Fascist Spectacles
In this, the modernâor, we might say, postfestiveâera, 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 notoriousâand certainly the most disturbingâwere 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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This image of ecstatic crowds
Sieg heil
âing their mad leaderâalways juxtaposed in our minds with the mass graves and starved bodies of his victimsâhas 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.”
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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.”
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Or, as some revisionist social psychologists put it very recently, the effect of fascism was to convince social scientists that “groups are inherently dangerous.”
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In less academic circles too, the very word
Nuremberg
evokes crowds driven to hysteria by cunning stagecraft and charismatic speakersâprimed 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”;
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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.”
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In a 1968
New York Times
article, a critic described a Rolling Stones concert as “pure Nuremberg!”
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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
?
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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
ânot 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 nowâeven heralds of an age of democracyâbut 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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”âwhether obediently cheering Hitler at Nuremberg or rising up to demand bread in revolutionary Parisâresembles 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.”
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Individually, we may be reasonable and civilized people, butâthe thinking goesâput us together and some primitive evil churns up. Nuremberg in 1934 and Paris in 1789, the Holocaust and the Reign of Terrorâall 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 attentionâthe marchers or, in the Roman case, chained captives and exotic animals in cagesâare only part of the attraction. Central to the experience is the knowledge that hundreds or thousands of other people are attending the same spectacleâjust 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 throughâsmiling, 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 themselvesâafter 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.”
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