JuliusWerner describes the same phenomenon withastrong sense of foreboding
that implies acceptance of the inevitability of dramatic social and political
changes.“It seems that the spiritual birthmark of inner resentment will not dis-
appear from the forehead of the modernwage-earning class,”theLutheran pas-
tor concedes, concluding that,“Even as the manifestations of theirwild, eruptive
hatred have changed, the original sting(Stachel)isboundto remain.”²
Meaning“sting”or“prick,”the ambiguity of the Germanwordcaptures per-
fectlythe tension betweenguilt (about having injured the other)and fear (of
being injured by the other)that informs most middle-class conceptions of the
workingclass duringthe late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century.Itwould
be easyto dismiss all ofmass discourse as elitist and conservative by quoting
the nationalist historian HeinrichTreitschkewho insisted that,“the masses
must forever remain the masses. There would be no culturewithout kitchen-
maids.”³In fact,the writings of scholars who opposed the socialist movement
offer privileged accessto the personification of what has toremain unnamed,
namelythe destructive forces released by capitalist modernity.Inother words,
they bring forth the other–thatis, the elusive,ubiquitous masses–against
which the proletarian dream announces its emancipatory functions and prefigur-
ative effects. Moreover,contempt for the new social underclass should notauto-
maticallybeequated with antimodern, antiurban, and antidemocratic positions.
As the secondverse of the“Workers’Marseillaise”confirms,contempt for the
masseswas alive and well in the socialist movement:“The enemythat we
hate the most,/ That surrounds us thick and black,/It is the foolishness of the
masses,/That can onlybebroken with the sword of the spirit.”⁴
Nineteenth-centurymassdiscourse is inseparable from the rise of the work-
ing class and the socialist movement. Nowhereisthis connection clearer than in
the work of Gustave Le Bon, the influentialFrench anthropologist and sociolo-
gist.While hisLa psychologie des foules(1895,inEnglish asTheCrowd: A
Study of the PopularMind)becameafounding text of masspsychology, his fol-
low-up bookPsychologie du socialisme(1899,translatedasThePsychology of So-
cialism)has been largelyforgotten.Yetitisinthe latter work that thegeneral ob-
servations on crowd behavior find their clearest application inrelation to the
JuliusWerner,Das moderne Proletariat und die deutsche Nation(Stuttgart: Chr.BelserscheVer-
lagsbuchhandlung,1907), 13.The book was published inaseries on“Zeitfragen des christlichen
Volkslebens.”
HeinrichvonTreitschke,Politics,trans.Blanche Dugdale andTorben de Bille, foreword A.
LawrenceLowell(NewYork: Macmillan, 1916),42.
JacobAudorf,“Arbeitermarseillaise,”inProletarier singe!Kampf-undVolkslieder,ed. Carl
Hoym (Hamburg: A. Willaschek, 1919), 104–105.
34 Chapter 1