Everybody

by Olivia Laing

  I find it hard to watch footage of protests from the 1990s, especially of the evictions at Newbury, because it feels as if I’m looking directly into a moment when the future could still have gone a different way, a microcosmic, speeded-up version of what is happening now to the planet as a whole. A woman lies in front of bulldozers, and then she is dragged away through the churned-up mud. The woods are intact and full of people, and then the trees are cut down; all bar the giant Middle Oak, which stands alone on a roundabout on the A30, looking as pointless and isolated as an animal in a zoo.

  *

  Witnessing a protest, especially if it’s unreliably reported or violently suppressed, has the capacity to strip away naivety, to expose invisible power structures or to fling into doubt previously unquestioned assumptions and beliefs. One of the reasons I was so struck by Reich’s writing back in the 1990s was that he too experienced this kind of awakening. In 1927, when he was thirty, he witnessed an uprising in Vienna that turned into a massacre. It seemed like a hinge in his strange life, a moment of revelation that still shone, despite everything that came after.

  The inter-war years in Austria were a time of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, of angry bodies assembling in the streets. During the 1920s, the controlling power nationally was the conservative, monarchist Christian Social Party, but Red Vienna itself was a bastion of socialism, a model of the welfare state that would be rolled out across Europe after the ruination of the Second World War. By 1927, the political situation had grown so fraught that nearly every Sunday in nearly every town and village you could find a uniformed militia marching, the socialist Schutzbund with red carnations in their caps and the right-wing Heimwehr in olive-green bonnets with outsized black grouse feathers sticking absurdly from the peak.

  It was one of these rallies that catalysed the July Revolt. On 30 January 1927 the Schutzbund gathered in Schattendorf, a small town forty miles south of Vienna. After their march, they were walking back to the station when they passed an inn popular with the Frontkämpfer, a far-right, anti-Semitic paramilitary organisation associated with the Austrian government. The innkeeper’s sons stood at the windows and fired rifles at the backs of the passing marchers, killing a veteran, Matthias Csmarits, who had lost an eye in the First World War, and his eight-year-old nephew, Josef Grossing.

  Csmarits’ funeral was attended by thousands of uniformed Schutzbund, and there was a fifteen-minute general strike in honour of the deaths. On 5 July, the three Frontkämpfer responsible were tried for the crime of public violence. They confessed to the shooting but claimed self-defence and nine days later were acquitted by the jury. ‘A JUST VERDICT’, the right-wing Die Reichspost proclaimed, but it was received with outrage, especially in Vienna. Nonetheless, the Social Democrats who controlled the city decided not to officially contest the verdict, in part because they didn’t want to undermine the new institution of the jury trial.

  Most people didn’t hear the news until early the next morning, as they were walking to work. It surged through the city with the first papers, rushing through factory floors and depots. At 8am, the workers decided spontaneously to hold a peaceful demo. They switched off the electricity and stopped all public transport. As the city ground to a halt, tens of thousands of people gathered to express their frustration and disquiet. According to G. E. R. Gedye, a British journalist stationed in the city, at this stage the crowd were peaceful and good-humoured, laughing and joking as they jostled through the streets.

  At ten in the morning, police on horseback tried to break up the gathering, firing at the crowd with revolvers, riding into them and refusing to let them pass. The bottleneck created chaos. The marchers armed themselves with sticks and cobblestones, planks and iron bars salvaged from a construction site, breaking into the police station and freeing anyone who’d been arrested (this scene is very like the Stonewall Riots, when the outnumbered police barricaded themselves in the Stonewall Inn, while the queers outside smashed their way in, armed likewise with cobblestones and street detritus). After setting the station on fire, the protestors were driven by the police to the square in front of the Justizpalast, which a small number stormed and set ablaze. By now a crowd of two hundred thousand had gathered, and they refused or were unable to let the fire engines pass.

  Around the same time that Gedye heard the first isolated revolver shot, a patient arrived at Reich’s office in a state of agitation. He said that the city workers were on strike, that the police were armed and that people were being killed. Reich cancelled the session and together they went outside to see what was happening in the streets. Everywhere, people were walking in silence, heading towards the University. To Reich’s great surprise, he passed columns of Schutzbund marching in the opposite direction. Later, he learned that they had been sent back to barracks and ordered not to involve themselves in the dispute by the Social Democrats, though they were a trained force of fifty thousand that existed to protect the working people of Vienna.

  On his way across town he passed the police headquarters, where he saw rifles being handed from a truck. He first heard the whip-crack of rifle fire as he crossed Rathaus Park, on the other side of Parliament from the burning Justizpalast. The crowd was screaming now, and running in and out of side streets, melting away and then re-forming, a terrified mass of bodies pursued by galloping horses. Most of the police had never been taught to use a gun, and held their rifles against their bellies, firing indiscriminately from left to right. They shot men, women and children, many of them onlookers who, like Reich, had only come to see the blaze. They shot at ambulances, fire engines, Red Cross workers, even at each other.

  Tides of people ran in panic through the streets, chased by mounted police, sabres raised above their heads. Smoke rose from the Justizpalast. The sky turned red and the air smelt of burning paper. The lash of rifles, followed by boos and screams. A man opened his coat in defiance and was shot in the chest. A woman kneeling over the wounded was shot in the back of the head. Later, it transpired that the chief of police had issued rifles to six hundred officers along with dumdum bullets, a type of ammunition that expands on impact, inflicting terrible wounds from the expanding lead, especially when fired at close range.

  Reich ran home to get his wife Annie, and together they went back to the university. A phalanx of policemen was across the street. As the Reichs watched, they inched towards the crowd, ‘slowly, very slowly’, like children playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. When they were fifty steps away they began to shoot. Dozens of people were lying on the ground. Reich grabbed Annie and hid behind a tree, unable to believe what he was seeing. One or two policemen deliberately aimed over people’s heads but most of them were simply gunning people down. ‘It was not a riot per se, with two antagonistic factions,’ he wrote in his memoir, People in Trouble, ‘but simply tens of thousands of people, and groups of policemen shooting into the defenceless crowd.’

  As it grew dark he wandered the desolate streets, encountering weeping and traumatised strangers, many hunting for missing friends or family members. Eighty-nine people were dead, and a thousand more were in hospital, where doctors attempted to stitch up catastrophic wounds, some inflicted from less than a metre away. Shaken and exhausted, he and Annie decided to call in on a friend whose family were associated with the Social Democrat leadership. He wanted to discuss what he’d seen and to plan an urgent response, but instead he walked in on the preparations for a disconcertingly formal dinner. There were flowers and candles on the table. ‘The gory events’, he remembered later, ‘appeared not to have penetrated this room.’

  The guests arrived, and though they discussed the bloodshed Reich was sure none of them had seen it for themselves. They spoke in the same way that they customarily spoke of Goethe: cultured, reserved, intelligent, polite. He was beset with a sense of furious unreality and fantasised about tipping up the shining table and knocking the plates to the floor. Outside, protests were still flaring in suburbs and outposts of the city, but the next mo
rning the strike was broken up by the right-wing Heimwehr. In the months that followed the Heimwehr received funds from Italian fascists and local industrialists keen to restore the nation to its lost imperialist glories. Within a few years, most would change their allegiance to the Nazis. As Reich’s friends sat over their supper, the far-right had begun its Austrian ascent.

  *

  The things Reich saw in the streets of Vienna stayed with him. He was haunted by the spectacle of the brutalised crowd and the robotic policemen: a vision, though he didn’t know it yet, of what would soon befall Europe. Why hadn’t the people defended themselves, even though they far outnumbered their attackers? If the civil order was founded on and maintained by this kind of violence, how could a psychoanalyst be aiding their patients by insisting they accommodate themselves to it? And, most urgently of all, what force made the police shoot their undefended fellow citizens; like rabbits, Reich said. ‘Somewhere’, he wrote furiously in People in Trouble, ‘a great deception was hidden.’

  Freud too was troubled. He hadn’t been in Vienna during the riots, and when Reich visited him at Villa Schuler a few weeks later it became apparent that he didn’t regard the massacre as an injustice, but as something deplorable, the fault of the workers and not the police. All that spring, he’d been working on an essay about religion, and his disquiet about the events of 15 July trickled into it. In ‘The Future of An Illusion’, which he finished in September and published in November, he turned from a direct investigation of the psyche to the question of civilisation itself, an arena that had fascinated him since boyhood. ‘Every individual’, he wrote, thinking perhaps of the weeping, baying crowds outside the Palace of Justice, ‘is virtually an enemy of civilisation, though civilisation is supposed to be an object of universal human interest.’ He argued that disciplined leaders were vital in order to persuade the irrational, violent masses towards the instinctual sacrifice that civilisation required. While it wasn’t an argument for fascism, it certainly didn’t support the kind of egalitarian revolution Reich both longed for and believed was in sight.

  Two years later, Freud refined this argument in Civilisation and its Discontents, the book that crystallised his battle with Reich. In it, he explains that the curtailment of individual rights is the necessary price to be paid for a world that is anything other than a stinking battlefield, a world in which the strongest don’t trample, torture and murder the weak. Homo homini lupus, he concluded, adding grimly: ‘civilisation overcomes the dangerous aggressivity of the individual by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town.’

  It wasn’t that Reich didn’t think the price worth paying; it’s that he suspected that the garrison was the problem. What troubled him most about 15 July wasn’t the crowds who marched for justice, but the behaviour of the police. They acted as if they were following orders in their sleep, incapable of shame or independent action, ‘a stupid, idiotic automaton lacking reason and judgement . . . Machine men!’ He recognised it from his own behaviour as an officer on the Italian front. What he’d witnessed on the streets of Vienna was not, he was certain, the natural or inevitable order of being. It was the product of patriarchal capitalism, which established a rigid, immobilising, sexually-repressed, authoritarian model of relationships from the moment a child was born, and it had culminated in a massacre.

  This, I think, is the true crux of Reich’s breach with Freud. They weren’t arguing over psychoanalytic technique so much as two contrasting views of human nature, two visions of what freedom entails. The events in Vienna convinced Freud that humans needed civilisation – armed police, oppressive laws and all – to protect them from their anarchic, reckless selves, and that the compromise demanded in terms of individual freedom was worth it for the enlargement of communal security. Reich, on the other hand, could not believe humans were naturally hateful and cruel. He thought these behaviours were a consequence of the unequal and deforming systems in which they were forced to live. Freedom came from tearing the garrison down, not building it up.

  I don’t know how profitable it is to speculate about the essentials of human nature, but I am certain that civilisation has not yet provided equal levels of security for all bodies, and nor has it limited their freedoms to the same degree. Freud’s pessimism can seem the more realistic position, but let’s not forget that the price he was willing to pay for stability included appeasement of the Nazis, while Reich’s belief in a better world allowed him to see that fascism must be resisted, a conviction that set into motion all the catastrophes of his later life.

  But Reich and Freud were not the only people to have their ideas shaken by the events of 15 July. The question of the disenfranchised masses was one of the most prominent and widely discussed issues of the interwar period, and the riot became a central exhibit in a passionate debate about crowds, rationality and power. It preoccupied politicians and inspired novels and works of theory. Some people, like Reich, saw a warning in the behaviour of the police, while others regarded the burning of the Justizpalast as an indictment of lawless, nannyish Red Vienna, a sign that the masses were dangerously out of control.

  For the twenty-two-year-old chemistry student who joined the crowd on his bicycle, 15 July was a crucial day: a prefiguration in perfect miniature of all that lay ahead, not to mention the beginning of a career as a writer that would culminate in the Nobel Prize. ‘Fifty-three years have passed,’ Elias Canetti wrote in his memoir, The Torch in my Ear, ‘and the agitation of that day is still in my bones. It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced.’ Standing by the burning Justizpalast, he was especially struck by a man who stood plaintively on the sidelines, crying, ‘The files are burning! All the files!’ People matter more than paper, Canetti snapped, and the incident seeded his grotesque 1935 novel Auto-da-fé, in which a scholar, Peter Kien, secedes from humanity and its demands so totally that in the end he barricades himself in his beloved library and sets it on fire.

  Like Reich, Canetti felt his physical experience that day made a nonsense of all the theories he’d read about crowd behaviour. It was all very well for Freud and Gustave Le Bon to write about the violence and irrationality of the crowd as a threat to civilisation, but his experience of dissolution was ecstatic, almost sublime. Even as people had fallen and died around him, he had felt himself subsumed and swept along, no longer an individual but part of a wild organism with its own dignity and desires. His account of the day is not journalistic, like Gedye, but metaphysical, conveying the temporospatial disruptions that accompany a radical shift in consciousness from I to we.

  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.

  The experience of feeling the crowd as a kind of living being, one that had been mistrusted and maligned throughout history, pricked away at him, driving his vast and unclassifiable work of non-fiction, Crowds and Power – a book that Sontag, who loved Canetti, described as expounding a ‘poetics of political nightmare’. There wasn’t one crowd, Canetti argued, but many, among them the mob with pitchforks and the scapegoated or victimised herd. A crowd could be electric or ecstatic or zombie-like. It could be cowed or riotous, sprawling or disciplined. It could have a carnival atmosphere or it could bring terror. One of the most important aspects of Canetti’s argument was that the crowd was complex and deserving of scrutiny. He refused the pervasive belief that it was automatically primitive and irrational, the opposite to the enfranchised and articulate individual. Crowds might not communicate in language, but that didn’t mean they weren’t expressing subtle hopes or fears.

  I�
�ve been in a lot of different crowds but I’ve only once been in what might be called a mob. It was at a protest at Newbury in 1997, on the first anniversary of the final camp’s eviction. The gathering was tightly organised by the police, and took place inside a cordon. It was very misty, and it was only once we got close to the fence that the construction site became visible. It was a shocking transformation, a whole landscape simply lifted up and taken away. There was a vast pit gouged into the earth, and at the edge of it was Middle Oak, a pathetic remnant of what had once been a whole forest.

  I think it was seeing the tree that set people off. Someone cut a hole in the fence and then we were all through, followed by mounted police and security guards in hi-vis vests. There were maybe a thousand people there, scrambling on diggers and shinning up cranes. I was in a pair of tiger trousers with a tail (forgive us the tastes of our youth), and I clambered on a bulldozer and watched as people smashed windows and set Portakabins on fire. The fog never lifted, and the mood was a strange, muted mixture of wildness and despair.

  What did we look like from the outside? What would Freud have thought? It’s sometimes hard to remember that the bodies in a crowd are individuals, each with their own complex history and motivation for being there. When the Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer used the 15 July riot in the final chapter of his panorama of bourgeois Vienna, The Demons, the crowd served as a pointillist backdrop to the stories of the individual characters whose heroism was tied up with their refusal of a communal identity. He used it as a way of bringing together his cast, neatly tying off all their narrative lines – marriage! inheritance! – against a background of terrible disorder. To the narrator, watching the events through binoculars, the crowd seemed like a mass of seething kaleidoscopic dots, punctuated by the dark bundles of corpses in the sunlight.

  Doderer was temporarily a member of the Nazi Party, though he’d left by the time he wrote The Demons, and his sense of the crowd as something inchoate chimed with the way fascists regarded the masses as raw material, in need of sifting and moulding (Goebbels characterised the relationship as that of a painter to his paints). As Stefan Jonsson observes in his illuminating account of the masses in the interwar period, Crowds and Democracy, part of the fascist route to power is to cleave human bodies into two types of mass, the ‘block’ and the ‘swarm’: one hyper-disciplined, orderly and in service to the state; the other chaotic and transgressive, requiring inoculation, purging or extermination lest it contaminate the larger body politic.