Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Such were the tristes tropiques lamented by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the mid-1950s—scene of broken cultures, wrecked economies, and melancholic populations disposed to suicide and alcoholism.91 In the face of so much destruction, it may seem petty to focus on the obliteration of communal ritual and festivity. But in any assessment of the impact of European imperialism, “techniques of ecstasy”—ways of engendering transcendence and joy from within the indigenous group itself, without any recourse to the white man’s technologies or commodities—must at least be counted among the losses.

  9

  Fascist Spectacles

  In this, the modern—or, we might say, postfestive—era, people still come together in large numbers from time to time, expecting an experience of unity, uplift, or, at least, diversion. The occasion may be a sporting event, a concert, theatrical production, parade, or public ceremony such as the funeral of an important personage. Of all the mass gatherings of the modern era, though, the most notorious—and certainly the most disturbing—were the giant rallies and public rituals staged in the 1930s by the Nazis and the Italian fascists. And of these, none was more notorious than the annual Nazi party congress held in Nuremberg, where hundreds of thousands of the party’s faithful gathered for an experience often characterized by observers as “ecstatic.”

  It was at the 1934 Nuremberg congress that the American journalist William Shirer began to “comprehend … some of the reasons for Hitler’s success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.”1 The congress, which went on for a week, included no debates or deliberations to interfere with the “mystic” effects, only parades (chiefly of soldiers and Nazi leaders), military drills, and exhortatory speeches. For the climactic nighttime events, the Nazi architect Albert Speer had designed a huge stone stadium crowned with a giant eagle, decked out with thousands of swastika banners, and illuminated by 130 highpower antiaircraft searchlights.2 There, “in the flood-lit night,” Shirer believed that the congress-goers “achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds … until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the German herd.”3

  The Austrian was of course Adolf Hitler, whose entrances and speeches were staged for the maximum dramatic effect. Upon his arrival at the rally site, Shirer reported, the band would stop playing and a hush would fall over the crowd. Then the band would strike up the Badenweiler March, which was used only for Hitler’s entrances, followed by an orchestra playing Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, while “great Klieg lights played on the stage.”4 The speech itself might be little more than a string of slogans about “blood and soil,” “our fallen heroes,” et cetera, but it was delivered with a mounting passion, approaching fury, to repeated choruses of full-throated “Sieg heils” from the crowd. Under these circumstances, even the thoroughly hostile ambassador from France, André François-Poncet, could not help marveling at “the atmosphere of collective enthusiasm that permeated the ancient city, the singular exaltation that seized hundreds of thousands of men and women, the romantic fever and the mystic ecstasy and the sacred delirium, as it were, that possessed them!”5

  This image of ecstatic crowds Sieg heil—ing their mad leader—always juxtaposed in our minds with the mass graves and starved bodies of his victims—has become, in our own time, emblematic of collective excitement in any form. It altered the outlook of the social sciences, making Durkheim’s enthusiasm for what he called collective effervescence begin to look, as Charles Lindholm wrote, “terribly naive.” Lindholm reported that the field of social psychology was so “traumatized by the direction mass movements have taken in the contemporary era” that it came to see collective excitement as “synonymous with evil.”6 The historian William H. McNeill added that “since World War II, repugnance against Hitlerism has discredited rhythmic muscular expressions of political and other sorts of ideological attachment throughout the western world.”7 Or, as some revisionist social psychologists put it very recently, the effect of fascism was to convince social scientists that “groups are inherently dangerous.”8

  In less academic circles too, the very word Nuremberg evokes crowds driven to hysteria by cunning stagecraft and charismatic speakers—primed for any atrocities they may be called on to commit. Search the Internet for the words Nuremberg rally and you will find references not only to the historical event but to almost any kind of gathering charged with group excitement: “Nuremberg” as a pejorative applied to the Super Bowl, to rock concerts, to the Academy Awards show. A left-winger describes a right-wing pro-Israel rally as a “Jewish Nuremberg”;9 a critic says of the audience for a less-than-witty stand-up comic, “It feels like I am at the Nuremberg rally and everyone is Sieg heil-ing in the form of laughs.”10 In a 1968 New York Times article, a critic described a Rolling Stones concert as “pure Nuremberg!”11 Reflecting on sports fandom, including his own enthusiasm for baseball, the novelist Leslie Epstein writes:

  Dissolution of the self, transcendence, the feeling of oneness, wholeness, unity: Who can draw the line between, on the one hand, such innocent joy, the return to childhood in the adult, the jump toward manhood in the boy; and, on the other, the echo of a Nuremberg rally … ? Between, finally, the tolerated commonplace, Kill the ump! and the no less sanctioned urge to Kill the Jews?12

  Epstein refrains from taking credit for this insight, attributing it to long-standing general knowledge: “Long before Freud wrote on the subject … everyone knew that membership in a crowd was a permit to regress to a more primitive form of the instinctual life.”

  But the intellectuals’ condemnation of crowds originates no more than 150 years before Nuremberg, and in an entirely different, if not opposite, political situation: the French Revolution. While the fascist rallies celebrated tyranny, the French revolutionaries sought its permanent overthrow. While fascism epitomizes the political right at its cruelest extreme, the French Revolution gave birth to the modern idea of the left—not to mention the very categorization of political stances into right and left. If there was any similarity between, say, the events at Nuremberg and the decisive actions of the French Revolution, such as the storming of the Bastille, it is a seemingly superficial one: Both involved large outdoor gatherings of people, in other words, crowds.

  The insurgent French crowds may seem relatively benign to us now—even heralds of an age of democracy—but they had sent a shock wave throughout the palaces and manor homes of Europe: Here were shabbily dressed people, many of them hungry or at least demanding bread, and they had succeeded in demolishing the Bourbon monarchy. Looking back from the late nineteenth century, the amateur French social scientist Gustave Le Bon declared that the revolutionary crowds could not be understood in terms of any rational motives, such as hunger or disgust with the Old Regime. They were simply insane, and they were so because insanity is an inherent feature of crowds. Within one, individuals enter a “special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.” The proximity of large numbers of other people causes the brain to become “paralysed,” so that the individual “becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord.”13 What you have, in effect, is a crowd not of individuals but of spinal cords, and there could be nothing more “primitive” than that.

  Le Bon’s 1895 book, The Crowd, became the one of the world’s all-time best-selling works of social science, despite the fact that Le Bon did not witness the revolution he freely described as if he had been watching it all from a balcony, nor did he see the necessity of citing either historians or eyewitness accounts. His book consists of a string of assertions, most of which we would dismiss today as simple prejudices. For example, crowds are “like women,” he insists, in their irrationality and tendency to go to extremes.14 As for the lower classes whose energy drove
the revolution, he was opposed to the kind of egalitarianism the French revolutionaries fought for, as well as all forms of democracy, writing that “the masses” of his own time were motivated by “nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists.”15 But these failings did not disqualify Le Bon from being the sole source for Freud’s reflections on collective behavior, and hence entering into the canonical mainstream of Western thought.

  Thus in what has been the conventional intellectual view, “the crowd”—whether obediently cheering Hitler at Nuremberg or rising up to demand bread in revolutionary Paris—resembles nothing so much as the bands of “savages” colonialists encountered performing their ecstatic rituals. Early missionaries understood the ecstatic “savages” to be possessed by the devil; later psychologists described people caught up in crowds as “de-individuated” or as having “regressed” into a highly suggestible, emotionally labile, childlike state. Not that the devil went entirely out of style, even with the scientifically minded: Commenting on street crowds he had witnessed as a young man in Paris, Freud wrote, “I believe they are all possessed of a thousand demons … They are the people of psychical epidemics, of historical mass convulsions.”16 Individually, we may be reasonable and civilized people, but—the thinking goes—put us together and some primitive evil churns up. Nuremberg in 1934 and Paris in 1789, the Holocaust and the Reign of Terror—all merge with the war dances of the Mohawk and the initiation rites of Australian Aboriginals into a single category of wild and potentially homicidal behavior.

  But were the fascist rallies of the 1930s really examples of collective ecstasy, akin to carnivals and Dionysian rituals? And if so, does the threat of uncontrollable violence stain every gathering, every ritual and festivity, in which people experience transcendence and self-loss?

  We begin with an important distinction: The mass fascist rallies were not festivals or ecstatic rituals; they were spectacles, designed by a small group of leaders for the edification of the many. Such spectacles have a venerable history, going back at least to the Roman Empire, whose leaders relied on circuses and triumphal marches to keep the citizenry loyal. The medieval Catholic Church used colorful rituals and holiday processions to achieve the same effect, parading statues of saints through the streets, accompanied by gorgeously dressed Church officials. In a mass spectacle, the objects of attention—the marchers or, in the Roman case, chained captives and exotic animals in cages—are only part of the attraction. Central to the experience is the knowledge that hundreds or thousands of other people are attending the same spectacle—just as, in the age of television, the announcer may solemnly remind us that a billion or so other people are also tuned in to the same soccer game or Academy Awards presentation.

  In the case of Nuremberg, we have a record of the proceedings in the form of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Triumph of the Will, and it bears witness to a distinctly unfestive experience. Most of the “action” consists of uniformed men marching in columns through streets or across open spaces. Occasionally civilians are featured: Women in traditional folk costumes briefly walk by; thousands of members of the national work brigades march. The latter are also uniformed and carry their shovels over their shoulders like rifles. Other than that, there is speech making, mostly at night, by lengthy lineups of dignitaries, and a good deal of music, mostly from marching bands. That is the sum total of the entertainment, if we can call it that. At Nuremberg, as at countless other rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the only spectacle on display was the military, the only legitimate form of motion the march.

  And what is there for the nearly two hundred thousand people who have come to Nuremberg for the event to do? They line the streets as Hitler’s motorcade comes through—smiling, cheering, giving the Nazi salute. They line the streets again as the various columns of men march through. They assemble in the evening for the speeches. Their sole role, in other words, is to watch and applaud.

  It could be argued that the crowds in Triumph of the Will have a further role as part of the spectacle themselves—after all, a movie is being made of the proceedings, not to mention the fact that Hitler and his henchmen get to enjoy the view of the assembled masses from on high. But even as a part of the overall spectacle, the individual’s role is limited to being one tiny element of the mass. His or her movements are restricted to the occasional straight-armed salute; even the slight forward surge of the crowd as Hitler passes in an open car is quickly and firmly arrested by the line of policemen. Day after day as the party congress proceeds, the crowds wait and watch, reassemble at a new spot where they again wait and watch. They could be theatergoers deprived of seats. But they are too well-behaved and immobilized to be mistaken for, say, a late-twentieth-century crowd of sports fans or rock concert-goers. “They are actors,” the historian George L. Mosse observed, “in carefully staged liturgical rites.”17

  An audience is very different from a crowd, festive or otherwise. In a crowd, people are aware of one another’s presence, and, as Le Bon correctly intuited, sometimes emboldened by their numbers to do things they would never venture on their own. In an audience, by contrast, each individual is, ideally, unaware of other spectators except as a mass. He or she is caught up in the speech, the spectacle, the performance—and often further isolated from fellow spectators by the darkness of the setting and admonitions against talking to one’s neighbors. Fascist spectacles were meant to encourage a sense of solidarity or belonging, but in the way that they were performed, and in the fact that they were performed, they reduced whole nations to the status of an audience.

  The Festivals of the French Revolution

  The prototype for the fascist rallies of the twentieth century was, ironically enough, forged in the French Revolution, though in a kind of event unnoted by Le Bon. He fantasized and obsessed about the spontaneous actions of crowds but paid no attention to the well-organized, and for the most part quite staid, mass patriotic spectacles staged by whatever faction held power or was intent on capturing it. At least in the case of the French Revolution, there is little danger of confusing the officially staged spectacles with more spontaneous types of festivities. The official “festivals of the revolution,” as these patriotic spectacles were called, did not build on or reinforce either traditional, carnivalesque festivities or the excitement of crowds in the streets. They were designed in no small part, in fact, to counter and replace such livelier forms of festivity.

  And within the revolution itself, there was a great deal of festive crowd behavior to counter. Nineteenth-century historians—of whatever political sympathies—invariably commented on the revolution’s “maenadic” or “Saturnalian” qualities. Here, in the years from 1789 to about 1794, the European lower-class tradition of festive uprisings reached a historic climax: People deployed traditional festive occasions and symbols, like the maypole, to advance the revolutionary cause. Or they used political uprisings as occasions for festive behavior: dancing the carmagnole in the streets, singing revolutionary songs, feasting, and drinking. Even the carnival tradition of costuming makes an appearance, with citizens wearing the tricolor badge of revolution or affecting the simple garments of the lower classes. The largely female crowd that marched on Versailles in 1789, which, legend has it, had been summoned by a little girl beating a drum, turned the return trip into a traveling celebration: “The fishwives seated on the cannon, others wearing grenadiers’ caps; wine barrels next to powder kegs; green branches attached to butts of rifles; joy, shouting, clamor, gaiety, … noise, the image of the ancient Saturnalia, nothing could describe this convoy.”18

  Power, during the years of the revolution, was a slippery thing, and whichever group grasped for or briefly held it faced a vexing problem: how to harness the collective energy of ordinary people without letting that energy turn against the group itself. The more or less spontaneous actions of le menu peuple (the simple people) had toppled the king and brought the National Assembly to power, but there was always the danger, e
specially in times of great hunger, that the same sorts of spontaneous actions would be used against the National Assembly or factions within it. Decades earlier, Rousseau had suggested public festivals as a means of unifying people, and revolutionary intellectuals were well aware of the need for something to replace the discredited rituals of the royalty and the Catholic Church. The idea behind the revolutionary festivals, insofar as they lend themselves to generalization, was that instead of running and marching in the streets, people would stand on the sidewalks and watch the officially selected groups march by: battalions of old men and little boys, elaborately painted floats, columns of soldiers. Instead of entertaining themselves by dancing, drinking, and flirting, people would listen to speeches and perhaps recite the Declaration of the Rights of Man in chorus. Instead of wildness and spontaneity, there would be serenity and order.

  We can discern something of the intentions of the men who designed the official revolutionary festivities from their attitude toward traditional festivities, such as carnival, and this was an attitude of relentless hostility. In part, the intellectual leaders of the revolution, the men who populated the National Assembly, were repelled by the “traditional” per se, along with any reminder of the old regime. They abolished the traditional Church calendar, replacing it with a series of months of their own invention—Prairial, Thermidor, and so on—and a ten-day week culminating in a kind of Sunday called Décadi. To the revolutionary authorities, carnival was “that season that the peculiar prejudices of the ancien regime once devoted to noisy pleasures,” an event fraught with superstition, and a breeding ground for “religious tricksters.”19 All of this had to be swept away to make room for the revolutionary program of rationality and unwavering virtue.