The Torch in my Ear, page 26
Some time ago, I set down this account of July 15 and its aftermath. I have quoted it here verbatim. Perhaps, although brief, it can offer a notion of the gravity of what happened.
Ever since, I have often tried to approach that day, which may have been the most crucial day of my life after my father’s death. I have to say “approach,” for it is very hard to get at this day; it is an outspread day, stretching across an entire city, a day of movement for me too, for I biked all over Vienna. My feelings on that day were all focused in one direction. It was the most unambiguous day that I can remember, unambiguous only because one’s feelings could not be diverted from the day as it went by.
I don’t know who made the Palace of Justice the goal of the tremendous processions from all parts of the city. One could think that the choice was spontaneous, even though this cannot be true. Someone must have blurted out the words “to the Palace of Justice.” But it is not important to know who it was, for these words were taken in by everybody who heard them; they were accepted without qualms, waverings, or deliberation, without delay or demur, and they pulled everybody in one and the same direction.
Perhaps the substance of July 15 fully entered Crowds and Power. If this is so, then it would be impossible to trace anything back completely to the original experience, to the sensory elements of that day.
There was the long bike ride into town. I cannot remember the route. I do not know where I first bumped into people. I cannot see myself clearly on that day, but I still feel the excitement, the advancing, and the fluency of the movement. Everything is dominated by the word fire, then by actual fire.
A throbbing in my head. It may have been sheer chance that I did not personally see any attacks upon policemen. But I did see the throng being shot at and people falling. The shots were like whips. I saw people run into the side streets and I saw them reemerge and form into crowds again. I saw people fall and I saw corpses on the ground, but I wasn’t right next to them. I was dreadfully frightened, especially of these corpses. I went over to them, but avoided them as soon as I got closer. In my excitement, they seemed to be growing bigger. Until the Republican Defense Corps arrived to carry them away, the corpses were surrounded by empty space, as if people expected bullets to strike here again.
The mounted Defense Corps made an extremely horrible impression, perhaps because they were frightened themselves.
A man in front of me spat and pointed his right thumb halfway back: “Someone’s hanging there! They’ve pulled his pants off!” What was he spitting at? The victim? Or the murder? I couldn’t see what he was pointing at. A woman in front of me shrieked: “Peppi! Peppi!” Her eyes were closed and she was reeling. Everyone began to run. The woman fell down. However, she hadn’t been shot. I heard galloping horses. I didn’t go over to the woman, who was lying on the ground. I ran with the others. I sensed that I had to run with them. I wanted to flee into a doorway, but I couldn’t get away from the running throng. A very big, strong man running next to me banged his fist on his chest and bellowed as he ran: “Let them shoot me! Me! Me! Me!” Suddenly, he was gone. He hadn’t fallen down. Where was he?
This was perhaps the eeriest thing of all: you saw and heard people in a powerful gesture that ousted everything else, and then those very people had vanished from the face of the earth. Everything yielded and invisible holes opened everywhere. However, the overall structure did not disappear; even if you suddenly found yourself alone somewhere, you could feel things tugging and tearing at you. The reason was that you heard something everywhere: there was something rhythmic in the air, an evil music. You could call it music; you felt elevated by it. I did not feel as if I were moving on my own legs. I felt as if I were in a resonant wind. A crimson head popped up in front of me, at various points, up and down, up and down, rising and dropping, as if floating on water. I looked for it as though I were to follow its directives; I thought it had red hair, then I recognized a red kerchief and no longer looked for it.
I neither met nor recognized anyone; any people I spoke to were unknown to me. However, there were few people I spoke to. I heard a great deal; there was always something to hear; most cutting of all were the boohs when the police fired into the throng and people fell. At such moments, the boohs were relentless, especially the female boohs, which could be made out distinctly. It seemed to me as if the volleys of gunfire were elicited by boohs. But I also noticed that this impression was wrong, for the volleys continued even when no more boohs could be heard. You could hear the gunfire everywhere, even farther away, whiplashes over and over.
The persistence of the crowd, which, driven away, instantly erupted from the side streets. The fire would not let the people go; the Palace of Justice burned for hours, and the time of the burning was also the time of utmost agitation. It was a very hot day; even if you did not see the fire, the sky was red for a great distance, and the air smelled of burned paper, thousands and thousands of files.
The Defense Corps, which you saw everywhere, recognizable by their windbreakers and armbands, contrasted with the police force: the Corps was unarmed. Its weapons were stretchers on which the wounded and the dead were carried off. Its eagerness to help was obvious; its members stood out against the fury of the boohs as though they were not part of the crowd. Also, they turned up everywhere; their emergence often signaled victims before these victims were seen by anyone else.
I did not personally see the Palace of Justice being set on fire, but I learned about it before I saw flames: I could tell by a change of tone in the crowd. People shouted at one another about what had happened; at first, I did not understand; it sounded joyous, not shrill, not greedy; it sounded liberated.
The fire was what held the situation together. You felt the fire, its presence was overwhelming; even if you did not see it, you nevertheless had it in your mind, its attraction and the attraction exerted by the crowd were one and the same. The salvoes of gunfire by the police aroused boohs, the boohs new salvoes. But no matter where you happened to be under the impact of the gunfire, no matter where you seemingly fled, your connection with others (an open or secret connection, depending on the place) remained in effect. And you were drawn back into the province of the fire—circuitously, since there was no other possible way.
This day, which was borne by a uniform feeling (a single, tremendous wave surging over the city, absorbing it: when the wave ebbed, you could scarcely believe that the city was still there)—this day was made up of countless details, each one etched in your mind, none slipping away. Each detail exists in itself, memorable and discernible, and yet each one also forms a part of the tremendous wave, without which everything seems hollow and absurd. The thing to be grasped is the wave, not these details. During the following year and then again and again later on, I tried to grasp the wave, but I have never succeeded. I could not succeed, for nothing is more mysterious and more incomprehensible than a crowd. Had I fully understood it, I would not have wrestled with the problem of a crowd for thirty years, trying to puzzle it out and trying to depict it and reconstruct it as thoroughly as possible, like other human phenomena.
Even were I to assemble all the concrete details of which this day consisted for me, bring them together hard and unadorned, neither reducing nor exaggerating—I could not do justice to this day, for it consisted of more. The roaring of the wave was audible all the time, washing these details to the surface; and only if this wave could be rendered in words and depicted, could one say: really, nothing has been reduced.
Instead of approaching individual details, however, I could speak about the effects that this day had on my later thinking. This day was responsible for some of my most important insights in my book on crowds. Anything I looked for in widely separate source works, repeating, testing, taking notes, reading, and then subsequently rereading in slow motion, as it were, I was able to compare with the memory of that central event, which remained fresh—notwithstanding subsequent events, which occurred on a greater scale, involving more people, with greater consequences for the world. For later years, when agitation and indignation no longer had the same weight, the isolation of the Fifteenth of July, its restriction to Vienna, gave it something like the character of a model: an event limited in both space and time, with an indisputable cause and taking a clear and unmistakable course.
Here, once and for all, I had experienced something that I later called an open crowd, I had witnessed its formation: the confluence of people from all parts of the city, in long, steadfast, undeflectable processions, their direction set by the position of the building that bore the name Justice, yet embodied injustice because of a miscarriage of justice. I had come to see that a crowd has to fall apart, and I had seen it fearing its disintegration; I had watched it do everything it could to prevent it; I had watched it actually see itself in the fire it lit, hindering its disintegration so long as this fire burned. It warded off any attempt at putting out the fire; its own longevity depended on that of the fire. It was scattered, driven away, and sent fleeing by attacks; yet even though wounded, injured, and dead people lay before it on the streets, even though the crowd had no weapons of its own, it gathered again, for the fire was still burning, and the glow of the flames illuminated the sky over the squares and streets. I saw that a crowd can flee without panicking; that mass flight and panic are distinguishable. So long as the fleeing crowd does not disintegrate into individuals worried only about themselves, about their own persons, then the crowd still exists, although fleeing; and when the crowd stops fleeing, it can turn and attack.
I realized that the crowd needs no leader to form, notwithstanding all previous theories in this respect. For one whole day, I watched a crowd that had formed without a leader. Now and then, very seldom, there were people, orators, giving speeches that supported the crowd. Their importance was minimal, they were anonymous, they contributed nothing to the formation of the crowd. Any account giving them a central position falsifies the events. If anything did loom out, sparking the formation of the crowd, it was the sight of the burning Palace of Justice. The salvoes of the police did not whip the crowd apart: they whipped it together. The sight of people escaping through the streets was a mirage: for even when running, they fully understood that certain people were falling and would not get up again. These victims unleashed the wrath of the crowd no less than the fire did.
During that brightly illuminated, dreadful day, I gained the true picture of what, as a crowd, fills our century. I gained it so profoundly that I kept going back to contemplate it anew, both compulsively and willingly. I returned over and over and watched; and even today, I sense how hard it is for me to tear myself away, since I have managed to achieve only the tiniest portion of my goal: to understand what a crowd is.
The Letters in the Tree
The year following this event was totally dominated by it. My mind revolved around nothing else until summer 1928. I was resolved more than ever to find out just what the crowd was—the crowd that had overwhelmed me both mentally and physically. I pretended to go on studying chemistry, and I began to work on my dissertation; but the assigned topic was so uninteresting that it barely grazed the skin of my mind. I devoted every free moment to studying the things that were really important to me. In the most diverse, seemingly farfetched ways, I tried to approach what I had experienced as a crowd. I sought crowds in history, in the histories of all civilizations. I was more and more fascinated by the history and early philosophy of China. I had already started in with the Greeks much earlier, while attending school in Frankfurt. I now delved further and further into ancient historians, especially Thucydides. It was natural that I study revolutions, the English, French, and Russian ones. Furthermore, I began to get insights into the meaning of crowds in religions; it was at this time that I developed my eagerness to know about all religions, a desire that has never left me. I read Darwin, hoping to learn something about the formation of crowds among animals, and I thoroughly perused books on insect societies. I must have gotten little sleep, for I read through many nights. I wrote down a number of things and tried to pen a few essays. These activities were all tentative and preliminary work for a book on crowds, but they were fairly meaningless, since they were based on too little knowledge.
In reality, this was the beginning of a new expansion in many directions at once; and the good thing about it was that I set myself no limits. True, I was after something specific, I wanted to find testimony to the existence and effect of crowds in all realms of life. But since little attention had been paid to this phenomenon, such documents were sparse; and as a result, I found out about all sorts of things that had nothing whatsoever to do with crowds. I became familiar with Chinese names and soon Japanese names as well; I began to move freely among them, as I had done among the Greeks during my school days. Among the translations of Chinese classics, I came upon Chuang Tzu, the philosopher I am now most familiar with; under the impact of his works, I began to write a paper on Taoism. To rationalize straying so far from my actual theme, I tried to convince myself that I would never understand crowds without first learning what extreme isolation is. However, the true reason for my fascination with this original trend in Chinese philosophy was (without my realizing it) the importance of metamorphoses here. It was, as I see today, a good instinct that drew me to metamorphoses; my probing kept me from giving in to the world of concepts, and thus I have always remained at the edge of this world.
It is strange with what skill—I cannot call it anything else—I avoided abstract philosophy. In it, I found no trace of what I was hunting as a crowd, a both concrete and potent phenomenon. It was not until much later that I understood the disguise of crowds and the form in which they appear in certain philosophers.
I do not believe that any of the numerous things I experienced in this pushing, tempestuous way remained on the surface. Everything struck roots and spread into adjacent areas. The connections between things that were remote from one another were created under the ground. They remained concealed from me for a long time, which was a good thing, for they then emerged years later, all the more strongly and surely. I do not feel that it is dangerous to make plans that are too all-encompassing. A narrowing comes with the process of life; and while you cannot prevent such narrowing altogether, you can at least hold it up and work against it by spreading out as far as possible.
The despair right after July 15, a kind of paralysis caused by horror, sometimes coming over me as I worked and making it impossible for me to continue, endured for six or seven weeks, until early September. Karl Kraus’s poster, put up at this time, had a cathartic effect, releasing me from my paralysis. However, I retained a sensitive ear for the voice of a crowd. That day had been ruled by raging boohs. Those were lethal boohs, they had been answered with gunfire, and they had intensified when people, hit by bullets, had fallen to the ground. In some streets, the boohs faded out; in others, they swelled up; they were most indelible in the vicinity of the conflagration.
A short time later, the boohs moved to the area around Hagenberggasse. A mere fifteen minutes from my room, on the other side of the valley, over in Hüttelsdorf, lay the Rapid Stadium, where soccer matches were held on Sundays and holidays. Huge throngs poured into the stadium, unwilling to miss the famous Rapid soccer match. I had paid little heed since soccer did not interest me. But on a Sunday after July 15, a hot day again, I was expecting company; and through my open windows, I suddenly heard the shouts of the crowd. I mistook them for boohs; I was still so filled with my experience of the terrible day that I was confused for a moment and looked out for the fire that had illuminated that day. However, there was no fire; the golden dome of the church of Steinhof was glowing in the sun. I came to my senses and realized that the noise was pouring over from the playing field. By way of confirming this, the noise was soon repeated; I listened very strenuously; these were no boohs: the crowd was shouting.
I had been living here for three months and never paid attention to these shouts. They must have wafted over to me earlier, just as powerful and bizarre as they were now; but I had been deaf to this noise. It was only the Fifteenth of July that had opened my ears. I did not budge from the spot; I listened to the entire game. The triumphal shouts were triggered by goals and came from the winning side. One could also hear a different noise, a cry of disappointment. I could see none of this from my window: there were trees and houses in the way; the distance was too great. But I could hear the crowd, and it alone, as though everything were taking place right near me. I could not tell from which of the two sides the shouts were coming. I did not know who the teams were. I paid no attention to their names and made no effort to find them out. I avoided reading any newspaper items about them, and I never conversed about them during the week.
But throughout the six years that I lived in this room, I missed no opportunity to listen to these sounds. I saw the torrent of people down by the urban rail station. If the throng was denser than normal at this time, I knew that a match was scheduled and I went over to my window. I find it hard to describe my excitement when following the game from a distance. I did not root for either side, since I did not know which side was which. There were two crowds, that was all I knew; both equally excitable and speaking the same language. At this time, detached from the place that had given rise to them, not diverted by a hundred circumstances and particulars, I developed a feeling for what I later understood and attempted to describe as a double crowd. Sometimes, when deeply absorbed by something, I sat writing at my desk in the middle of the room, while the game went on. But whatever I was writing, no sound from the Rapid Stadium eluded me. I never got habituated to the noise. Every single sound made by the crowd had its effect on me. Reading through manuscripts of those days, I believe even today that I can discern every point at which such a sound was heard, as though it were marked by a secret notation.
