614
PARTISAN REVIEW
that seize an entire city so profoundly that it is no longer the same after–
wards." At a coffeehouse in Vienna on June
15, 1927,
he reads of a
"just verdict" in which a court declares those responsible for the shoot–
ings of workers in Burgenland not guilty.
The acquittal had been termed, nay, trumpeted, as "a just verdict"
in the organ of the government party. It was this mockery of any
sense of justice rather than the verdict itself that triggered an enor–
mous agitation among the workers of Vienna.
When they set fire to the Palace of Justice, the mayor of the city ordered
the police to shoot, causing ninety deaths. "Fifty years have passed, and
the agitation of that day is still in my bones.
It
is the closest thing to a
revolution that I have physically experienced."
What is the effect of the event on Canetti?
It
is not the sense of injus–
tice, which originally moved him, but rather the experience of the crowd
in action. He descends into the streets, joins the procession, indeed "dis–
solves in it" ;lnd feels not "the slightest resistance to what the crowd
was doing." At the same time, he says "[I was] amazed that despite my
frame of mind, I was able to grasp all the concrete individual scenes tak–
ing place before my eyes." In
Crowds and Power
Canetti would provide
an explanation for the irresistible attraction of the crowd.
It
rests on a
paradox:
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the
unknown....Man always tends to avoid physical contact with
anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can
amount to panic... .It is only in a crowd that man can become free
of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the
fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense
crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd too, whose psy–
chical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer
notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has sur–
rendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.
The crowd is a kind of homeopathy for a universal phobia: the fear of
touch.
Canetti dissolves in the crowd and yet finds that he is able to grasp
all the events taking place before his eyes. This capacity for participa–
tion and detached observation is a remarkable feature of all his work.
(He would be an exception to Gustave Le Bon's view in his classic study
