2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 137–139

What does Stimmung mean?

Heinz Bude, Kassel University

Comment on Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017.

“The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in
Germany’s refugee crisis.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3):
105–135.

The German word Stimmung refers to something between mood and atmosphere.
Being in a mood means a subjective feeling that separates oneself from others,
whereas the atmosphere of a building or at a party is felt by all of those looking
up at the stained-glass windows of Cologne Cathedral, or by those gathering in
the kitchen while the music is to be heard from the dance floor in the living room.
Stimmung is both: the feeling in myself and the feeling between us.
In German, the Stimmung rules and nobody can deny it. How does that hap-
pen? It’s like rain. There is no subject like the rain when it rains as there is none like
Stimmung when we feel happy or sad, embedded or exposed, addressed or forgot-
ten. Stimmung occurs when we fall into the mood to dance, to cry, to rise up, to
sink down. It’s me who is in that Stimmung, but in that moment the whole world
seems to dance, to cry, to rise or to sink. The Stimmung is located in the world that
surrounds me.
I am ruled by a Stimmung only if I am ruling it out. It rules over me and through
me. With Heidegger ([1953] 2010) one could say: in a certain Stimmung the self
encounters herself in her own world. Stimmungen are like melodies that set the
tone of my being in the world; they make me conscious of how I am there and how
I will be there; they disclose the feeling behind my thinking, willing, and judging.
In contrast to emotions, Stimmungen do not intentionally refer to a certain ob-
ject that explains and maintains my anger or surprise. Normally I can tell a story
that accounts for my emotions. But Stimmungen are no side-effects of emotional

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Heinz Bude.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.007
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 Heinz Bude 138

narratives; they are the emotional medium that realizes the situation as a whole.
They trickle down and cover everything. In other words, Stimmungen transcend
the duality of self and reality because they are the ground on which self and re-
ality apppear as different and divided. To this extent, the formula is right that
Stimmungen rule the world into which I find myself thrown. Stimmungen are the
frames of experience.
However, how could a society be in a certain Stimmung? With regard sexual en-
counters, sports events, or talking cures, the idea of a prevailing Stimmung makes
sense. But is it plausible to look at a challenging situation of, let’s say, German so-
ciety in the fall of 2015 in terms of Stimmung? And again after the events of New
Year’s Eve from 2015 to 2016 in Cologne?
Reseach in historical semantics show that from the late nineteenth to the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, the word Stimmung was used to grasp the situation
of a nation going to war, of financial markets breaking down, or of states swinging
between one political party and another. This is, of course, due to media that con-
stitute a feeling of contemporaneity: first, the daily newspapers, the TV, and now
the net. Stimmung is not so much transported by the news itself and its emotional
impact, it’s more a case of the excited imagination that accompanies the moment
of reading: I imagine sharing the news with hundreds of thousands or hundreds of
millions of readers completely unknown to me: “Angela Merkel opens the borders.”
By reading this together, we form the audience of a certain Stimmung. The question
is: Which reaction will be dominant? That of those who open their arms or of those
who close their arms?
In the fall of 2015, the former occupied the right to speak while the latter had
to keep quiet. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974) suggested a model according to
which Stimmung is a result of that fight for the right to speak: between those who
behave like opinion leaders and those who have to disappear in a “spiral of silence.”
That changed on New Year’s Eve: now those who had doubts about the situation
disappeared in the “spiral of silence” and those who had to listen dared to speak.
This is the situation we now have among the German public: on both sides there
are some who are silent and some who speak up. And nobody can gauge the bal-
ance of forces between these two tendencies. Therefore the prevailing Stimmung is
testy.

References
Heidegger, Martin. (1953) 2010. Being and time. Translated by John Stambaugh. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1974. “The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion.” Jour-
nal of Communication 24 (2): 34–51.

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 137–139

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139 What does Stimmung mean?

Heinz Bude is Professor of Sociology at Kassel University. His latest book is Society
of fear (Polity Press, forthcoming).
 Heinz Bude
 Universität Kassel
 Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften
 Nora-Platiel-Straße 1
 D-34127 Kassel
Germany

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 137–139

This content downloaded from 179.210.093.213 on August 01, 2018 12:45:06 PM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).