Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  For Hitler and Mussolini, mass rallies were not only a means of mobilizing the population for the war effort but a means of governing it. There was of course no semblance of democracy in totalitarian Germany or Italy; but this did not mean that either dictator could afford to completely ignore his people—as, for example, the Bourbon kings had before the revolutionary year of 1789, running France as if it were their private estate. If the French Revolution offered one great lesson to all future regimes, it was that “the people” had to be encouraged to identify with the state, even in the case of a state they had no way of influencing. The new media—radio and film—helped propagate the fascist message, but they could not give people a sense of direct and personal involvement. That was the function of the mass rallies: to create a kind of ersatz participation. Soldiers would march, demonstrating the power of the state; the dictator would speak, perhaps announcing new policies; and the assembled people would cheer, thus registering their approval without anything as cumbersome and potentially divisive as a vote.

  Hence the need for regular and frequent mass rallies, scheduled according to a new calendar of nationalist holidays. No one, so far as I can tell, has totaled up the cost of these rallies, but it must have been enormous, beginning with the expense involved in giving the majority of the population a day off from work. As for their frequency, Lindholm comments that Hitler strove to “turn all of Germany into a gigantic and permanent mass meeting, awaiting his galvanizing appearance.”45 In the same vein, a contemporary observer described Mussolini’s mass rallies as “the chief industry of Fascist Italy.”46 The piazzas of Italian towns and the central squares of German cities—once the sites of lively festivities on religious holidays—became the settings for the new nationalist spectacles, with ancient Roman ruins (in Italy) and newly built nationalist monuments (in both countries) providing an imposing backdrop.

  As in the case of the Jacobins, the Nazis and fascists frowned on alternative forms of celebration and entertainment. The Nazis famously banned swing music and fretted about what constituted a racially acceptable rhythm.

  On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated; so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10 percent syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races and conducive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs).47

  Traditional, Christian-based entertainments presented them with a more difficult problem, since these could be seen as a legitimate part of the Aryan heritage. A 1939 article in the Nazi party journal agonized over Christmas.

  Both according to popular custom and popular view, the Christmas holiday can justifiably be seen as a festival of the homeland … But if we do this, we must realize that the Christmas holiday or Christmas festival is more than a date on the calendar suitable for cheap entertainment events. We cannot meet our goals in the style of pre-war clubs with their “variety evenings,” raffles or the ever so popular military farce. Not even if “Bananini the Magician” or “Bear Mouth the Sword Swallower” make a guest appearance.48

  While the official Nazi attitude toward traditional holidays was one of toleration, the party covertly sought to discourage them. As Michael Burleigh writes, “Feast days, pilgrimages and religious processions were [a] … flashpoint between the faithful and the Nazis, especially in Catholic regions.”49 The Nazis would, somewhat spitefully, schedule compulsory Hitler Youth activities on the same days as church events, or make attendance difficult by canceling round-trip train service to the site of a religious festivity.

  Not having gone through the Reformation, Italy had a more robust tradition of festivities for the fascists to worry about. In 1926, Mussolini declared that “it’s time to put a stop to such ceremonies, assemblies, and festivals,” citing their lack of “seriousness.” A year later, he officially banned “any ceremony, demonstration, celebration, anniversary, centenary great or small, as well as speeches of any sort,” other than his own, of course.50 Apparently these prohibitions were not entirely effective, because in 1932 we find the Fascist party secretary Achille Starace banning “gala shows” and New Year’s Eve parties, which not only lacked seriousness but snubbed the official fascist year-end date of October 29. Echoing the seventeenth-century Calvinists, he warned against participation in banquets and prohibited people’s attempts to humanize the mass rallies by using them, or their aftermath, as an occasion for dancing: there would be no dancing at fascist events.51 Some traditional rural festivals were permitted, so long as they were conducted in a somber, “healthy” fashion and “permeated with Fascist symbolism.” 52 The wine harvest celebration, for example, was to be “very similar to that of the Romans, who”—the fascist youth newspaper averred—“did not admit barbarian influences in their rituals and did not want orgiastic contamination of the joyful festival of the wine harvest.”53

  Mussolini’s ostensible concern was that festivities other than official mass rallies would both take too much time and “satiate” the public.54 And why, a good fascist might wonder, should the public require any source of collective excitement beyond what the state provided? Both Hitler and Mussolini held rather grandiose views about the psychological impact of their spectacles, which they believed to be on a par with religious epiphany. Ideally, the individual spectator should experience complete self-loss and submergence in the larger collective—the volk, or the nation. In Italy, the Fascist party leadership sought to forge the masses into “an organic whole,” which, in their rhetoric, more resembled a homogeneous substance than a collection of individual people.55 Hitler was equally explicit about the need to meld the public into a single unit, and the agreeable effect this transformation would have on the individual: “There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself … The day of individual happiness has passed. Can there be any greater happiness than a National Socialist meeting in which speakers and audience feel as one?”56

  But the alleged delights of the mass rallies did not mean that the spectators and marchers could be trusted to follow their impulses in the slightest degree. The rallies were heavily policed and scripted in every detail; attendance was often compulsory: “No citizen must be allowed to stay at home,” insisted a Nazi official in Northeim.57 Hitler’s biographer John Toland reports that the party members who participated in the 1934 Nuremberg rally had been “carefully selected months in advance, each had a number, a designated truck, a designated seat in the truck, and a designated cot in the vast tent city near Nuremberg. By the time the ceremonies began on Sept 4, the thousands of party members had been rehearsed to perfection.” 58 At pre-Nazi May Day celebrations, the crowds had been disorderly, “roaming around, singing or speech-making,” but at the Nazis’ 1933 May Day event the working-class participants “observed exemplary shopfloor discipline, arranging themselves into teams, lines, and squares, following directions, signals, and cordons: I, II, III, IV, …”59 In Italy, “order and punctuality dominated the events, which were structured around Mussolini’s arrival and departure from the train stations.”60 Even the clothing of spectators was specified: no “festive dress” and, for men anyway, the emblematic fascist black shirt was recommended. Furthermore, the Fascist party ruled that all ceremonies should be “marked by the greatest possible austerity and sobriety. To this end, banquets and lavish receptions are prohibited.”61

  It’s not easy to gauge the subjective impact of the Nazi and Italian fascist rallies. For one thing, memoirs are unreliable, in part because in the aftermath of fascism witnesses of the rallies were likely to downplay whatever thrills they may have experienced. But contemporary accounts from the state-dominated media are no better, since these no doubt erred in the other direction, by exaggerating the enthusiasm and size of the crowds. The newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, for example, offered a typically breathless account of a fascist rally in
1932.

  Squadrons of airplanes fly in ever-tighter circles overhead, as if to crown this splendid assembly.

  The crowd never tires of following their maneuvers, and the thunder of their engines mixes with the peals of the fanfares and the songs of the Fascists. Meanwhile, Piazza Venezia has reached its flood point. The clamor of the music and the constant alala [the fascist chant, which had no meaning] deafens all. The people are carried away by the huge roar calling for the Duce …

  The crowd continues to swell. The square is thronged. Fifty thousand are there waiting for Mussolini, fifty thousand shout his name …

  The bands break into “Giovinezza.” The flags are raised high. Mussolini! … “Duce! Duce!” The cry is infinitely multiplied over the clanging of the music.62

  Nor can we trust the highly edited Triumph of the Will to provide a representative sample of images from the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Riefenstahl shows only upraised faces, smiling in exaltation—no sullen children or foot-sore spectators.

  There is scattered evidence that, especially as the novelty of the rallies wore off, many of the spectators and even participants may have been dragging their feet. On the basis of her study of railroad receipts, one historian, for example, makes a case that the crowds that watched Italian fascist rallies did not assemble spontaneously but were rounded up by train and transported to the rally sites “to give the appearance of volume.”63 Another historian observes of the Italian scene that “the unremitting mobilization on behalf of the collective rituals could indeed give rise to feelings of satiety and impatience in some.”64 Certainly the much-heralded 1934 “18BL” mass performance in Florence—featuring an air squadron, brigades from various branches of the military, and fifty of the new Fiat 18BL trucks—was a flop, with a contemporary reviewer fretting that its main result would be to create “a certain aversion on the part of the masses towards this sort of spectacle.”65 Meanwhile, in Germany, at the Nazis’ 1933 May Day rally,

  only a thinning line of bystanders stretched along parts of the parade route. On this May Day at least, the theaterical nature of Nazi political production was too apparent. For many observers, it was obvious that the streets were but stage scenery, the blue smocks simply costumes, the gestures and speeches awkwardly followed scripts, and the audience insufficiently animated.66

  The historian Peter Fritschze quotes a worker who was required to march in this event: “As the parade passed a pissoir, I said to myself ‘in you go …’ As I stepped out of line, the guy next to me followed, and when we were done, we ran home.”67

  As for the great Nuremberg rallies: In recent years, German historians have emphasized their “tedium and banality” as well as their manipulative intent. The official Documentation Center opened at the rally site in 2001 shows a side of the events either unglimpsed by Riefenstahl or carefully edited out: the influx of prostitutes that accompanied the rallies, along with soaring rates of venereal disease; the shortage of public toilets, and the “filthy” conditions of the few that were available.68 And if the show itself was endless and dull, there seems to have been plenty of beer drinking on its margins. The police reported the arrest of drunken “political leaders” caught vandalizing a fountain—perhaps by putting it to use as a toilet. 69 After 1935, even the Nazi party began to lose interest in the rallies, which were not only expensive but unreliably productive of the proper “mystic” effects: “So many ingredients were needed to create the right atmosphere for a mass celebration: a starlit summer sky … a receptive audience, a well-rehearsed mass choir or a choreographed march past [sic]—and then a shower of rain could ruin everything.”70

  We can conclude, then, with some confidence, that the nationalist spectacles of the modern era—from the official festivals of the French Revolution to the fascist mass rallies of the 1920s and ’30s—were a sorry substitute for the traditional festive gatherings they replaced. This failure had nothing to do with ideological content, which ranged from radically left-wing during the French Revolution to viciously reactionary in the fascist states of the twentieth century. It was the medium that failed: the endless parades, the reviews of the troops, the exhortatory speeches. One could argue that this medium necessarily contains its own message—about power, militarism, the need for the individual to be subsumed by the collective—and that the message itself had grown tiresome over time.

  But judged simply as a species of entertainment, the nationalist spectacles seem to have fallen rather short of the mark. They were, for one thing, utterly solemn events. The traditional carnival had been an occasion for subversive humor, in which customary forms of authority could be inverted and the mighty safely mocked, for a few days at least. But the nationalist events we have surveyed in this chapter featured no parodies of the puritanical Robespierre, for example, and certainly no one playing the part of Hitler as a “king of fools,” riding backward on a donkey through the streets. Where the carnival had been joyously irreverent, the nationalist rallies, and especially the fascist ones, were celebrations of state authority, designed to instill citizenly virtue or at least inspire awe.

  Could better nationalist spectacles have been devised, with perhaps more color, less speechifying, and some comic relief? Yes, certainly, and Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee celebration in 2002 provides an example of what can be done with the spectacular medium: There were the usual military touches—flyovers by fighter jets, for example—but also a veritable variety show featuring pop music, extravagantly dressed dancers, and humanizing glimpses of the royals. But a spectacle, by its nature, offers an inherently more limited experience than a participatory event. In a late medieval carnival, for example, everyone had a role to play and a chance to distinguish themselves individually by the brilliance of their costumes, the wittiness of their jokes, or their talents as dancers or athletes. You went to be seen, as well as to see. At an event organized entirely as a spectacle, though, all creativity is invested in the spectacle itself, and none is demanded of the spectators. They are not there to be seen, except as part of an inert mass. All attention focuses on a central point: the parade, the speaker, or the hoopla that showcases the arrival of the head of state.

  But we do not have to confine ourselves to inferences about the limits and frustrations of spectatorship relative to more physical forms of participation: Within a generation after the mass rallies of the 1930s and ’40s, young people in the heart of the postfestive Western world would rebel against the immobility required of the “audience” and, against all expectation, begin to revive the ancient tradition of ecstatic festivity.

  10

  The Rock Rebellion

  What has been repressed, no matter how forcibly and thoroughly, often finds a way of resurfacing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Anglo-American culture was struck by an outbreak of “hysteria” or “mania” described by alarmed observers as obscene, disruptive, and even criminal. Neither the United States nor England was, in the mid-twentieth century, a likely site for such unrestrained behavior. Both societies were heavily burdened by the puritanical legacy of the sixteenth century; each had contributed to the suppression of festive and ecstatic traditions among colonized—or, in the case of the Americans, enslaved—peoples. But it may be that their very success in expunging “foreign” ecstatic traditions heightened their vulnerability to the call, when it came, to get up and move and dance and shout.

  From the beginning, the rock rebellion manifested itself as a simple refusal to sit still or to respect anyone who insisted that one do so. Wherever the “new” music was performed—and it was new at least to most white people—kids jumped out of their seats and began to chant, scream, and otherwise behave in ways that the authorities usually interpreted as “rioting.” Most of these incidents, according to Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll, “just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters; jiving in their seats; and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot—having a good time, in short. The authorities thought an a
udience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance.”1 In 1956, performances by Bill Haley and His Comets, who were at the moment the most popular rock group in the world, provoked “a national outbreak of dancing in the aisles, chanting in the streets, and deliberate rudeness toward assorted figures of authority.”2 In both England and the United States, managers of the theaters and concert halls where rock groups performed responded by enlisting the police to control the “rioters,” so that early rock concerts evolved into a kind of slapstick ritual: Kids would stand up and begin dancing in the aisles; the police would chase them and stuff them back into their seats; the kids would get up again.

  Throughout the 1960s as well, rock concerts were routine settings for confrontations between young fans and the police. Members of the Jefferson Airplane complained that “as soon as kids got up to dance in the aisles the cops would disconnect the amps.”3 Rolling Stones concerts almost invariably led to “riots,” with the Vancouver chief of police, for example, complaining that one of the group’s concerts provided the “most prolonged demand of physical endurance I have ever seen police confronted with during my 33 years of service.” In Vancouver, as in other cities, the police began to demand and get complete control of the curtains, lighting, and sound systems for rock concerts.4 Audiences responded with still more “riotous” behavior, such as rushing the stage or counterattacking the police with fire extinguishers and missiles. Jim Morrison of the Doors blamed the cops: “If there were no cops there, would anybody try to get onstage? … The only incentive to charge the stage is because there’s a barrier.”5 Barriers of any kind only served as a provocation to the fans, who sought a freedom of motion and physical self-expression horrifying to the adult world—a chance to mingle with one another, to move to the music, and later to assert themselves in the streets outside the concert venues.