ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany was divided into hundreds of principalities with no central government. The radical move from rural to urban life, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, well illustrates the manic pace of things in nineteenth century. Modris Eksteins argues that there was a pattern in Germany of privileging the inner world and the life of the human spirit over the world of the senses and material reality. Twenty years before the Great War, Gustave Le Bon's The Psychology of Crowds was published in Paris. Le Bon writes compellingly of how groups develop hallucinations – as when a group of sailors are convinced that they are seeing men in the water calling for their aid, only to discover that they are merely pieces of wood floating in sea. It is in his chapter "Impulsiveness, mobility, and irritability of crowds" that Le Bon identifies the potential for a manic mood to emerge from group life.
