Feeling Political in Demonstrations: Street Politics in Germany, 1832–2018

Abstract

This chapter focuses on street politics in Germany. Before the establishment of elected parliaments, there were social movements in which citizens united to make public demands for political representation. The practice of democracy in such associations was synonymous with practicing political feelings—democracy involved a high level of emotional excitement and dynamism. The decades preceding the 1848 revolution, the post-revolutionary 1920s and early 1930s (including National Socialist mobilization), and the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s illustrate how emotions served as mobilizing forces and were necessary for sustaining personal involvement and political activism. Yet these examples also shed light on the problematic side of political emotions, which could sometimes block or polarize political debate and obstruct collective action. The more action in the public sphere was defined by passion, the more exclusionary politics could become: this was the argument mounted by early liberalism against women’s political participation.

Leipzig, 25 September 1989: it is 5 p.m. on a Monday. About 2000 men and women gather in a protestant church in the city centre for an hour of prayer and singing. Outside, many more people are waiting. As soon as prayers end and participants leave the church, they mingle with the crowd outside and start walking through the streets and squares of the city. They do not march in orderly rows or columns. Instead, their steps and body language are casual, informal. They wear ordinary clothes. Many hold hands. They shout slogans like ‘Freedom’ or ‘Authorize the Neues Forum’ (an activist platform for political reform). They clap their hands, and they sing. Two songs stand out: We shall overcome , the hymn of the US civil rights movement, and the Internationale , the socialist anthem from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Though everyone raised in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has learnt the Internationale at school, the American song is less familiar. Still, many join in the chorus with tears in their eyes. Stasi men wait with clubs and dogs, ready to beat and arrest anyone who catches their attention. Fear grips the old and the young. Nevertheless, even at the sight of armoured police vehicles, a fifty-six-year-old man reported, ‘I did not feel left alone, and we learned to walk upright’.¹

Despite the fear and the brutality, the weekly ‘Monday demonstrations’ in Leipzig in the autumn of 1989 continued, drawing increasing numbers of participants. On 2 October, more than 20,000 people took part. A week later, the crowd had grown to 80,000. By 16 October, 120,000 people protested, and by 23 October this number had more than doubled again. Protesters carried banners and posters with individual messages that changed from week to week. They also diversified their props and brought candles and flowers too. Among them were families with children, factory workers, young students, as well as, increasingly, older people in their forties and fifties. Chanting slogans such as ‘Democracy now or never’, ‘We are the people’, ‘Free elections’, and ‘Freedom to travel’, they seemed as surprised as they were happy to be part of a huge, spontaneous street movement without leaders, programmes, or central organization.² ‘Nobody has mobilized these 300,000 people to the ring road’, fifty-three-year-old Reiner Tetzner wrote on 23 October. ‘Not even a new party or association could have done this. Men and women come of their own accord to join the weekly people’s assembly, walk around the inner city alongside like-minded citizens, and then go home. The stronger the current, the more power and strength I feel myself.’³ ‘All of a sudden’, another participant observed, ‘people talked politics’ and, in a self-dignifying way, felt political—in the sense that they cast off the feeling of ‘deep humiliation’ and claimed to having an active say in how they lived, individually as well as collectively.⁴

The streets and squares overflowed with emotions. There was not only fear, but enthusiasm, unbridled joy, hope, and optimism combined with a feeling of deliberate, self-determined togetherness and solidarity. The protesters were united in their conviction that things had to change, against a shared opponent: the state apparatus monopolized by the ruling party. Abolishing that regime and reforming the system for the better was their common goal. Week by week, the goal became more concrete through the addition of specific demands and desires. People arranged to meet again ‘next Monday’ and step up the pressure. Experiencing the ‘autumn of change outdoors’ induced ‘a feeling of great liberation’.⁵ They suddenly understood how to be political and act politically in a self-defined and self-empowering way. This emotional experience was crafted on the street as a new ‘tribune of the people’ in mass demonstrations in Leipzig and other cities across the GDR.⁶

Street politics have long been a staple in democratic or democratizing societies. Historically versed observers of the Monday demonstrations felt reminded of the 1848 revolution, when Germany witnessed for the first time a mass movement of people challenging the old regime and demanding freedom (of the press, of assembly, of religion, etc.).⁷ From that time on, protest marches and demonstrations had become an integral, though contested, part of politics. They offered the chance to form and share feelings about politics, and they communicated those feelings to the wider public as well as to other political institutions and arenas. These emotionally expressive manifestations of political desires and concerns took place in the open air, under a ‘free sky’ (unter freiem Himmel). Freedom and openness came with the promise of equal, unrestrained movement of bodies, minds, and souls.

Some saw this as a threat to formally institutionalized politics as they played out in parliaments, government offices, or assembly halls.⁸ Whereas these spaces were architecturally closed and confined, streets and squares as sites of demonstrations allowed for a wider range of social action. They made it possible, said the critics, for emotions to run wild and infect large crowds whose behaviour could no longer be controlled and contained. All political regimes, even democratic ones, therefore took precautions against open-air assemblies and marches, especially those that came close to official sites of politics.⁹

Demonstrations did and do indeed lay claim to the public sphere as a ‘space of appearance’ as Hannah Arendt has famously called it.¹⁰ Taking up a position in such space requires certain kinds of performative acts that ‘signify’, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘prior to, and apart from, any particular demands’ people make. They do so not necessarily by way of ‘linguistic performativity’, but through ‘a concerted bodily enactment’.¹¹ Enactment heavily depends on emotions coming to the fore as they move people to coordinate and synchronize their actions. ‘Feeling political’, then, emerges as the result of a situated experience of self-efficacy. At the same time, emotions are themselves modelled and regulated by the very practices that constitute such enactment and experience: walking, running or marching, singing and chanting, clapping, cheering or booing, or carrying banners, flags, badges, candles.

Demonstrations can thus be studied as collective bodily performances that template political feelings. Although they are staged outside of, and often in opposition to, formalized structures and convey a lower grade of social and legal institutionalization, they develop their own power as ‘localized plebiscites’ and ‘tools to realize popular sovereignty’ by enabling the direct communication, expressive representation, and emotional dramatization of public matters.¹² Furthermore, they aim to influence other sites and actors of politics by this very plebiscite and leave an imprint on political deliberation and decision-making in legislative and executive bodies.

As a matter of fact, demonstrations did and still do play a decisive role in setting the political agenda and assuring citizens’ participation and sovereignty. From their very emergence in the nineteenth century, through various transformations during the twentieth century, political activities conducted under the free and open sky generated distinct rules, practices, and meanings.¹³ Undoubtedly, these were less scripted and ritualized than parliamentary or party protocols. Yet a close analysis shows how emotional templating worked even under the auspices of rather spontaneous and unorganized political action. The cases investigated below come from German history, starting with the 1848 revolution and what preceded it, continuing with turn-of-the century politics, and finishing with newer modes of political participation observable since the 1960s, including the peaceful GDR revolution of 1989.

Moments of Emergence: Feeling Political, 1830s–1840s

Street politics in Germany did not begin in 1848, nor were its formats restricted to demonstrations and protest marches. As ‘repertoires of contention’, street politics embraced popular rebellion as much as events such as the liberal-democratic Hambach festival of 1832.¹⁴ Non-contentious repertoires included official parades with citizens lining the streets in order to welcome, congratulate, or pay homage to kings and princes.¹⁵ Others used the public sphere for tumultuous riots, mostly in the context of rising bread prices and famine.¹⁶ Such protests were buttressed by a moral economy that included expectations about the duties of governing bodies and the rights of the poor. When the good order of things, humans, and saints had been violated, men and women took to the streets and demanded that order be reinstated. This also involved practices of communal justice like rough music or charivaris, as they were collectively performed against social transgressors.¹⁷

Local authorities tried their best to prevent, curb, and outlaw such practices. They also increasingly retreated from public spectacles of official retribution which had been common during the early modern period. Punishments like flogging, pillorying, or execution that had attracted large crowds gradually disappeared from streets and squares and became hidden behind prison doors. Urban space was given over to commercial traffic and social encounters that became closely monitored and regulated by police and military.¹⁸

At the same time, governments all over Europe started to sense the dangers of modern street politics as they emerged during and after the French Revolution. Much of what happened in Paris in 1789 still followed older patterns of popular upheaval, like the storming of the Bastille prison and the women’s march to Versailles. A great deal of political activity took place in clubs and behind closed parliamentary doors. Yet speeches, debates, and resolutions also cut their way through to the outside world and sparked demonstrations as well as festive manifestations. The 1830 revolution added barricades and fighting to the common picture of urban unrest. In Germany, at that time composed of thirty-five monarchical states and four free cities, citizens remained calm (which, as a Prussian governor had warned in 1806, was their first civic duty). The attempt by university students in 1817 to rally behind ‘honour, freedom, fatherland’ had been met with harsh police repression. Against this background, people with liberal and democratic views chose rather cautiously to declare them in parliamentary bodies that some states had set up during the early nineteenth century, and/or in cultural associations such as singing clubs, carnival, and gymnastic societies.¹⁹

Such clubs and societies lacked the radical attire of students’ assemblies and torchlight processions. Yet they were by no means unpolitical. Through song, theatrical performance, and physical practice, hearts, bodies, minds, and souls were thought to be elevated and synchronized in a common bid for personal freedom, democratic rule, and national belonging. Collective singing enhanced enthusiasm, courage, solidarity, and hope. Physical education and training formed strong bodies that withstood corruption and offered protection to weaker fellow citizens, among them women and children. Self-evidently, association membership was restricted to (middle class) men only. Their wives and daughters could, at times, be involved in larger festivities that combined open-air and roofed elements. But they were not supposed to participate in their own right or play an active, let alone dominant, role.

When, in 1832, the former Palatine regional governor and journalist Jakob Siebenpfeiffer convened the first mass demonstration in German history, he explicitly invited men and women to join the Hambach festival and celebrate liberal ideas about constitutional rule and democratic participation.²⁰ While he praised the future role of women as free and independent citizens, they should not go so far as to claim positions of power. They could attend political meetings and assemblies, be present in patriotic associations and clubs, and ornament national festivals, but they should not rule or govern, he thought. Apart from violating the laws of nature, such power would run against male dignity.²¹ This warning was echoed by the liberal professor and politician Carl Welcker who, in 1838, went out of his way to propel women’s social and civic emancipation forward. In politics, though, he believed women should take a less prominent role. Besides repeating Siebenpfeiffer’s reasons, Welcker added his own: emotions. Due to women’s fragile nervous systems and physical weakness, they would simply not be able to live through the passionate struggles waged in the political arena.²²

Welcker and Siebenpfeiffer, like most of their contemporaries, shared a belief in naturally given gender differences that were not to be blurred. Women were designed and pre-destined for family tasks, while men did business and, as a modern invention, went to war and into politics. Just as women were not to bear arms, they were to keep away from political deliberation and decision-making on the grounds that it was, by its very nature, contentious and combative. Ideally, Welcker noted in 1832, politicians and lawmakers should appeal to intellect and reason in a ‘cool, calm, reporting, observing, informative’ style that avoided ‘warm and emotional’ language. As a member of the Second Chamber of the Baden State Parliament, though, he knew from personal experience that this ideal was neither convincing nor realistic. People’s wishes and intentions, he argued, worked through minds and hearts, and both should be politically engaged. In particular, this concerned issues related to the good and bad fortunes of the fatherland. They enlisted heart-felt emotions as much as strategic consideration. ‘Warmer words’ rather than ‘cold speeches’ were what was needed to mobilize patriotic feelings and invigorate citizens as well as civil servants.²³

Those warmer words were indeed being spoken at the lectern, and they sometimes radiated considerable heat. Yet, speakers and interlocutors had to be on guard and employ them carefully. Under no circumstances should passions prompt them to lose control and physically go after their counterpart. Controlling and dispensing their passions in a measured way demanded a degree of self-discipline that, from the perspective of early liberal academics, neither women nor members of the lower classes could maintain and master. Even those who came out in favour of active citizenship and popular participation had reservations about who should and could participate, and how. Middle-class men, they held, were not only better educated and more knowledgeable in political matters. They also possessed refined and ‘cultivated emotions’ (veredelte Gefühle), which allowed them to respond appropriately to what the fatherland wanted and needed.²⁴ In light of increasingly frequent food riots, urban tumults, and street fights, middle-class observers were torn between accepting such practices as the weapons of the weak and shunning them as dangerous outbursts of untempered emotion and unlimited violence.²⁵

Such fears also abounded during the early stages of what turned out to be the 1848 revolution, which broke out at various sites and in diverse forms, in assembly halls and parliaments, street rallies and open-air assemblies. Pro-government newspapers quickly raised the question of whether ‘the frenzy of enthusiasm’ that had gripped the people would yield to a ‘frenzy of rage’. Initially, the Paris news had startled academics, students, artists, merchants, and craftsmen alike. Pubs and reading rooms developed into political meeting places. Yet reading reports from France aloud to public audiences no longer quenched their ‘newly awakened political ambitions’: there were ‘excited discussions’ and ‘exclamations that would not have been tolerated by the police’. Larger gathering places were needed and found. Assemblies of several hundreds or even thousands of men drafted petitions. They spoke of the ‘power of enthusiasm’ that rallied the people around their king but had to be nurtured by ‘free institutions’ and ‘greater political freedom’. Most speakers belonged to the educated classes, while journeymen and workers formed part of both the indoor and outdoor audience.²⁶

Although political meetings usually took place in confined spaces, the sheer number of attendants made it necessary to move beyond their walls. Those outside experienced the situation differently from people who could see and hear the speakers, and make themselves heard also. Even if information travelled quickly, it did so without proof of accuracy. Densely packed rooms, floors, and staircases allowed for all kinds of noise, commotion, and resonance. Conflicting opinions voiced inside evoked more fervour outside, as was the case during a Berlin city hall meeting in early March 1848. When the representatives disagreed about procedures, the audience gave multiple signs of disapproval, raising a ‘truly awful clamour’, and objected to leaving the site. Eventually, someone managed to turn the tide by suggesting that they should instead cheer and applaud those whose stance had won their support.²⁷

Not every political assembly ended on such a cheerful and peaceful note. A few days later, about 20,000 Berliners gathered in the popular Tiergarten area west of the Brandenburg Gate. Middle-class families mingled with young people, journeymen, and workers. Impromptu speeches were given, disputes and discussions erupted, and the Chief Constable implored everybody to remain calm. His assurance that all grievances would be met was greeted with a cheer. On their way back to the city centre, however, citizens clashed with soldiers on horseback who freely used their bayonets to slash pedestrians. Many were wounded, and some got arrested. The death toll was even bigger on March 18, when an equally numerous crowd, most of them ‘decently dressed’, gathered in front of the royal palace to hear the king make political concessions. Again, the military intervened—thus sparking the revolution, with its barricades and street fighting as well as innumerable public meetings and demonstrations.²⁸

Officially, popular assemblies had been forbidden after the Hambach festival in 1832. Political crowds were feared by the authorities as potentially unruly and revolutionary. During the ‘excitement’ and ‘movement’ that followed the 1848 events in France, however, they could no longer be contained or prohibited. In early April, a royal ordinance finally declared that every unarmed Prussian had the right to assemble and join an association. More than a year later, when many liberal achievements had already been annulled, the government severely restricted those rights: political assemblies (‘in which public affairs were discussed and influenced’) had to be announced to the local police. Policemen sat in on those meetings and made sure that no one stirred up punishable offences; in such cases it was within their authority to send everybody home and participants would be required to immediately leave the premises in order to avoid a fiery commotion. The fear that discussions and debates among an ‘excited crowd’ might be transformed into ‘deeds’ was profound.²⁹

Above all, it was the political associations thought to exert influence through ‘mass demonstrations and terrorism’ that came under close surveillance. Membership was restricted to adult men; neither women nor men under twenty years of age were allowed in. If they did attend and refuse to leave a political meeting, the meeting could be dissolved by the police. Even greater restrictions applied to public assemblies and parades under the open sky. As they might be a threat to ‘public safety and order’, including traffic, the authorities kept a wary eye, particularly in the wake of the revolution, in light of the ‘agitation that still exists in many parts of the country and is carefully being nurtured by political associations’.³⁰

Such deliberations, decisions, and events clearly showed that participatory politics as they emerged before and during the 1848 revolution were dreaded by the government. Conservatives despised them as opening the door to people who could and would not take responsibility for what they asked for. Liberals, too, kept their distance. Although they argued in favour of constitutional rule and political representation, they felt uncomfortable about popular movements that had, in the past, often instigated turmoil and violence. The 1848 incidents again proved how fast demonstrations could get out of hand, especially when less ‘educated’ and ‘refined’ people joined them. Even though politics could not do without a certain amount of passion, that passion had to be measured and regulated, preferably in closed rooms with a limited, all-male, middle- and upper-class audience.

Lower-class people, in contrast, were more accustomed to open-air gatherings, processions, and confluences that were less spatially contained. Although they also followed a certain protocol, such gatherings demanded less organization, planning, and monitoring. With younger men participating—as journeymen, day labourers, and factory workers—they could easily turn more passionate. Gifted orators readily prompted the audience to act in what the sociologist Max Weber later called ‘irrational’ ways—even though such ways followed their own logic and might well have seemed more rational to participants than to distant observers.

Mass Politics around 1900

Weber , a liberal-minded professor with a vivid concern for contemporary politics, strongly opposed ‘irrational mob rule’ on the grounds that it undermined sober political strategy making, as he saw it. Instead ‘the democracy of the street’ harboured a disposition to ‘putch, sabotage and similar politically sterile outbursts’ that remained erratic and turned destructive.³¹ Such ‘mass’ behaviour seemed inappropriate in political matters, and not just for Weber and his professional interest in modern rationality. Weber had read Gustave Le Bon’s popular book on La psychologie des foules and quoted frequently from it in his own work.

Against the background of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, Le Bon described the masses—a term widely used at the time—as the new force in modern democratic politics. From the 1793 levée en masse (which Le Bon extolled for its heroic passion and historic achievement) to later general strikes (Massenstreik in German), masses had made history and turned the political tables. There were virtuous and criminal masses—depending on whom they listened to and by whom they were influenced. As a common feature, they shared a feminine character which meant that they were easily aroused, emotionally arrested, and acted in an exaggerated manner. Emotions travelled fast (a medical doctor by training, Le Bon used the term ‘contagion’) and thus produced a strong sense of community. In masses of the same type, as formed around social classes, castes, and sects, that sense was stable and long-lasting, whereas in others, like street crowds, it was short and fleeting.³²

Masses needed and gathered around a charismatic leader who gave them direction and purpose. In contemporary French politics, Le Bon saw this happening both in left-wing proletarian politics and in the right-wing Boulanger movement. But he also observed emotional mass behaviour in parliament, in court juries, and among educated citizens. Passion loomed large whenever and wherever groups of people convened and found someone who aggressively used the rhetorical tools of assertion, repetition, and contagion, mental as well as emotional. Mere words did not suffice, however; masses wanted, as Le Bon noted, colourful images and convincing narratives about past, present, and future. Symbols such as flags, flowers, and uniforms, but also songs and chants played a crucial role in emotionally motivating people and keeping them on board.

In Germany, Weber witnessed similar movements and processes. Although he unwaveringly supported organized party and parliamentary politics as the best and most rationally minded way to advance political goals, he also knew about the power of passions. He even went so far as to argue that politics and politicians without passion were failing in their duties. Nevertheless, hot passion had to stand side by side with cool reflection and serious effort.³³ This was what he saw lacking in street politics as they had developed since the late nineteenth century.

But was this really true? Even charismatic socialist leaders like Ferdinand Lassalle who had founded the first labour party in 1863 diligently worked to match passion with sang froid. Time and again, he warned against ‘blurry emotional politics’ and advocated ‘cold analysis’ so that ‘principles and interests’ rather than ‘personal hatred’ and ‘false patriotism’ would inform people’s political sympathies and opinions.³⁴ The Socialist Workers’ Party that emerged under the leadership of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1875 strictly followed Marxist theories and organizational strategies that left little room for spontaneity and frenetic action. As most party activities were legally outlawed and prosecuted by the police between 1878 and 1890, members were forced to mainly focus on electoral campaigning. This in turn influenced the tonal approach to politics and the way potential voters were addressed.

Under such repressive conditions, street politics as they had been practised during the 1848 revolution were utterly out of the question. Party meetings and electoral campaigning mostly took place indoors and followed parliamentary protocols. Arguments were exchanged through addresses and counter-addresses. Oratory skills were rehearsed beforehand, and party members were trained to speak up and express their opinion. The audience decided who would chair the meeting and for how long speakers should talk. Words had to be carefully weighed so as not to alarm the police officer sent to watch over the assembly. Decorum was generally observed, and confrontations, though lively and sharp, remained within the boundaries of what was then deemed politically correct and polite.³⁵

Elections thus figured as educational rituals. They taught party members as well as voters how to talk politics and persuade others. Words mattered; handbills and leaflets crowded with text were distributed in the tens of millions. Even if, as one leading party official confirmed, election campaigns triggered a high amount of enthusiasm, that enthusiasm could at best be merely voiced, rather than performed.³⁶

This was altogether different when political gatherings once again began to take place in the open air. After the Anti-Socialist Laws expired in 1890, Social Democrats gradually reclaimed the streets for political action, be it strikes summoned by workers’ unions and associations or public demonstrations. Although the agenda was set by central and local party leaders, it still relied on large numbers of people becoming ‘inflamed’ and ‘stirred up’. They also had to be ‘taught’ how to make their political claims known to a wider public and, above all, to the authorities. The latter did not appreciate them ‘taking politics to the streets’, as the complaints of Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1908 attested. Under no circumstances would they ‘tolerate agitators laying claim to rule the streets’, and the police received orders to take drastic measures.³⁷

Even without police intervention, however, such power over the streets was far from easily secured. As the gifted agitator of the socialist left Rosa Luxemburg reminded her comrades, demonstrations and rallies had ‘their own logic and psychology’ and their own dynamic: they tended to ‘escalate and intensify’ and demanded new, more effective forms and slogans. If these new expressions were blocked by the leadership, the ‘masses’ would be left disappointed, and their enthusiasm would simply evaporate. While Luxemburg urged party leaders to provide those new emotional templates, others were reluctant. Instead of feeding radicalism, they rather sought to tame and ‘contain’ the energy displayed during mass demonstrations.³⁸

Not surprisingly, it was around this very time that the journalist Leopold Schönhoff coined the term Straßenpolitik. ‘Street politics’, he wrote in 1908, ‘whether welcome or not’, were an expression of ‘profound need and powerful yearning’, and they served as an effective ‘de-escalation’. Popular hopes and worries might prove far more dangerous behind closed doors than in the open air, where they could be observed ‘by a thousand uncovered eyes’.³⁹ Social Democrats, to be sure, did much to both enact and ‘de-escalate’ such street politics when they called for mass demonstrations to demand suffrage reform in Prussia during the early twentieth century. Cognisant of the tight restrictions set by the local police, organizers saw to it that public safety was guaranteed, traffic remained undisturbed, and onlookers unscathed. They intervened whenever someone lost their temper or was about to clash with the police. Liberal observers noted that the demonstrations calling for an end to the three-class franchise were not dominated by ‘dull rage and passion’ but conveyed ‘a festive and elevated mood’.⁴⁰ Dressed up in their Sunday clothes, some demonstrators marched in disciplined columns, while others walked casually and buoyantly. They made no noise, nor did they even talk loudly—what some bystanders interpreted as a menacing silence. At other times, however, they sang together, as a powerful means of instilling courage, strength, and synchronicity.⁴¹

Marching in unison had a similar effect. It set bodies in motion and was intended to impart a striking display of force and determination. In demonstrations human bodies were spectacular conduits of alignment and pressure. The signal they sent was simultaneously peaceful and threatening. It expressed feelings of confidence, pride, and passionate commitment, while at the same time channelling those feelings and bringing them under disciplinary control. The ‘giant body of the proletariat’ made itself visible, full of vigour and resolve, of exuberant ‘joy’ and ‘brotherly kindness’. Some observers were reminded of military formations, which only enhanced an impression of barely concealed power and aggression. Socialists themselves spoke of ‘workers’ battalions’ whose ‘loud footsteps’ chided the complacent ‘bourgeoisie’ and demanded change.⁴²

These proletarian masses, in short, had nothing in common with the rioting crowds that had haunted bourgeois imagination since the early nineteenth century. There was neither tumult nor chaos. Instead, the masses displayed highly disciplined behaviour that refuted the condescending stereotype of wild people with violent temper and dissolute passion. Short moments of expressive action were restricted to waving red flags over Bismarck statues. Nobody was harmed, not even monuments dedicated to repressive and disliked politicians.

The same held true for the annual 1 May demonstrations that gathered steam in the 1890s. They were increasingly organized as family outings, consisting of casual walks ending with coffee and cake in the presence of women and children. This peaceful impression was further emphasized by participants wearing red carnations on the lapel or across the bosom. This could hardly be interpreted as a violent message, especially considering the flower’s polysemic meaning: red carnations were known to be the Kaiser’s favourite flowers, and red generally figured as the colour of love.⁴³

Red carnations were also worn by female suffrage campaigners from 1910 onwards. Instead of staging public parades and demonstrations, they met in local assemblies where they listened to male and female speakers and songs sung by male choirs. Still, there was a public air to such events because women would first gather in their local neighbourhood before walking ‘in orderly rows’ together to the designated assembly halls. Whenever any male onlookers tried to ridicule the women or heckle them with tasteless jokes, they received a quick retort. Even the slur of ‘red suffragettes’ fell flat, powerless against ‘the serious and dignified demonstration’.⁴⁴

These demonstrations, rallies, and meetings were meticulously organized by party members. Millions of leaflets were distributed beforehand and articles in the socialist press called upon proletarian women to ‘come out’ and raise their voices for their due rights. The fiery rhetoric of their appeals contained plenty of emotional catchwords such as ‘pain’, ‘misery’, ‘humiliation’, ‘contempt’, ‘complaints’, and ‘sorrows’. They also referred to ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘hope’, invoking a benign and victorious future. Above all, they stressed the importance of being publicly visible and speaking loudly, with one voice. This, participants were assured, would increase both resilience and self-confidence .⁴⁵

The general picture was, therefore, one of well-orchestrated socialist street politics that effectively enhanced the political pressure exercised through parliamentary interventions and electoral campaigning. Other parties and associations quickly comprehended the added value of public political manifestations. While liberals continued to privilege appeals to individual citizens and remained reluctant to mobilize on a grand scale, nationalists increasingly used the public sphere not only to show off their monarchist sentiments, but also to convey and gather support for their political interests and objectives.⁴⁶ Patriotic rallies and parades set the stage for the pro-war gatherings that erupted in July and early August 1914.⁴⁷

Demonstrations had thus become a highly visible element of political life since the 1890s; they were reported in the press, served as an argument in parliamentary debates, and left a lasting impression on participants. They taught and reminded them of the fact that modern democratic politics were not just about electing one’s representatives into parliament. By joining a demonstration or attending a rally, citizens behaved and presented as active political subjects—with bodies, minds, and hearts. They acted emotionally and in doing so enthused others. Ideally, they sought to visibly rearrange the political furniture and enjoy a powerful echo in other political institutions. But even if they fell short of this, the movement itself introduced a sense of collective pride and solidarity as it strengthened their comprehension of self-efficacy and personal agency.

Emotions were inherent and visible at all stages of these events, in marching and walking, singing and chanting, in the waving of hats, and the wearing of certain clothes and symbols. The physical experience of being one among many moving in unison added to the sense of strength and power in the performance of street politics. In turn, collective action shaped and templated the feelings that participants took home from each public forum and would bring to the next. As stated in a socialist brochure of 1892, ‘nothing strengthens the sense of self and power among the repressed class as much as mass demonstrations do’. Demonstrations operated like ‘healthy bodily movements’ that energized the mind, banished apathy and ‘political lethargy’, and fostered ‘revolutionary passion’: ‘Each participant gains courage by seeing so many hitherto unfamiliar others join them in fighting for a common cause. The elementary feeling of solidarity and the sense of togetherness engender a mass spirit that imbues and sweeps along every single person.’⁴⁸

New Feelings and Social Movements, 1960s–1980s

While organized and ideologically distinguished street politics continued and even expanded during the Weimar Republic, they suffered a marked decline after the Second World War. Although West Germany’s Basic Law confirmed the right of citizens to assemble freely and boosted the role of parties as major political institutions, party leaders were reluctant to reintroduce participatory politics in the form of mass demonstrations and rallies. The word ‘mass’ itself fell into disrepute and was replaced by concepts of plurality and social differentiation.⁴⁹ Politicians warned against demagogical propaganda designed to provoke ‘agitation’, and thereby evoking memories of ‘bad times’, rather than offering sound and sober arguments. Agitation was clearly on the agenda of parties on the extreme right and left, yet they remained small and were legally prohibited in the mid-1950s.⁵⁰ Mainstream parties, by contrast, refrained from rallying their members and voters to public gatherings. Campaign rallies increasingly focused on no-nonsense information rather than emotional appeals; the latter were, by and large, restricted to both raising and soothing fears of Communist rule in Germany’s East after 1945.⁵¹

The reluctance to mobilize was motivated by two negative experiences. First, people remembered the Weimar Republic as a period of intense political polarization that ultimately drowned the country in violence. Parties on both the left and the right had formed militias numbering between 2.5 and 3 million men in total by the early 1930s, who roamed the streets in search for equally combative opponents.⁵² Women who had initially marched in protest against post-war food shortages or the legal ban on abortion gradually left the streets to younger men whose ‘hatred’ for the enemy stood side by side with their ‘enthusiasm’ for their own struggle.⁵³ Street politics in the hands of extremist parties acquired an overtly antagonistic, aggressive, and paramilitary face.

Second, memories of violent political marches and street fighting during the Weimar period were compounded by the subsequent experience of Nazi rallies and parades that, after 1933, had transformed public space into a site of state theatre. Instead of paying homage to kings and emperors, as in former times, citizens now gathered to cheer and celebrate the Führer and his many ‘wonders’. They did not do so in a spontaneous or self-organized fashion, however. Rather, the regime immediately started to prepare and stage mass events ‘on a grand scale’. As Hitler saw it, ‘mass demonstrations’ promoted what he called ‘mass suggestion’, turning every individual into an animated and high-spirited ‘member of a community’ inspired and guided by a charismatic leader.⁵⁴

Mass demonstrations, Nazi-style, took various forms and appealed to different constituencies. On the one hand, Stormtroopers and members of the Hitler Youth appeared regularly in public to convey the disciplined and uniformed presence of the National Socialist movement. These appearances were all choreographed to emphasize shared motion and emotion. Although charged by ‘enthusiasm’, participants marched in rows of four and struck up patriotic and military songs as well as Nazi hymns. Passion and fanaticism, positively connoted, thus visibly generated order and community.⁵⁵

On the other hand, the regime organized large rallies in which ordinary citizens were invited to participate. On 1 May 1933 Berlin’s Lustgarten was filled with schoolchildren gathered under a sea of swastikas to listen patiently to their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. When Hitler and the ageing Reich President Paul von Hindenburg arrived by car, they were greeted with jubilation and deafening cheers. The Lustgarten event was followed by central May Day celebrations attended by 1.5 million people. In one clever and sophisticated manoeuvre, the regime hijacked the socialist Labour Day tradition and transformed it into a work-free holiday ‘for the whole people’. Berliners came, as Goebbels noted, ‘with kith and kin’, mingling ‘workers with middle classes, employer with employee, high and low’. Responsible for the organization of this ‘masterpiece’ of a ‘mass demonstration’, the minister had ensured the ‘demonstration of a nation’, of a united Volk ‘standing shoulder to shoulder’. After Hitler’s speech the audience felt a ‘great rush of enthusiasm’: ‘It’s no longer just a phrase: we have become one nation of brothers. And the one who showed us the way now stands upright in his car as it conveys him back to his office on Wilhelmstrasse along a via triumphalis that has formed around him, made up of living, human bodies.’ ⁵⁶

Mass demonstrations of this kind took place all over the country and all year round, on different occasions that were carefully chosen and organized. Tapping into folk traditions as well as inventing new ones, the regime continuously held festive celebrations that reached out to all racially agreeable citizens. The ‘masses’ who attended these outdoor events were both passive and active: they were given speeches designed to emotionally ‘excite’ them, and they performed coordinated actions that were meant to enhance their feelings of belonging, purpose, and power.

After 1945, the memories of those events further contributed to the widespread shunning of ‘mass’ demonstrations and rallies in the West, where they were seen as tools of emotional domination and ideological manipulation. The fact that East Germany followed a different trajectory—one that had a lot in common with the Nazi past—only strengthened this negative stance. From the very start, the Communist regime in the GDR organized parades and rallies with mandatory attendance. In order to create visual proof of the alleged unity between state, party, and citizens, they privileged a particular spatial arrangement: while ordered masses, uniformly dressed and carrying flags, marched on the street, party and state officials stood or sat on an elevated tribune and watched the marching and cheering crowds from above.⁵⁷ Unlike the West, the East took pride in setting up Massenorganisationen numbering many millions each. Membership of these organizations was, again, far from voluntary and their rhetoric was intensely emotional. Love (for one’s fatherland or the Soviet Union) and hatred (of ‘imperialism’ and ‘militarism’) loomed large, as did notions of enmity (towards ‘capitalist’ countries) and warm friendship (towards socialist ‘brother nations’).

Initially, such language seemed to impress participants, especially those of a younger age. In the 1960s and 1970s, nearly all children between six and fourteen years were members of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organization. Marching songs prepared them for regular May Day parades in front of the ‘tribune of honour’ mostly staffed by elderly men. The Free German Youth (FDJ), whose membership reached 2.3 million in 1981, also took part in official parades and festivals, with members easily identifiable through their blue shirts, banners, and badges. Torchlight processions added emotional surplus value to the performance of optimism, determination, and loyalty.⁵⁸

Mobilizing people for public action in support of centrally defined goals and issues was no difficult task, then. Street politics, GDR style, meant the enactment of political emotions like trust, enthusiasm, solidarity, and pride. The younger the participants were, the easier it was to impregnate them with those feelings and ideological references. By contrast, citizens who chose not to march in step were immediately targeted by security and educational institutions and made to feel the disciplining and punishing power of the state.

By the late 1980s, that power was confronted and challenged by a rapidly growing movement of discontent, predominantly fuelled by the younger generation. Starting in autumn 1989, people reclaimed the street to protest against a regime that had nothing to offer but repression and a hollow admonition ‘not to use the street as a site for political demands and discussion’.⁵⁹ The protesters chose not to follow this advice and instead began to rediscover, step by step, a democratic tradition of street politics. Independently of any formal organization, authority, or leadership, citizens young and old flocked to the streets, transformed them into ‘tribunes of the people’ and challenged the autocratic government. The overwhelming number of protesters eventually forced the political elite off their ‘tribune of honour’, making way for fresh voices to set the political agenda.⁶⁰

This was remarkable for two reasons. First, independent demonstrations in the GDR faced severe repression by the security apparatus that used all necessary means to crush them. The memory of 1953, when grassroots protests had been violently stamped down by Russian tanks, loomed large. Second, East Germans were not habituated to protesting independently and publicly standing up to their government. They were accustomed to making written petitions or sending anonymous letters of complaint. Yet they lacked the experience of taking to the street—except when ordered to do so from above, for official rallies and mass events.

In the Federal Republic, such experience had become, since the 1960s, a crucial part of many people’s lifestyle and political repertoire. The new habit of ‘going on a demo’ also entailed new ways of moving and new political feelings, as could be witnessed during the annual Easter Marches. Invented by the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, they drew ever larger crowds throughout West Germany, reaching a climax in 1968. As the term ‘march’ had raised concerns, peace activists tried hard to prevent these marches from resembling any type of synchronized movement modelled on military and Nazi patterns. Furthermore, participants insisted that they were there on their own behalf, as individual citizens concerned about war and the deployment of nuclear weapons. Party politics were absent, as were other official institutions.⁶¹

Emotions, too, were kept ostentatiously at bay. This was meant as a visible sign of dissociating the marches from the past. Instead arguments mattered, and so did evidence-based information about the impending dangers of rearmament and the Cold War. Internally, though, the Easter March movement did develop social mechanisms that helped sustain it, and that typically drew on emotional practices. Singing was one of them. New songs were created, old ones resuscitated, and some even travelled across the Iron Curtain to be shared by GDR youth groups.

In 1968, official statistical data began to include the headcounts of street demonstrations, and conservatives bemoaned the end of ‘trouble-free life’ (störungsfreies Leben) in the Federal Republic.⁶² Meanwhile, students had turned out to be the most ardent and vocal political activists.⁶³ Their critiques did not stop at the university, but extended to the state and its domestic or foreign policy, as well as to the media. The way criticism was expressed greatly irritated the authorities and bore little resemblance to former modes of street politics. Protesters usually did not march in line, but invented their own rhythms of movement, mixing walking with running. They shouted catchy slogans and carried self-made banners, often with images and caricatures. Even though the messages were serious, participants obviously enjoyed what they were doing. They found pleasure in acting collectively, dominating public space, and provoking passers-by and pedestrians with their unconventional performance. Their faces and bodies did not look tense but joyful, happy, and relaxed. They linked arms, chatted, laughed. The very next moment, they accelerated their pace and rushed forward, only to stop after a few seconds and resume their easy-going demeanour.

Such tactics were new and did not conform to past patterns. The police responsible for ‘public safety’ often felt unprepared. When they reacted aggressively, sometimes with unveiled brutality, demonstrations became more militant and violent.⁶⁴ Emotional attitudes were not brought to the streets ready-made, but created and learnt there, often in physical encounters with armed policemen who did not hesitate to use sticks and cubs to restore order. For many protesters, this experience fuelled fierce opposition and alienation from ‘the system’ and the ‘repressive’ state that guarded it. A minority even left the open street altogether and took their politics underground, launching terrorist attacks on state representatives and turning their back on political dialogue and negotiation.⁶⁵

The majority took a different stance, though. They founded new parties (the Greens), changed old ones, and joined social movements. Centring on feminism, peace, anti-nuclear energy, and the environment, those movements went public in creative ways. They made their concerns known through acts of civil disobedience, masquerade, and carnivalesque behaviour. They invented ‘die-ins’ and ‘human carpets’ at street junctions and squares. They formed ‘human chains’ stretching hundreds of miles, with participants holding hands to demonstrate solidarity and connectedness. More explicitly than their forerunners, they emphasized emotions as a key motivational force of political action. Participants frankly addressed their fear, rage, and hope and called on one other to ‘demonstrate feelings’ so that ‘something profound and intense can emerge’.⁶⁶ Women in particular were determined to seek new forms of ‘speech and action’ (Arendt ) in the public realm. Accentuating their sensibility and vulnerability went hand in hand with demanding a radical transformation in political decision-making. Under the headline ‘the personal is political’, activists both expanded the range of what was considered political and connected it to what was seen as the most personal: emotions.⁶⁷

They thus initiated a new phase in the long history of political participation. Even the most radical opponents of the liberal-capitalist system sought to integrate Gefühl und Härte, gentle feelings and toughness. They combined their own feelings of being ‘affected’ (betroffen) by global violence and injustice with strategies for undermining and ultimately overthrowing the political and economic system they deemed responsible. They also accused the system, as many had done before them, of deliberate insensitivity. Opposing and challenging capitalist society, then, also meant creating an alternative subculture of warm and tender authenticity. Militant street politics, as they reemerged in the 1980s, were accompanied by claims for protective autonomous spheres where left-leaning groups could practise and experience subjectivity, solidarity, and belonging. ‘In street fighting’, it was observed, politics could become ‘directly affective—everybody feels that he or she is acting politically’. This joy of ‘feeling political’ was buttressed by new forms of communal living that rejected ‘alienated’ forms of consumption, work, leisure, love, and family relations.⁶⁸

Conclusion

Feeling political, as the chapter has argued, is an experience that can be traced back to street politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The feeling emerged through the performance of new ‘repertoires of contention’ that confronted the authorities with participatory claims voiced by large numbers of citizens. Compared to parliamentary sessions and other assemblies, open-air rallies and protest marches privileged collective bodily movement rather than individual speech. Walking, strolling, and marching, as well as singing, shouting, clapping hands, and waving hats, flags, and banners rendered demonstrations emotionally dynamic and lively, as much for bystanders and spectators (including the police) as for those participating.

Feeling political could mean different things depending on historical circumstances. It could engender a sense of self-confidence and self-determination that filled participants with pride and optimism. Acting collectively and moving forward strengthened the individual’s sense of power. People felt in their bones, to take up a quote from the early 1980s, that they were acting as opposed to watching, listening, and following instructions.⁶⁹ One hundred years earlier, as demonstrations were becoming a major political tool within the socialist movement, that feeling was crucial for mobilizing followers and stirring up opponents. For strategic reasons, however, activists did not let their emotions get out of hand. Rather than feeding middle-class images of wild and unruly crowds, they instead tried to create an impression of orderly, structured masses who threatened the system with their very discipline, coupled with carefully harnessed, emotional fervour.

Authoritarian regimes never felt at ease with citizens taking politics to the street and setting their own agenda. Yet they learnt to use street politics for their own purposes. Political participation now served the goal of enlisting and manifesting popular support for the state and creating an image of unity between government and people. Both the National Socialist regime and GDR state socialism set up mass organizations that regularly mobilized their members to march in unison, hold rallies and parades, carry the authorized flag, and chant slogans provided by the ruling party.

In democracies, political mobilization and participation followed different standards. Demonstrations resembled protest marches rather than choreographed parades. They were not ordered from above but answered to bottom-up dynamics. Initially organized along party lines and, as in the 1920s, strongly polarized and polarizing, they were later integrated into new modes of political action that transcended party memberships and reached out to broader sections of the population. New social movements emerging in the 1970s experimented with a style of street politics that was far more spontaneous, diverse, and colourful than earlier manifestations. The new street politics also produced and foregrounded new emotions, as proof of individual commitment and political urgency. While protesters in the past had proudly evoked a ‘mass spirit’ of solidarity, participants now emphasized personal feelings of Betroffenheit (concern, affectedness), fear, and indignation. Such feelings were templated, framed, and contextualized by collective action and thus acquired political potency—as illustrated by the youth movement Fridays for Future since its inception in 2018. Performing emotions like outrage and sadness vis-à-vis the danger of climate change here serves the goal of buttressing well-argued, science-based demands and propositions addressed to political leaders.

Street politics thus continue to play an important role in contemporary democratic societies. By inviting and necessitating a specific emotional performativity that lends them a unique thrill and power, they challenge and revitalize other political institutions. They mobilize citizens individually and collectively to feel political in their own, self-determined way and somewhat independently from any particular demands. At the same time, they work as an institution with rules and practices that template participants’ emotions in connection with joint bodily enactments. People usually do not get involved in street politics with prefixed emotions; rather, they construct their emotions in the process of being part of a demonstration.

In the course of history, street politics take on different meanings and purposes, and emotional templating changes accordingly. Once demonstrations become socially accepted as a fully legitimate element of democratic politics, they are free to experiment with more playful and less disciplined bodily enactments and emotional performances. Currently, the spectrum extends from vivacious Fridays for Future types with its high proportion of female participants to the violence-prone, markedly masculine marches of the extreme right. As a general rule, however, ‘feeling political’ in demonstrations and street rallies—in contrast to party meetings, public assemblies, or going to the polls—comes with a degree and intensity of emotional excitement and self-transformation that far exceeds most other forms of political participation.Ute Frevert(frevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de)