minds; his masses remained a multiple and “molecular” agent.

Meanwhile, the highly utopian dimension of Piscator’s project cannot be overlooked. It embraced the possibility of theater to allow the people to represent themselves and to authenticate that representation as the truth of their historical being. This was a space in which the sociologically divided people, numberless isolated and alienated individuals, were able to experience one another as companions. Theater would thus offer them an experience of community that capitalist society denied them, and this experience would help them not only to survive that denial but also to struggle against it. Underlying this aesthetic is thus a vision that saw in the masses or the proletariat a representative not just of the people in some narrow national sense but of humanity beyond class divisions and any social divides. In Paul Tillich’s socialist theology, developed in the same years, the masses were posited as a coming human community embodying an ideal that transcended “the opposition between masses and individuals.” In this utopian register, the audience or collective formation for which Gropius and Piscator’s theater was planned, answers to the universal agency that Tillich ascribed to Germany’s working classes.¹³⁶

Looking at Gropius’s drafts for the Total Theater, one realizes that the floor plan of the cross-sectioned building resembles an eye (figures 4.17–20).¹³⁷ The seat rows located in the oval form of the building cover the area corresponding to the iris. The lines that mark out how film and sound projections are to be used radiate from periphery to center through the iris. Slightly off center in the oval is a circular form symbolizing the stage and the proscenium, the focal point of action. In Gropius’s design it has the appearance of a pupil, an opening through which the world is perceived. Just as the human eye is elastic, giving the pupil horizontal and vertical movement, so would the stage of the Total Theater be able to turn and move in order to place itself either in the front of the seating area or in its midst. The architecture of the theatrical space would adjust to the environment and adapt its senses to the emotional atmosphere of the audience and the forms and contents of the play.

Total Theater thus becomes an eye through which the audience perceives society. Perhaps, this is also how Piscator envisioned the aim of political theater: to help the public acquire an additional eye through which the collective could perceive what was invisible to each one individually: the relations structuring their economy, their society, and their life. In this way, the Total Theater becomes a social eye, an aesthetic vision that can be attributed only to the collective. The allegedly blind fools of the masses have finally got organs to see with, and society is able to glimpse a representation of its own being: the unfathomable forms of the collective.