This book has engaged critically with the idea and image of the masses in interwar European culture. Germany and Austria have been in the focus. For historical reasons the discourse on the masses in these two countries was more intense and contentious than in other intellectual milieus. However, comparable images and theories of the masses, as well as derivatives of the German discourse, circulated everywhere from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula and throughout the world.
It should be clear that the mass was a dominant theme in the culture of the Weimar Republic and Austria’s first republic, or even an intellectual and political obsession. My coverage of this theme is far from complete. Other intellectual projects and aesthetic works deserve to be analyzed from the point of view that I have applied, and I think that would strengthen the general conclusion: the mass was an organizing signifier for German thought, arts, and culture in the interwar period.
My argument is that this signifier, the mass, ultimately refers to crises of political, cultural, and aesthetic representation. Following Hannah Arendt, we may see the masses as the numberless people who lacked political voice and representation. However, the masses may also be seen as an issue that reveals the very uncertainty as to how to represent the nation and the people in the first place, and which thus indicates political contingency in pure form. In this sense, “the mass” does not, strictly speaking, designate anything or anybody; rather, masses are produced, through acts of representation, as the excluded part in relation to which a “people,” “culture,” or “nation” is enabled to identify itself as a community. This also explains why masses are located at the very limit of the polis, the outlying area of culture, and the hazy horizon of sociological scholarship. They are the periphery that determines the location of the center.
But if this is the right way to theorize the category of the mass, it implies that it must always be historicized. In the Weimar period there was no consensus as to who held the right to speak in the name of the German nation. There was minimal agreement on the principle of democracy but not on how to realize that principle, and there was an increasing sense that the Weimar constitution and the parliamentary system were illegitimate. Deep discord concerning the right definition of the sovereign people and its legitimate representation explains why the mass was such a useful term in this period. First, and most commonly, the term was a negative designation of people not meeting required criteria. Through strategies of reversal employed by left-wing forces, it could also be used as a signifier for the “real” people, unjustly excluded, in whose name a new politics and culture must speak. In both cases, the mass was a signifier referring to the precarious institution of democracy in interwar Germany and Austria. In a third modus, the mass also referred to the sheer indeterminacy and fluidity of the social sphere, about which so many interwar Germans and Austrians testify. Here, each human being was potentially a man and woman in the crowd, or an atom in a mass. Unable to represent herself through any stable identity or place of belonging, the human subject was thrown into a society demanding mobility as well as duplicity. Intellectuals such as Brecht, Kracauer, and Musil magnified this understanding of the mass, diagnosing the experience of modernity as an experience of radical contingency, without any firm ways of representing either the collective or the individual.
One specific conclusion to be drawn from this investigation is that the mass was a term with multiple meanings, yet all of them related to, and energized by, the impossibility of providing society with a coherent representation. In the first chapter we saw how one single event—habitually described as a mass event—was given three different interpretations. Heimito von Doderer assumed the position of the detached individual looking at the demonstration from a distance, seeing only irrational violence and colored dots, and interpreting it as an outburst of collective madness. Elias Canetti took part in the demonstration and used it as departure for a new theory of the collective life of humanity, which, ultimately, presupposed a radical distance from the mass but at the same time recognized that the mass represents an instinct and a need within each human being. Karl Kraus, for his part, identified himself with the perspective of the demonstrators, gathering the accounts of persons who had been witnesses to it, after which he concluded that the mass was a fabrication made by those that claimed to speak in the name of Austria and who needed to justify their position by violently marginalizing the protesting people as irrational elements.
One event? One mass? Maybe. But in that case a mass with multiple intentions, faces, and voices, impossible to unify into a single whole except from a position of distance and isolation. In order to analyze the mass historically, a radical perspectivism is therefore called for. This mode of analysis should try to occupy as many vantage points as possible, ideally as many as the number of minds and bodies involved in the event or movement under examination.
German artists and intellectuals drew the aesthetic and epistemological consequences of this by developing the art of the montage, discarding linear narratives and organic visual compositions. I have embraced a similar standpoint in this book not just through its disposition, in which the argument progresses by way of separate examples and analyses that fall into a larger theoretical and historical pattern. Above all, this perspectivism is detectable in the larger movement of my narrative, in which I have tried to portray the masses first as a remote object, and toward the end as something very near, at which point they eventually dissolve into the plural perceptual apparatus of, say, worker photographers and revolving theater stages.
An epistemological choice is involved in this movement from distance to proximity, from looking at the face of the mass to assuming the gaze of the masses. One’s explanation of mass behavior will largely depend on where the stress is put. Needless to say, the choice involved is also a political one. On the one hand we may claim the right to speak on behalf of others who are distant from our own position and at the margins of our life world. On the other hand, we may enter the crowd and perceive the world from the same perspective and with the same senses as the people around.
A second conclusion may also be drawn. If “the mass” is a term with multiple meanings, why accept the strong tendency in scholarship to confine the historical analysis of the issue of the masses to the fields of fascism, mass psychology, and popular culture, those three being the areas to which debates on the masses are usually related? The mass was a term of global significance in interwar Europe, and with a particular intensity in Germany and Austria. Precisely through its global significance and its open reference to crises of political and aesthetic representation, this term may help us map the interrelationships among all the various cultural forces, aesthetic experiments, and political projects that emerged in the interwar period. This approach also allows us to see the political and aesthetic expressions of the Weimar period as so many symptoms of the failed attempt to institute democracy. It is often said that Weimar culture witnessed the explosion of mass media and that this had profound consequences as fascism took advantage of film, radio, and print. What remains to be realized, however, is that the masses as such—fluid, mobile, and mutable—were the very media in which all central political questions were posed.
“The masses” was thus the perpetually circulated and ultimately empty signifier that absorbed all political, cultural, and aesthetic energies unleashed by the crisis of representation in Germany and Austria. Despite its unreality, this phantom points us toward an essential trait of European society and culture between the wars. I have repeatedly stated that Weimar Germany and Austria’s first republic were societies with weak political institutions. The lack of legitimacy that restricted the operation of their parliamentary systems is indicative of unresolved problems of political representation, which led both countries to the brink of revolution and civil war. As in all situations where political institutions have weak support, political discourse was split and operated on two levels. Chief of state, government, and national and regional assemblies, as well as civil servants, technocrats, and functionaries, managed the political discourse in the strict sense. But this discourse was swayed by a far stronger one of political distrust and cultural malaise that sprang from a sense of precariousness or imminent danger among large sections of the population, which doubted that they were justly represented by the existing political setup.
I have stated that “the masses” were a symptom of this crisis of representation. This statement may now be qualified as implying that the idea or specter of “the masses” sprang up from the gap between the existing parliamentary system and the vast horizon of expectations for some more complete and dignified way of representing the social passions of the people. On this horizon, which featured a range of contradictory ideological interpretations of what German or Austrian society and history were about, the masses were continuously reproduced as a sign for fundamental problems that official politics had left unresolved. Depending on the speaker’s worldview, this horizon portended either doom or rejuvenation, and the masses entered now as a hero, a stand-in for people being unjustly excluded, now as a villain, a name for everybody that threatened to raze social orders and cultural hierarchies.
Situated in and nourishing itself from the gap between official politics and expectations for more satisfactory representations of people and nation, the masses would shuttle between two contexts or frames of reference. They could be described as a real political force, that is, as ordinary men and women engaged in extraparliamentary demonstrations and manifestations and articulating themselves in party politics. In a different frame, they could be described as an allegory for everything and everyone that threatened the ideals on which political and cultural life was based. The masses were thus articulated and could articulate themselves not just in proper political discourse and action but in a variety of discursive registers and genres, ranging from interpellations in parliament to photography, caricature, cinema, dance performances, architectural projects, novels, and philosophical treatises. By activating ideas and fantasies of the masses, by inventing crowd symbols and crowd ornaments, by promoting mass theater and mass housing, or by warning against mass insanity, mass hysteria, mass psychosis, and the coming age of the masses, all exponents of cultural and intellectual life engaged in the overriding political problem of their period: to provide people and nation with new narratives, images, ideas, and forms in which they would recognize their historical being. This accounts for the profoundly political character of Weimar arts and literature. Because of the instability of the system of political representation, other areas of intellectual and cultural life rallied to its support, or contributed to its collapse, by narrating, visualizing, depicting, organizing, and forming the social and political body of the people, thereby also throwing the limits of existing cultural orders and systems of representation into relief.
Thus, if the masses were a symptom of a crisis, they were also a figure for a shared concern. As an organizing term for so many cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic endeavors of the period, the masses may be seen as a secret code helping us to link seemingly unrelated social, political, ideological, artistic, scholarly, and cultural discourses, thus allowing us to diagnose the common fracture within them. Which fracture? The fracture of breakdown and defeat that generated restless searches for new forms and concepts, as well as reactionary reactivations of old ones, in the hope of reconstituting society under conditions of modernity.
There is nothing in this conclusion to support the often made claim that the interwar period’s compulsive management of the masses indicated some sort of cultural deficiency or political imperfection that predestined the young republics of Germany and Austria for failures to which fascism was the only possible answer. On the contrary, if the “mass” signified many different and contradictory meanings, this should be read as an indication of political danger and instability, to be sure, but also of possibility and vitality or, put differently, of a situation that postwar Europe soon learned to forget but that may again become recognizable to us in the 2010s, which some have already dubbed a new era of crowds. For if German and Austrian culture between revolution and fascism attributed multiple meanings to the masses, this is because these societies contained political agents envisioning multiple and mutually excluding ways to represent society. Each of these proposals for representing society and the people entailed an answer to the democratic problem, and these different answers constituted or envisioned alternative political and societal futures for the polity. These future horizons were eventually closed by fascism’s victory, which soon obliterated what these societies once knew as alternative paths and prospects. To revisit the multiplicity of the meaning of the masses in this period is thus also to learn of the multiple futures contained in its
Jetztzeit, or present moment. It is to affirm Rüdiger Graf’s position that, for the Weimar Republic, “the future was an open horizon of possibilities,” which in turn echoes that of Peter Fritzsche: “A great deal of the political dynamic in the 1920s is obscured by the telos of Weimar’s collapse.”
1 One thing to retain from this book’s numerous observations and analyses of the idea and image of the masses is that far from all of them contributed to or portended Weimar’s fall and the rise of fascism. Against the conventional wisdom codified by Hannah Arendt—that the “masses” emerging into the public sphere after World War I were the formal and material cause of totalitarian systems of rule—we may thus conclude that these “masses” were never anything more, and at the same time never anything less, than signs and symptoms of unresolved problems concerning the adequate political, cultural, and aesthetic representations of the socially significant passions and political desires in the public sphere. Moreover, in order to retain some sense of historical proportion in face of Hannah Arendt’s influential assessment, it is prudent to add the conclusion of Weimar historian Heinrich August Winkler. Weimar’s political failure had nothing to do with “the masses”; on the contrary, people lumped together under that designation often rose to defend democracy against assaults from the old elites, Winkler states. The reason for totalitarianism’s swift takeover in Germany was rather that the republic’s bourgeoisie lacked both democratic convictions and solidly democratic parties.
2Arguably, this is what the masses were about in interwar Europe as they emerged from the rift between a parliamentary system that betrayed democracy and millennial expectations of more adequate forms of governance. They were a ghost that animated the imaginary struggle between authority and anarchy—and they were the signifier that drew politics, arts, and culture together around a single nexus. Such an understanding of the masses offers a dialectical explanation of the catastrophic and destructive aspects of this society—as its leadership opted for approved authoritarianism, which then ushered in Nazi dictatorship—and also of its immense resources of invention and creativity, as artists and intellectuals tried new answers to the problem of the political constitution of society and the identity of the people. To disentangle the variegated discourses on the masses between the wars is thus to revisit the original problem of democracy.
Needless to say, this problem is as pertinent today as it was then. What is perhaps less clear in our postcontemporary situation is that aesthetics—the art of giving form, voice, and visibility to human and social experience—remains founded on the very same problem. Perhaps we are then able to finally determine more exactly the location of the masses in the cultural terrain of Germany and Austria between the wars. I have stated that they sprang from a gap between the existing system of parliamentary democracy and the horizon of alternative expectations for some more complete way of representing the passions and interests of the people. More precisely, this means that the masses were generated by the friction between politics and aesthetics, and it shows what the two have in common as both seek to form the constituting power of the human community, that is, to determine the modes of appearance, visibility, and representation under which social life is conducted.
German and Austrian interwar culture offers many instances of that location, and previous chapters have explored some of them. But there is one image that gives a better idea than any other. In early March 1933, Siegfried Kracauer told readers of
Frankfurter Zeitung what he had seen in the faces staring at the burned-out Reichstag in Berlin. On February 27, this symbol of Weimar democracy had been destroyed in a chain of events out of which Hitler emerged as victor. In his article, Kracauer remarked that in moments of public danger or sudden catastrophes people tend to gather to discuss what should be done. But the atmosphere he had felt outside the Reichstag had been different. The masses arriving to see the destroyed building were stunned silent. Kracauer conveyed the idea that the burning of the Reichstag had muted the voices of the people. What was destroyed, he stated, was the very hope for an order that would represent the people in a way they would acknowledge as their own. Where that hope once was, there was now a void, which was reflected in the paralysis of the onlookers as well as in the gaping window openings of the evacuated building. The demolished Reichstag owned a magic power found only at sites that have suffered sacrilege, said Kracauer, and he went on by stating that the eyes watching the building were endowed with an infernal intensity that burned “right through this symbol and disappeared] into the abyss that its destruction [had] opened up.” As for the young people looking at the ruin, they would now spend the rest of their lives finding out the meaning and consequences of this void, which they could not yet understand.
3The gutted Reichstag of course recalls Vienna’s destroyed Justizpalast and the collapsed city halls in Hermann Broch’s
Sleepwalkers. Ruins of democracy? Remnants of political violence? Results of failed efforts to redraw the boundaries of the political? The issue of the masses encapsulates this drama, which is brought to a close by the image of the burning Reichstag. Looking at the void left after the collapse of Weimar’s experiment in democracy, the gathered public also witnessed the end of the history of the masses as I have addressed it in this book. This is a history about an ongoing and irresolvable struggle for political and aesthetic form that had begun in 1918 and had articulated itself as a struggle of the masses, for the masses, with the masses, or, most frequently, against the masses. February 1933 blew the final whistle, the image and idea of the masses being absorbed by the blackened edifice in which all hopes for democracy vanished and from which Nazism then emerged with a solution in its own right. As we know, Hitler used the occasion to declare a state of emergency, arrest all communist members of parliament (who were blamed for the arson), and assume dictatorial powers. This brought the crisis of representation that haunted Germany and Austria in the interwar period between revolution and fascism to a temporary end. The agents of the masses were now split between those who joined the organic
Volksgemeinschaft and those who—when not killed—dispersed and then regrouped as exiled or clandestine collectives of resistance.