56
PARTISAN REVIEW
army administration, academy, etc., all for me -
mass
units." Like many
of his Viennese contemporaries, Herzl instinctively grasped the aesthetic
and symbolic dimension of modern politics, the dialectical interaction
between myth and objective reality, between the unconscious forces in
the lives of individuals and the structural socio-economic factors that un–
derlay "Jewish distress"
Uudennot)
in late nineteenth-century Central and
Eastern Europe. Zionism as a political mass movement presupposed this
context of real misery (which marked it off from other utopian projects
like the
Freiland
plan of the liberal journalist Theodor Hertzka, another
Hungarian-born Viennese Jewish contemporary of Herzl), but it also
needed a sense of dynamic form and even operatic spectacle to get it off
the ground. This does not mean that Herzl, the Viennese aesthete turned
politician, consciously became an
i"ationalist
who deliberately exploited
or manipulated the masses in order to fulfill personal ambitions or a
pseudo-messianic complex (though Freud, with his innate suspicion of
such political artists, probably suspected as much). Herzl responded to
an
objective crisis in Jewish life. He acutely diagnosed it in terms of the im–
pact of modern anti-Semitism and the devastating blow to peaceful as–
similation in European society that by the end of the 1890s it already
heralded.
Herzl's special contribution, however, lay less in his sociopolitical
analysis (anticipated by Leon Pinsker fifteen years earlier and by Nathan
Birnbaum in his native Austria in the early 1890s) than in his ability to
create the
illusion
of power where there was as yet none, by fostering in
the Jews themselves a national consciousness and the belief that they
could overcome their fate and translate the Herzlian vision of a Jewish
state into a concrete, organizational goal. To forge this
will
Jor nation–
hood,
to reawaken the dormant energies of the dispersed Jews, Herzl
openly played on myths, symbols, dreams - many of them drawn from
the arsenal of the romantic German nationalism he had espoused in his
youth. "With a flag you can lead men," he told Baron de Hirsch in
1895, "for a flag, men live and die. In fact, it is the only thing for which
they are ready to die in masses, if you train them for it." Herzl always
attached special importance to outward symbols; hence the attention he
paid to dress, bearing, deportment, and to the theatrical staging of the
First Zionist Congress as an elegant, impressive, festive spectacle. As an
experienced journalist, Herzl moreover was convinced that "noise is ev–
erything ... in truth noise is a great deal. A sustained noise is in itself a
noteworthy fact. All of world history is nothing but a noise." This the–
atrical sense of public relations, of image-building and the power of
communications, magic and make-believe in public life, this readiness to
tap the energies of the unconscious for political ends and to organize the
