No new book is needed to declare that German and Austrian culture between the wars was shaped by “the masses” In all surveys and histories of the eventful years from the revolutionary uprisings in November 1918 to the Nazi takeover in 1933 there is a chapter or section devoted to them. They are usually discussed as revolutionary crowds or as fascist mobs or as urban multitudes engaged by the new phenomenon of “mass culture” or as the rising anonymous middle classes or, again, as an object of anxiety pervading the zeitgeist. The prominence of the idea and image of the masses in this period has been thoroughly discussed. It has been illustrated and judged. It has been viewed as a self-evident feature of the historical landscape. We have grown accustomed to look upon the interwar period as an era of crowds.
Strangely, however, few authors have connected the theme of the masses to Weimar history in any deeper sense. They loosely hint at the German revolution, fascist propaganda, swarming Berlin streets, Bauhaus programs for cheap housing for the working classes, or other phenomena that serve well to illustrate the period’s obsessive talk about the masses but not to clarify it. Even more strangely, no one has sought to organize these images and ideas of the masses by relating them to one another and to subsequently subject them to theoretical analysis in an attempt to find out what, if anything, they have in common—except that they all exemplify some typical German condition of modernity.
In this book I construe “the masses” as a global issue affecting all areas of interwar German and Austrian society. I argue that the compulsive treatment of this theme can guide us toward a defining historical predicament of both states. The problem was felt in all spheres of life and concerned the political and cultural organization of state, nation, and society in its most basic sense. The problem is a well-known one: how to effect a transition to democracy.
Of course, just as little as we need a new book to tell us that people in interwar Germany and Austria debated the masses, we need one to show that these societies had trouble instituting democracy and that the transition failed. What may be needed, though, is a study that connects these observations to each other. This is what I seek to accomplish in this book, but I also try to do more than that. I try to constitute the connection between the masses and the transition to democracy as an explanatory framework that allows us to see both the specificity of this historical period and the general problematic that it has passed on to posterity. According to the explanation I offer, the specificity of interwar Germany and Austria is the way in which the masses were turned into a general signifier for most, if not all, cultural endeavors. The mass was the dark sun, unapproachable for all the heat it emitted, around which scholarly studies, aesthetic experiments, political activities, and social programs moved in the vibrant and violent cultures of interwar Germany and Austria. Or so believed those who explored the distant planet of the masses. In reality, however, that sun was nothing but an optical illusion generated by the energy from conflicts erupting in the social terrain beneath their own feet. These conflicts had to do with the agonizing transition toward democracy. By analyzing German and Austrian culture and society in the interwar years, this book will also offer perspectives on the more general problem—which has become ever more pressing while I have been writing this book—of carving out a politics of liberty, equality, and solidarity between the poles of revolutionary utopianism and fascist repression. For “the masses” have today again become a cause of concern, as so-called austerity programs are imposed in one nation after another and, predictably, people are taking to the streets to protest being pushed into poverty. Portrayed as disorderly and misinfomed, these crowds are, according to the elites, a threat to such political stability as is needed for the markets to calm down and the economy to recover. Voter influence or democracy as such is described by leading European politicians as deceitful and unpredictable, undermining the very preconditions for investments and growth. This, then, is the moment when interwar Germany and Austria merits our attention. In his history of German film, Siegfried Kracauer described these societies as being caught in a double bind between tyranny and anarchy. Firmly convinced that these two options were the only ones, dominant circles of Germany and Austria fatefully embraced authoritarianism and accepted dictatorship, in the fear that society would otherwise fall apart.
Like my previous book A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (2008), which charted the long trajectory in the European conception of the masses from 1789 to 1989, this book about the masses in the interwar period arranges readings of seemingly disparate texts and events into one interdisciplinary and multidimensional montage. This strategy is based on a conviction that informs both books. Aesthetics teaches a lesson about politics and society that politicians and political experts are predestined to deny and that often remains hidden for those who are living in that society. What lesson? That the political arena always will fail to represent society. That the borders that determine who may be seen and heard in public life are contested. Democracy, the representation of the people by the people, is an unfinished process, marked by a constant struggle to sort out the proper representatives of the people. This is the political lesson of the aesthetic works that have concerned me in this history of the masses. They map and make visible those very borders that separate citizens from masses, human being from beast, and they show that these borders are at best contingent, at worst genocidal. But the power of aesthetics lies not here only but also in its ability to imagine a society where the borders are redrawn, thus remaking the system of representation so as to make room for people previously dislodged from political space. Surely, this capacity also explains the intensity of aesthetic experimentation in German and Austrian culture during the interwar period, as well as the strong attraction it exerts on later generations.
I began writing this book during a two-year fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at that time concentrating on the mass uprisings in Vienna in 1927 and Georg Simmel’s sociology. Some ten years later, these sketches have attained their proper shape and placement, framed by a historical and political context that I did not fully grasp as I embarked on what was then simply a critical history of mass psychology and crowd theory. In that early stage of my research, I saw these branches of knowledge as distinguishable and interesting theoretical formations that could contribute to an understanding of the civil wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocidal military campaigns that marked the latter part of the 1990s. Today, by contrast, I see mass psychology as well as general crowd theory as vague and intriguing phenomena that offer no clarification of social movements or political issues but rather are problems in their own right—problems, moreover, that have less to do with the causes of extremist collective movements or the mobilization of religious and ethnic communities than with the precarious institution of democracy itself.
Crowds and Democracy is thus the outcome of a project that has grown out of bounds in unpredictable ways, to the effect that a number of essays and even an entire book have branched off as separate undertakings—most importantly,
A Brief History of the Masses, which is tightly coupled to the present book—but also an ongoing project on contemporary ideas of political universality and collective action in which I hope to bring the discussion on crowds and democracy closer to the present moment.
1
Needless to say, over a decade of more or less intense research and writing has left me indebted to a number of institutions and individuals. I especially want to recognize the Getty Research Institute and its resourceful staff and excellent librarians, along with the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, which, during my year-long stay as spouse of one of its fellows, provided me with all the books and documents I needed and much more, in addition to the department of Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan, where I taught as visiting professor and learned from brilliant colleagues, and, finally, Linköping University, my current academic home, where I have been able to bring this project to a close, aided by the university’s skilled librarians and inspired by the outstanding research collective at the Institute for Research in Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO). I am also indebted to colleagues affiliated with the Crowds Project at the Humanities Lab of Stanford University and to former colleagues at the Department of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. I have benefitted from the services of the National Library of Austria and the archives of the Labour History Society, both in Vienna, the library of the Humboldt University (special thanks, there, to Ute Mousa) and the archives of Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and the National Library of Sweden and the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm. Financial support in the final phase has come from the research program Time, Memory, Representation, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. A special grant from this foundation also helped me, at the very last stage, to revise the manuscript and obtain the necessary illustrations. I acknowledge the support of these institutions with gratitude. I am also thankful to the expert staff of Columbia University Press, above all Wendy Lochner, Michael Haskell, and Christine Dunbar.
Thanks are also due to a number of individuals whose comments, advice, suggestions, and invitations have left their marks on this book: Kerstin Barndt, Petra Bauer, Jonathan Beller, Catherine Benamou, Erik Berggren, Gabriele Brandstetter, Kathleen Canning, T. J. Clark, Heinrich Dilly, P.-O. Enquist, Geoff Eley, Martha Feldman, Lydia Goehr, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Dan Karlholm, Wolf Lepenies, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Maria Lind, Chantal Mouffe, Richard Meyer, Toril Moi, Johannes von Moltke, Inka Mülder-Bach, Anders Neergaard, Ernst Osterkamp, Michael Roth, Charles Salas, Allan Sekula, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anders Stephanson, Neferti Tadiar, Häkan Thörn, Sophie Tottie, Ann Wegner, Peter Weingart, David Wellbery, and Jasmina Založnik. I am grateful to Sara Danius for intellectual inspiration in the early stages of this work. Aris Fioretos not only gave precise feedback on the final draft but has supported and improved my work throughout. I also thank Peo Hansen for years of inspiring conversations and collaborative work. For her accurate feedback and unfailing commitment, and for her faith in historical and political praxis, I thank Patricia Lorenzoni, minha querida.
Finally, a note on terminology is needed. Etymology is indispensible for understanding the terms that are central to this book: “crowd,” “mass,” and “masses,” usually put in the determinative: “the crowd,” “the mass,” “the masses” It is instructive, for instance, to know that “mass” derives from Greek
maza, which means “dough,” and that “crowd” harks back to the old Germanic verb
kroten, which means “to press,” “to push” However, etymological and semantic analysis is poor guidance if we wish to know what was meant by these words in interwar Europe. Despite the period’s numerous efforts to define them, they never fit into any terminological grids. I am thus in the awkward position of writing a history about a notion and phenomenon—the masses—that elude standard scholarly exactitude. Still, since I am interested in how these terms were used by German and Austrian intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, I must use them myself. But I make no attempt to provide my own definitions of “crowd,” “mass,” and “masses” For reasons that will become clear, I think such definitions are impossible, and this book is in one sense an explanation of the very impossibility to give coherent meaning to “the masses” The reader is therefore asked to accept or, at best, learn from the constitutive lack of conceptual consistency that characterizes my own and everyone else’s use of these words.
An additional problem is that the English word “mass,” in singular, sounds far more awkward and technical than does its German original, “die Masse” Sometimes I have therefore rendered this expression as “the crowd” or “the masses” rather than “the mass.” As will be seen, however, die Masse (the mass) was centrally important as an organizing signifier in German and Austrian public discourse. There is no other way to convey that centrality except by finding an English equivalent and giving it equal weight in my own text, and that equivalent must be “the mass.” However, in expository sections, where I am focused not on any specific texts but on generalities, I variously use “mass,” “masses,” and “crowd” without making any sharp distinctions but always mindful of intellectual clarity. In all translations from the German, and wherever conceptual rigor is called for, my terminology is consistent. For instance, in the German sources “Masse” (mass, crowd) is sometimes used in distinction to “Menge” (crowd, multitude), and in such cases “mass” is the obvious English choice whereas “Menge” is then translated as “crowd” or “multitude”