While Adorno and Horkheimer remained in California during the Second World War, several other members of the Frankfurt School went to work for the US government in Washington to help with its anti-war effort. The Institute for Social Research could as a result cut its wage bill. Viewed from the other side of the Cold War, it may seem surprising that a group of apparently neo-Marxist revolutionaries was invited into the heart of the American government. But Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer and Friedrich Pollock were all hired because, as recent Jewish exiles from Germany, they knew the enemy intimately and so could help in the fight against fascism. Within a decade, the McCarthyite witchhunts against suspected communists in the US would begin in earnest. In 1942, though, the reds weren’t under the bed, but invited between its sheets.
But what did fascism mean to the Frankfurt School? A decade earlier, Wilhelm Reich, in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, ascribed its rise to sexual repression. He wrote:
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyses the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties.1
The family was not for Reich, as it had been for Hegel, an autonomous zone that offered resistance to the state, but rather an authoritarian miniature state that prepared the child for later subordination.
The Frankfurt School’s leading psychoanalytical thinker Erich Fromm agreed with much of Reich’s analysis, though worried it had too little empirical confirmation and focused too much on genital sexuality. He contended that the rise of fascism was to do with sadomasochism. In his essay ‘Social-Psychological Aspects’, he distinguished the ‘revolutionary’ character from the ‘masochist’.2 The former had ego strength and sought to change his destiny, the latter submitted to his fate, turning over his destiny to a higher power. Fromm followed Freud in taking sadism to be of the same coin as masochism: the sadist turned himself against those who showed signs of weakness. The sadomasochistic social character was essential for authoritarian society, involving as it did deference to those above and contempt for those below. For Fromm, the sadomasochist was characterised by anal strivings for order, punctuality and frugality: this was the kind of social character a fascist would want in spades if he wanted to make the trains run on time or murder Jews on an industrial scale.
But all this said little about why fascism arose in Germany in particular. During the 1930s, Fromm developed an account of what happened that enriched his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, published after he had left the Institute. Fromm argued that, as Germany shifted from early to monopoly capitalism, the social character of the lower middle class persisted. The petit bourgeoisie, who were the icons of early capitalism, owning and managing their own businesses, became anomalies under corporate forms of capitalism. This class had been the unwitting heroes of the story Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: it was the parsimonious, pleasure-denying, duty-bound characters who predominated under early capitalism. Now they were politically powerless, economically crushed and spiritually alienated in the Weimar Republic. Sadomasochistically, they yearned not to change their own destiny but to yield to the authority that would do that for them. ‘The desire for authority is channelled towards the strong leader, while other specific father figures become the objects of the rebellion’, wrote Fromm in ‘Psychoanalytic Characterology and its Relevance for Social Psychology’ in 1932.3 By 1941, when he came to write Escape from Freedom, Fromm was to cast this sadomasochistic yearning on the part of the German petit bourgeois for a strong leader as part of a grand historical dialectical process. The process of becoming freed from authority (whether the authority of God or of social convention) resulted, Fromm argued, in a kind of anguish or hopelessness akin to what infants feel during child development.
He thought that freedom from authority can be experienced as crushing and terrifying. Fromm distinguished between negative and positive freedom – freedom from and freedom to. The responsibility conferred on humans by having freedom from authority can be unbearable unless we are able to exercise our positive freedom creatively. Fromm’s thought connected with the near-contemporaneous account of the anguish of freedom as experienced in the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea. But while Sartre took the nauseating experience of freedom to be a human fact, Fromm set it in a historical, dialectical context. But taking the responsibility to exercise positive freedom creatively was precisely what the weak, ego-depleted social character was incapable of doing. Instead, in order to achieve spiritual security and escape from the unbearable burden of freedom, the frightened individual replaced one form of authority with another.
Fromm wrote: ‘The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.’4 Hence Hitler: the Führer’s authoritarian personality not only made him want to rule over Germany in the name of a higher if fictional authority (the German master race) but also made him appealing for an insecure middle class. Fromm argued that this fear of freedom was not a peculiarly fascist one, but threatened the basis of democracy in every modern state. Indeed, at the outset of Escape from Freedom, he quoted with approval the words of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. ‘The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.’5
Fromm’s view of fascism as premised on the sadomasochism of its supporters became Frankfurt School orthodoxy. ‘This ideology’, wrote Marcuse in his 1934 essay ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’, ‘exhibits the status quo, but with a radical transvaluation of values: unhappiness is turned into grace, misery into blessing, poverty into destiny.’6
The German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, writing in exile in Zurich, dissented from this Frankfurt School orthodoxy, which took Nazism to be a symptom of a desire for an authority figure. In his 1935 book Heritage of Our Times, Bloch instead argued that fascism was a perverted religious movement that won people over with anachronistic kitsch and quasi-utopian ideas about the wonders of a future Reich.7 Fascism was, as a result, a paradox, being both ancient and modern: more precisely it was a system that used a tradition hostile to capitalism for the preservation of capitalism. For Bloch, as for Walter Benjamin, fascism was a cultural synthesis that contained both anti-capitalist and utopian aspects. The Frankfurt School failed to emphasise in its analysis of fascism what Benjamin called the ‘aestheticisation of politics’. It fell to Benjamin, Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer to reflect on the Nazi deployment of myths, symbols, parades and demonstrations to command support. Benjamin wrote in 1936 that mankind’s self-alienation had ‘reached such a degree that it can contemplate its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’8 By mankind, he meant that part of it that had succumbed to the delusive dreams of the Italian futurist poet and fascist Filippo Marinetti who saw war as beautiful.
These conflicting ideas fed into a dispute between two of the leading Frankfurt School theorists of fascism, Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann.9 Pollock had long argued that there was such a thing as state capitalism, and that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had not abolished capitalism, but rather, by means of state planning, the encouragement of technological innovation, and the boost to industry from increased military spending, had made it possible to defer its contradictions. Perhaps, hypothesised Pollock pessimistically, Hitler and Stalin had made the capitalist system invulnerable even during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This in itself was heretical: it certainly flew in the face of Henryk Grossman’s account wherein capitalism was destined to founder on its own contradictions. Neumann demurred. For him ‘state capitalism’ was a contradiction in terms. If the state became the sole owner of the means of production it stopped capitalism functioning properly. Rather, Neumann believed that what was happening in Germany under Nazi rule was ‘that the antagonisms of capitalism are operating at a higher and, therefore, more dangerous level, even if these antagonisms are covered by bureaucratic apparatus and by the ideology of the people’s community’.10 What Neumann called Hitler’s totalitarian monopoly capitalism was perhaps even more prone to crisis than liberal monopoly capitalism.
But even Neumann, who was not especially amenable to psycho-social or aesthetic explanations of Hitler’s success, still less to the idea that sadomasochism supposedly characterized his key supporters, could write in his 1942 book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism: ‘Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social conditions are set. The leader’s charismatic power is not a mere phantasm – none can doubt that millions believe in it.’11 But what proved disastrous for the Nazis was that they made the error of believing their own publicity. Adorno recognised as much when he wrote this passage of Minima Moralia during the last days of the Second World War:
They [the Nazi leaders] saw nothing before them except cheering assemblies and frightened negotiators: this blocked their view of the objective power of a greater mass of capital. It was immanent revenge on Hitler that he, the executioner of liberal society, was yet in his own state of consciousness too ‘liberal’ to perceive how industrial potential outside Germany was establishing, under the veil of liberalism, its irresistible domination.12
For Adorno, Germany was defeated by a more advanced form of capitalism. Indeed, in a letter to Horkheimer, he wrote that ‘the forces of production of more progressive countries have been proved to be the stronger after all … the war has been won by industry against the military’.13 There is something in this, though it does leave out the role of the Soviet Union, that non-liberal polity, whose defeat of Hitler’s forces at Stalingrad in 1943 was decisive in the course of the European conflict. It was Soviet totalitarianism that delivered the crucial blow to Nazi totalitarianism, not liberal capitalism.
ONE QUESTION remained about fascism, namely its connection with anti-Semitism. In the final section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, written after the war and first published in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Jews served as a necessary outlet for frustrations and aggressions in society. But that necessity they ascribed to the capitalist system rather than, specifically, to fascism in Germany. The frustrations and aggressions of workers were offloaded on to another group. ‘The productive work of the capitalist, whether he justifies his profit by means of gross returns as under liberalism, or by his director’s salary as today, is an ideology cloaking the real nature of the labour contract and the grasping character of the economic system’, they wrote. ‘And so people shout “Stop thief!” – but point at the Jews. They are the scapegoats not only for individual manoeuvres and machinations, but in a broader sense, inasmuch as the injustice of the whole class is attributed to them.’14
But why were the Jews the scapegoats? Because, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested, the image of the Jew was the false projection of things that were unbearable about non-Jewish society. Jews were hated because they were, unfairly, taken as being what non-Jews wanted to be.
No matter what the Jews as such may be like, their image, as that of the defeated people, has the features to which totalitarian domination must be completely hostile: happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These features are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe so long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil.15
And Jews could readily serve as those hated forms – the image of the wandering Jew, Adorno wrote in his 1940 ‘Note on Anti-Semitism’, ‘represents a condition of mankind which did not know labour, and all later attacks against the parasitic, consumptive character of Jews are simply rationalisations’.16
Löwenthal, Marcuse, Kircheimer, Neumann and Pollock helped to defeat the fascism that the Frankfurt School had described by working for the American government. Pollock worked for the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, Löwenthal with the Office of War Information. Meanwhile, William Donovan, aka ‘Wild Bill’, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US’s wartime intelligence agency established by President Roosevelt in 1941, recruited the three other members of the Frankfurt School – Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer – to work as intelligence analysts.
Marcuse said he went to Washington ‘to do everything that was in my power to help defeat the Nazi regime’. After the war, Marcuse’s communist critics chided him for working for what was the forerunner of the CIA. ‘If critics reproach me for that’, he said in a later interview, ‘it only shows the ignorance of these people who seem to have forgotten that the war then was a war against fascism and that, consequently, I haven’t the slightest reason for being ashamed of having assisted in it.’17
As German exiles, these three men had profound knowledge of the Americans’ enemy. In particular, Neumann had just published Behemoth, the fruit of detailed scholarly research into the workings of the Nazi system, albeit one written from a neo-Marxist perspective. In his Foreword to Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, the Cambridge philosopher Raymond Geuss suggested that such ‘toleration of intellectual deviancy’, in which the ideas of Marxism could be harnessed in the defeat of fascism, contrasts with the ‘politics of myopic intellectual conformism’ of the Anglo-American world in the twenty-first century.18 What Geuss had in mind is that Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer were recruited because they offered profound insight into the enemy’s political culture – which was, you might think, precisely the type of insight that might have served a purpose during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But Bush and Blair didn’t allow such knowledgeable dissident voices to inform their ‘war on terror’. In sharp contrast, the Frankfurt scholars brought a refreshing challenge to established opinions about Nazism. They doubted, for instance, Churchill’s notion that either ‘Prussian militarism’ or the ‘Teutonic urge for domination’ could explain the rise of Hitler, instead ascribing it to something more modern, namely a series of pacts between the industrial bourgeoisie and the regime.
They doubted, too, the Allied strategy of bombing the Germans into submission. In June 1944, Neumann wrote a paper criticising the bombing of German cities, not because it was inhumane, but because it was counterproductive. ‘Manifold as the effects of the air raids on the German population may be, they have one common characteristic’, he wrote, ‘they tend to absorb all political issues into personal issues, on the national as well as the individual level.’19 This was, effectively, a Marxist analysis of the utility of bombing: Neumann was arguing that bombed-out German civilians would put their immediate survival above their class interests or the imperative to topple Nazism. Bombing German cities risked extending the Third Reich’s lifespan rather than killing it off. Only many decades later with books such as Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–45 and W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, that broke the near silence about how 635,000 Germans, mostly civilians, died and 7.5 million were made homeless when British and US bombs were dropped on 131 cities and towns, might one realise the prescience of Neumann’s argument – how, in the rubble of Hamburg or Dresden, it was scarcely possible to think about organising resistance to Nazism.
Neumann is the most intriguing of the Frankfurt scholars who helped Uncle Sam, and not just because during the war he supplied information to Soviet spies who knew him by the code name Ruff. Born in 1900 in Katowice, Poland, Neumann had as a student supported the failed German Revolution of 1918;20 later he trained as a labour lawyer, represented trade unions and eventually became the lead attorney for the German Social Democratic Party. In 1933, fearing arrest from the Nazis, he fled to Britain, where he studied at the London School of Economics with, among others, Karl Mannheim. In 1936, he joined the Institute in New York on the recommendation of the LSE’s Harold Laski. While working for the Institute he not only wrote Behemoth but helped secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for the Frankfurt School’s study of anti-Semitism.
As deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, Neumann had access to secret information from American ambassadors that he obligingly passed on to Elizabeth Zarubina, a Soviet spy working in the US whom he met through his friends Paul Massing (a sociologist with connections to the Institute) and his wife Hede, both of whom had worked for and still had links to the NKVD, the Soviet secret service. Once he became a naturalised American citizen in 1943, though, the Massings worried that he would stop sending the Soviets information out of a new-found patriotic duty. Neumann wrote back saying he still saw his prime duty to be the defeat of Nazism and so, ‘If there is something really important, I will inform you without hesitation.’21
It has been suggested that Neumann may have been a Soviet spy mentioned in the the top secret Venona Papers. Declassified only in 1995, these papers disclosed the workings of a counter-intelligence programme run by the US Army Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the National Security Agency, from 1944 to 1980. It was the Venona Project that uncovered a Soviet spy ring targeting the Manhattan Project that was developing nuclear weapons, and later exposed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for passing information about the atomic bomb to Moscow, leading to their executions in 1953. But the suggestion that Neumann, for all his Marxist credentials, was a traitor like them seems fanciful: he was hardly a double agent but rather saw it as his wartime duty to help the Allies, one of which was the Soviet Union, to defeat Nazism. For him, at least, there was no conflict of interests. That said, as the US government increasingly focused on resisting the spread of Soviet communism across Europe in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat, his Washington bosses might have had other ideas. After the war, Neumann became professor of political science at Columbia University in New York and helped establish the Free University of Berlin. The latter, founded in the early Cold War in West Berlin, had a symbolic name: unlike the communist-controlled Humboldt University in East Berlin, it was part of what Americans liked to call the free world. Of course, sceptics might argue, these activities would be a good cover for a really cunning Soviet double agent, particularly one who wanted to avoid being executed like the Rosenbergs or forced into glum Muscovite exile like some of the Cambridge network of spies who betrayed secrets to the Kremlin. None of this, though, should be taken as indicating that Franz Neumann was one of their number.
All three men – Marcuse, Kirchheimer and Neumann – worked for the OSS as political analysts, helping to identify both the Nazis who were to be held accountable for war crimes and the anti-Nazis who could be relied upon to help in the post-war reconstruction. Jürgen Habermas once asked Marcuse if their resultant suggestions were of any consequence. ‘On the contrary’, came the reply. ‘Those whom we had listed as “economic war criminals” were very quickly back in the decisive positions of responsibility in the German economy.’22
After the defeat of the Nazis, Neumann continued to work for the OSS and the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal under its chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson. He wrote analyses of twenty-two Nazi defendants, including Hermann Göring who had been Hitler’s designated successor, that were central to the indictments against them. He was also asked by Donovan to investigate the purpose of the Nazi’s persecution of the Christian church. He and his team concluded that the power of the church over the people, and young people in particular, was broken because it represented a site of resistance to the ideology of National Socialism. ‘They avowed their aim to eliminate the Christian Churches in Germany and sought to substitute therefore Nazi institutions and Nazi beliefs and pursued a programme of persecution of priests, clergy and members of monastic orders whom they deemed opposed to their purposes and confiscated Church property.’23
What’s striking is that Donovan did not instruct Neumann and his team to investigate the other, more devastating form of Nazi religious persecution – one that led to the destruction of 267 synagogues across Germany during Kristallnacht in November 1938 – still less the persecution that led to the murder of six million Jews.
ON 9 JULY 1946, Adorno wrote to his mother after receiving a telegram informing him of his father’s death. Oscar Wiesengrund died aged seventy-seven after a long illness:
There are two thoughts I cannot shake off. The first: that I find death in exile, even though it was certainly a blessing compared to an existence over there, particularly dreadful – that the continuity of a person’s life is senselessly broken in two, that he cannot live his own life to its natural conclusion as it were, but instead ultimately has the entirely external category of the ‘emigrant’ forced upon him, a representative of a category rather than an individual … The other thought: that when one’s father dies, one’s own life feels like theft, an outrage, something that has been taken away from the older person – the injustice of continuing to live, as if one were cheating the dead man of his light and breath. The sense of this guilt is ineffably strong in me.24
But the guilt of the survivor had another cause. Adorno had survived the Holocaust. In August 1945, as two atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, the industrial-scale murder of Jews at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Majdanek and other camps was being revealed to the world.
In Minima Moralia, which Adorno was composing at the time, he saw the death camps as a kind of perverted expression of Marx’s exchange principle, involving a Freudian projection onto the other of what was most intolerable about oneself, both a culmination and a denial of the Enlightenment’s values. ‘The technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners resemble their guards, the murdered, murderers. The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing different survives.’25 For Adorno, Auschwitz was nonetheless a horror incomparable with earlier horrors. ‘Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind. Certainly, the unprecedented torture and humiliation of those abducted in cattle trucks does shed a deathly livid light on the most distant past.’26
Thinking could not go on as it had before. In 1949, deranged by Auschwitz, feeling not just the guilt but the responsibility of the survivor, Adorno returned from California to Frankfurt where he, along with Horkheimer, would philosophise in different circumstances – in the rubble of western civilisation.