tate, class, and stratum as different historicalmanifestations ofalonger process
thereafter known as social differentiation.¹⁹Most scholars welcomed the opening
of the emerging fieldtoward sociopsychological perspectives, and some even ex-
perimented with literaryformats (e.g., in the workers’life writingsdiscussed in
chapter 7)to gain insights into the so-called mass soul and better understand the
actual problems of real workers.Intellectual historians disagree to what extent
the historical preoccupation with the masses was nothing more thanadisplaced
reactionto the threat of class struggle and in what ways mass discourse alsorep-
resentedaproductive responsetoprofound changes in modern industrial soci-
eties. HelmuthBerking has argued that the tension between theabstract quality
of mass discourse and the concrete demands by new social groups andmove-
ments attests aboveall to the fear of culturalelites about their loss of influence
in aculturewheremassification invariablymeant democratization.²⁰The disap-
pearance around 1930 ofmass discourse asasubject of scholarlyinquiry con-
firms its dependence on the initial provocations of classsociety and Marxist cri-
tique–but it also marks the beginning of very different configurations of
socialism, populism, and nationalism that continue to hallucinatethe masses
as their abject others.
To summarize the various positions presented thus far,the modern masses
castapowerful spell over the social imaginary of the nineteenth and earlytwen-
tieth century and retained their heightened status asasubject of scholarlyinqui-
ry until the end of theWeimarRepublic. Once safely contained within the regis-
ters of mass discourse, the masses becameaconvenient wayoftalking about the
workingclass without mentioningits name. But massdiscourse never acquired
the status ofastableset of scholarlymethods and practices.Onthe one hand,
the theoretical armature of mass psychologyremained haunted by the threat of
revolution embodied by the proletariat since that utopian moment known as the
Paris Commune. On the other,modernsociologyexpanded the economically
based definitions of classto make sense of the unique nature of massmobiliza-
tions with the help of psychological categories. This emerging typologyand icon-
See MaxWeber,EssaysinSociology,trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth andC. Wright Mills (New
York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1946), especiallySection II on power.For an introduction, see
WolfgangMommsen,ThePolitical and SocialTheoryofMax Weber:Collected Essays(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,1989). On the change in social categories,see JürgenKocka,
“Stand—Klasse—Organisation. Strukturen sozialer Ungleichheit in Deutschlandvom späten
- bis zum frühen20.Jahrhundert imAufriß,”inKlassen in der europäischen Sozialgeschichte,
ed. Hans-UlrichWehler(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht,1979), 137–165.
Helmuth Berking,Masse und Geist. StudienzurSoziologie in derWeimarer Republik(Berlin:
WissenschaftlicherAutorenverlag, 1984),67.
44 Chapter 1