By increasing their control over nature, humans not only lost their fear of once unmasterable forces; they also lost the forms in which that fear was given concrete expression. What is more: despite humanity’s progress, the process of civilization has taken place within historical structures that cannot themselves be mastered. So fear remains with us. Not the fear that Freud called Realangst — anxieties produced by concrete external factors — but a traumatic fear that presents no basis for human action. The classical philosophers of history coined terms such as “the invisible hand” and “natural intention” to describe the instances supposed to act for us instead, though by the mid-nineteenth century even these conceptions had reached a state of crisis. Fear in history is fear of a history that has become unmanageable. The main alternative technique developed to cope with our fears is repersonalization, by which diffuse fears are transformed into concrete ones, which because they can be confronted can also be overcome. The repersonalization of anonymous structures occurs mostly in the form of strikingly condensed images: synergistic allegories and heroic figures believed to be at work underneath the historical surface. In the political posters and billboards of the early 20th century, these condensed images appeared as the Proletariat, the Soldier, the Capitalist, and the Jew.