In the autumn of 1949, Adorno sailed across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth back to Europe. He was on his way to the city of his birth, Frankfurt, after fifteen years of exile, to start teaching again. Horkheimer, who had been offered a professorship at Frankfurt University, was too sick to travel. In Paris, Adorno broke off his journey and from there wrote to Horkheimer:
The return to Europe gripped me with such force that words fail me. And the beauty of Paris shines more beautifully than ever through the rags of poverty … What survives here may well be condemned by history and it certainly bears the marks of this clearly enough, but the fact that it, the essence of untimeliness, still exists, is part of the historical picture and permits the feeble hope that something humane survives, despite everything.1
The gravitational pull of Europe didn’t work on many other of his exiled colleagues with such force. Other former members of the Institute – Marcuse, Fromm, Löwenthal, Kirchheimer and Neumann – all remained in the United States although they would occasionally visit their homeland. On the other hand, Henryk Grossman, who had spent his American exile years semi-detached from the Institute, was happy to leave the United States for Germany’s Soviet-occupied zone. During the war, he had been suspected by the FBI of being a German spy, and during the first years of the Cold War his communist affiliations made him fear being targeted by the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee. ‘Marxism is designated a crime’, he wrote to a friend, ‘and one can only make a career if one writes against Marx.’2 So in 1948, he accepted a lump sum pay-off from the Institute arranged by Friedrich Pollock and took up an invitation to become professor of economics at the University of Leipzig, then in the Soviet-occupied zone, and from 7 October 1949 part of East Germany.
Grossman no longer had any immediate family: his wife, Jana, and his son, Jan, had been murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 and his second son Stanislaw, apparently, had died before them. Grossman and the likes of Ernst Bloch, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht were major successes for East Germany in their Cold War competition with West Germany to attract eminent intellectual anti-Nazi exiles. In March 1950, Grossman was nominated by the city of Leipzig for the National Prize ‘for the totality of his scientific achievements in the area of scientific socialism’, but didn’t win. Possibly his achievements were insufficiently pure in doctrinal terms for the Berlin authorities.
He joined the Victims of Fascism organisation after his arrival and was recognised as a ‘fighter against fascism’. Strikingly, for official purposes he described himself as ‘without religion’, rather than as Jewish. His biographer Rick Kuhn reckons this was because he was ‘unable to conceive that anti-Semitism would be tolerated in “socialist” East Germany’. Grossman thought he needn’t express solidarity with other Jews, but could reveal his secular beliefs instead.3
Despite being ill, he gave every sign of enjoying his new berth in a new, purportedly socialist state. He lectured and enjoyed socialising with committed communists from the first intake of students who came from peasant and working-class backgrounds and who graduated in 1949. In November 1950, though, he died after suffering from prostate problems and Parkinson’s Disease. His biographer concluded: ‘Grossman had gone to Leipzig with high expectations and large illusions about the regime in east Germany. He seems to have died with those illusions intact. They concealed the distance between his Marxist belief in the capacity of the working class to usher in a radically democratic socialism and the realities of the dictatorial state capitalist regime.’4
Other Frankfurt School intellectuals had fewer illusions. Adorno chose capitalist West Germany over Marxist East Germany as his base when he returned from exile. So did Horkheimer when he finally arrived in Frankfurt. ‘We are unable to see anything in the practice of military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression and, in what people over there are accustomed to call “ideology”, we see only what was originally intended by that word: the lie that justifies an untrue condition of society’, wrote Adorno.5 The bigger question was why Adorno as well as Horkheimer and Pollock returned to Europe at all. Didn’t they realise that Europe was no longer the centre of western civilisation? ‘America is no longer the raw and unformed land of promise from which men of superior gifts like James, Santayana and Eliot departed, seeking in Europe what they found lacking in America’, wrote the art critic Harold Rosenberg in the Partisan Review in 1940, claiming that America’s century-long cultural dependence on Europe was over. ‘The wheel has come full circle and now America has become the protector of Western civilisation, at least in a military and economic sense.’6 Since the war, that nascent swagger had developed and something new asserted itself, America’s proud insistence on its cultural virility over European decadence.
When, for instance, the young Saul Bellow visited Paris in 1948, the year before Adorno’s visit, the young American novelist felt like Dostoevsky a century earlier. ‘I, too, was a foreigner and a barbarian from a vast and backward land’, Bellow wrote.7 Or at least he was treated as such. He went home to write his 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, which begins: ‘I am an American, Chicago born’ – as if in self-assertive rebuke to culturally dead old Europe.8 Europeans had no business in taking American civilisation to be an oxymoron when theirs had revealed its dark side during the Third Reich.
Adorno was travelling into the centre of that barbarism, into the heart of European darkness, only to find that, five years after the war had ended, his countrymen were carrying on as though the Third Reich had never happened. He didn’t deny feeling homesick, but he stressed another factor – the German language, which, he suggested in an essay called ‘On the Question “What is German?”’, had a ‘special affinity with philosophy’, and was able ‘to express something in the phenomena that is not exhausted in their mere thus-ness, their positivity and givenness’.9 A bracing idea – as though, for example, English speakers were doomed to the philosophies he and the Frankfurt School excoriated by dint of the structure of their language; as if in the rubble of Germany, there was a priceless jewel that could be rescued.
Adorno was hardly eulogising German culture at this, to put it mildly, unpropitious moment in history. In fact, such was his ambivalent sense of belonging to a German tradition, that in the same paper he was able to reflect that the idea of national identity was a product of the reified thinking that critical theory opposed. ‘The fabrication of national collectivities, however – the common practice in the abominable jargon of war which speaks of the Russian, the American and certainly also of the German – is the mark of a reified consciousness hardly capable of experience. Such fabrication remains precisely within those stereotypes which it is the task of thinking to dissolve.’10 But here’s the paradox: if there was thinking to be done in order to dissolve reified consciousness, that thinking was best done – perhaps could only be done in Adorno’s view – in German. But such thinking in German, and the critical philosophical heritage in which Adorno, for all his exile wanderings, felt at home was now viewed with suspicion. Jürgen Habermas, the former Hitler Youth who in a few years would become Adorno’s first research assistant, would later say that he could only identify his own intellectual traditions at a distance which enabled him to ‘continue them in a self-critical spirit with the scepticism and the clear-sightedness of the man who has already once been fooled’.11
Adorno was returning to a city from which nearly everything had been erased. German troops had destroyed all but one of the bridges across the river Main in the last days of the war. Allied bombings had destroyed 177,000 houses, leaving only 45,000 still standing in 1945. One ghostly memory of his family remained: on the parquet floor of the only habitable room left in his father’s bombed-out house on Seeheim Street, he could discern the imprints left by his mother’s piano. It was from this city that he had been forced to flee into exile, leaving behind his ageing parents who had been roughed up and jailed by the Nazis and compelled to sell their properties at well below market rate, before scrambling into exile so as not to be murdered in the death camps. No wonder he struggled to keep his feelings in check. Only once, he reckoned, did he fail to do so, when he confronted the son of the owner of another of his father’s houses in the Schöne Aussicht: ‘I called him a Nazi and a murderer, although I am not sure that I found the guilty party. But that is how things go – it’s always the wrong ones who get caught and the villains are always so experienced and able to cope with the real situations that they get by.’12
That was one of the problems with the Germany to which he and Horkheimer returned: there were no Nazis any more. The returning exiles found their homeland in a state of mass denial. When Horkheimer visited Frankfurt in 1948 to discuss with the university authorities the possibility of re-establishing the Institute for Social Research, he found his former colleagues ‘as sweet as pie, smooth as eels and hypocritical … I attended a faculty meeting yesterday and found it too friendly by half and enough to make you want to throw up. All these people sit there as they did before the Third Reich … just as if nothing had happened … they are acting out a Ghost Sonata that leaves Strindberg standing.’13
That meeting was emblematic of much of the spectral new Federal Republic of Germany that Adorno and Horkheimer uncovered on their return. A few weeks before Adorno arrived in Frankfurt, Germany had been divided into two states: the German Democratic Republic, which had been the Soviet zone of the post-war occupation, and the German Federal Republic, made up of the French, British and American zones. Delegates to the People’s Congress of the GDR were elected from a single list of Communist Party candidates; the first elections to West Germany’s Bundestag resulted in the conservative Konrad Adenauer becoming the Federal Republic’s first Chancellor. In his first speech as chancellor Adenauer did not refer to German responsibility for the murder of Jews – underlining how the new republic was to refuse to acknowledge Germany’s shame during the Second World War. Worse yet, the West German government hired many individuals who had served as civil servants and lawyers under the Nazis; responsibility for the country’s economy was taken over by those whom Marcuse and his team at the OSS had called economic war criminals.
The Federal Republic refused to acknowledge or definitively break with Germany’s recent past. For the Frankfurt School, the emblematic figure in this respect was Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher and Nazi Party member, who had never disavowed publicly the speeches that made him, in many eyes, one of Nazism’s strongest intellectual proponents. In the spring of 1947, while in Germany as part of his work for the OSS, Marcuse visited his former teacher in his hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. Heidegger told Marcuse that he had fully dissociated himself from the Nazi regime as of 1934 and that in his subsequent lectures he had made extremely critical remarks. But that wasn’t enough for Marcuse, who wrote to Heidegger later that year:
Many us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from such identification, a statement that honestly expresses your current attitude about the events that have occurred. But you have never uttered such a statement … A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews – merely because they were Jews – that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the Western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified … Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?
In reply, Heidegger wrote that, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he had ‘expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of western Dasein from the dangers of communism’.14 Indeed, he had said as much in his notorious rector’s address at the University of Freiburg. The following year, he had realised his ‘political error’ and resigned his rectorship. But why had he never publicly retracted or condemned those words after 1934? He wrote to Marcuse: ‘it would have been the end of both me and my family … An avowal after 1945 was for me impossible: the Nazi supporters announced their change of allegiance in the most loathsome way; I, however, had nothing in common with them.’15
This sounded slippery enough. But in 1953, the twenty-four-year-old Jürgen Habermas pointed out something that made Heidegger’s story about his change of heart over the Nazis seem even more dubious. Habermas publicly challenged Heidegger to explain what he meant in his 1935 book Introduction to Metaphysics by the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism. Hadn’t Heidegger claimed to Marcuse that his endorsement of National Socialism had ceased a year earlier? How could Heidegger have allowed the republication in 1953 of these lectures without any revisions or commentary? ‘What was really offensive’, wrote Habermas in Between Naturalism and Religion, ‘was the Nazi philosopher’s denial of moral and political responsibility for the consequences of the mass criminality about which almost no one talked any more eight years after the war.’16
For the young Habermas, this was not only his first intervention in public life but a key moment in his intellectual and moral development. Born in 1929, Habermas had been one of the ‘Flaghelfer generation’ (anti-aircraft generation) of post-war intellectuals like the novelist Günter Grass and the sociologists Ralf Dahrendorf and Niklas Luhmann, who had, as teenagers, helped to defend Hitler. At fifteen, Habermas was, like most of his contemporaries, a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from any war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences in rear-guard action against the Allied advance. He later described his father, director of the local seminary, as a ‘passive sympathiser’ with the Nazis and admitted that as a youth he had shared that mindset. But he was shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps. ‘All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system’, he later said. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans’ ‘collectively realised inhumanity’ constituted what he described as ‘that first rupture, which still gapes’.17
After the war, Habermas enrolled at the University of Bonn, later also studying philosophy at Göttingen and Zurich. Between 1949 and 1953, he spent four years studying Heidegger, so his letter to the philosopher was freighted with symbolic resonances. A young intellectual was calling out his older mentor, demanding that he not hide in silence but rather explain how he could have eulogised a politically criminal system. A new German generation was calling on an older one to account for itself, and perhaps atone for its sins.
In his mature writings, Habermas would hypothesise that there was something called communicative reason that had emancipatory power. In what he called an ‘ideal speech situation’, citizens would be able to raise moral and political concerns and the ensuing discourse would unfold in an orderly, conflict-free manner. It was a utopian hope that grew from the rubble of Germany, the philosophy of one who yearned for a human society that engaged in the free and rational discourse that was the good legacy of the Enlightenment. For Habermas, the inherent aim or telos of language was to reach understanding and bring about consensus. He argued that such rationally achieved consensus was both necessary and possible for human flourishing post-Auschwitz. The barriers preventing the exercise of reason and mutual understanding could be identified, comprehended and reduced.
Perhaps he was hoping for something like that in his exchange with Heidegger, but it didn’t happen; Heidegger didn’t reply. That silence confirmed for the young Habermas that German philosophy had failed in its moment of reckoning. Heidegger’s failure seemed to him symptomatic of the repressive, silencing anti-discourse prevalent in the new Federal Republic. Just as Heidegger refused to publicly acknowledge his support for the Nazis, so Konrad Adenauer’s government, mired in anti-communist jeremiads against its East German neighbour, refused to acknowledge or definitively break with Germany’s recent past.
If the Frankfurt School was to have a role in post-war Germany, it was to disrupt this ghost sonata, to challenge the culture of silence and denial. Adorno and Horkheimer were at least temperamentally suited to that task, since they were, as the latter put it to the former, ‘at right angles to reality’.18 When the Institute reopened in August 1950, with Horkheimer and Adorno as co-directors, some of its offices were in the bombed-out ruins of Franz Röckle’s Neue Sachlichkeit building. The following year they would move into Alois Geifer’s similarly spare, functionalist new building. Perhaps, once more, the Institute had committed an architectural blunder: in 1923 its architecture seemed to collude with the prevailing Weimar ethos of functionalism, managerial efficiency and positivism. Nearly three decades later, the pale ghost of that deluded design was rising from Frankfurt’s rubble, suggesting perhaps that the Institute wasn’t quite as oppositional to the powers that be as it postured. Architectural history was repeating itself, not quite as farce, but certainly as disappointment. Striking too was that what had, before 1933, been known as Café Marx, in 1951 became known as Café Max, after Horkheimer. Marx, the philosopher whose name the Institute astutely airbrushed from their papers during their American exile so as not to offend their hosts, was now sidelined in the Frankfurt School’s second European incarnation too.
Café Max opened for business. The newly reformed Institute started a new sociological project to investigate the conspiracy of silence that had descended on Germany. ‘The obviousness of disaster becomes an asset to its apologists’, wrote Adorno in Minima Moralia. ‘What everyone knows no one need say and under cover of silence is allowed to proceed unopposed.’19 The so-called ‘Group Experiment’ bore similarities to an earlier sociological project called the ‘Authoritarian Project’ which Adorno had worked on in Berkeley during his Californian exile. The Group Experiment too relied on psychoanalytical concepts to investigate the complex of guilt and defensiveness, which Adorno thought especially necessary because subjective opinion differed so sharply from objective fact – there was a need to dig behind the manifest content of what people said to explore what Adorno and his researchers took to be the collective psychopathology beneath.
The experiment involved about 1,800 participants taking part in 120 discussions between groups of fifteen to twenty. Though not representative of the German people, participants included former soldiers, fashion students, homeless people and even an ex-SS officer. Adorno found that participants were more likely to be defensive the more they were conscious of the enormity of Nazi crimes. They were likely, too, to identify with the new Germany despite those crimes. As a result, Germany seemed to be founded on a mass bad conscience, a collective psychopathology of denial. Of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Some respondents admitted guilt, but attempted to convert it into a private matter, a subject for self-pity. Others projected the guilt on to Nazi leaders as if to suggest that they were helpless in the face of the power of Hitler and his clique. Indeed, about half of those who took part in the group discussions rejected the suggestion of their guilt for the crimes of the Nazis. A few were able to confront their guilt, and it was in those that Adorno placed some hope: ‘It is the people who do not repress their consciousness of guilt and have no desperate need to adopt defensive attitudes who are free to speak the truth that not all Germans are anti-Semites.’20
Transcripts of interviews conducted for the Group Experiment included evidence of continued anti-Semitic and nationalist attitudes, which were sometimes combined with democratic views. Adorno identified a strange syndrome whereby people:
appeal to democracy in order to argue against the Jews … their reaction is: we have nothing against the Jews, we have no wish to persecute them, but they should not do things that conflict with an interest – wholly undefined and arbitrarily selected – of the nation. In particular, they should not have an over-representative share of highly paid and influential jobs. This kind of thinking … provides a way out for people caught in a conflict between bad conscience and defensiveness.21
Adorno concluded that in the post-war Federal Republic authoritarian attitudes and a general tendency to conform continued. When the Group Experiment was published in 1955, Adorno was attacked for his interpretation of the results. Its authors wanted to force the entire nation to repent, argued Hamburg social psychologist Peter Hofstätter in a review. ‘But how far can we assume that the majority of the members of a “nation” can be responsible for self-accusation for years on end?’22 But Adorno argued that it was the victims who had to bear the burden of the horrors of the Nazi regime, not a German people in denial. He saw that the Group Experiment would be resented for disrupting the ghost sonata. Or as he put it: ‘In the house of the hangman you should not speak of the rope; otherwise you will open yourself to the suspicion that you are rancorous person.’23
In the house of the hangman, Adorno kept speaking of taboo subjects. His essay ‘Culture Critique and Society’, when published in Prisms in 1955, proved incendiary to German and, more widely, European cultural life. He wrote:
Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.24
What Adorno had in mind, in part, was that culture served as an alibi, a zone of escape from political realities rather than painful confrontation with them. Culture, that is to say, was like Heidegger retreating into his Black Forest hut for spiritual contemplation when his proper task was to confront his past – an unjustifiable distraction. In his book of aphorisms, Minima Moralia: Notes on Damaged Life, which he had brought in manuscript in his suitcase from California and published to great acclaim in 1951, Adorno wrote: ‘That culture has so far failed is no justification for furthering its failure, by strewing the store of good flour on the spilt beer like the girl in the fairy-tale.’25
Thus far the revolutionary potential of works of art in the age of mechanical production in which Walter Benjamin had placed so much hope had not been realised: culture had become impotent to change oppressive social reality; worse, it helped hold that oppressive order in place. Marcuse, in his 1937 essay ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, had argued that culture separates itself from society or civilisation and creates the space for critical thought and social change. But instead of fulfilling any emancipatory role it had become an autonomous zone, a place of retreat from social reality. In this zone, Marcuse argued, the demand for happiness in the real world is abandoned for an internal form of happiness, the happiness of the soul. Bourgeois culture creates an interior of the human being where the highest ideals of culture can be realised. This inner transformation does not demand an external transformation of the real world and its material conditions. Such is affirmative culture: the horrors of the everyday can be dissipated by attending to the beauties of Chopin.
But that failure of culture to perform its critical social role effectively was a prelude to an even greater obscenity. In his memoir If This Is a Man, Primo Levi described hearing the musical reveille every morning from his infirmary bed in Auschwitz. ‘We all feel that this music is infernal’, he wrote. ‘When this music plays, we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills.’26 What was the point of culture when it had failed in its critical role, and when it did little more than supply a soundtrack to mass murder? And yet, philosophers, artists and writers railed against Adorno’s stricture. The Auschwitz survivor and philosopher Jean Améry accused Adorno of using a language intoxicated by itself in which he had exploited Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom of ‘absolute negativity’. The author and playwright Wolfgang Hildesheimer argued in his poetics lectures in 1967 that poetry was the only possible literary option after Auschwitz. For him, such poems as Paul Celan’s Todesfuge and Ingeborg Bachman’s Früher Mittag ‘were flight and flashes of insight into the terrifying instability of the world, the absurd’.27 Bachman’s poem, for instance, written seven years after the Second World War ended, begins with a description of lush summer, a verdant lime tree and gushing fountains, and then, in its second stanza, abruptly shifts mood:
Where Germany’s sky blackens the earth
Its beheaded angel seeks a grave for hate
And offers you the bowl of the heart28
Bachman’s partner, the Swiss playwright and novelist, Max Frisch once argued that culture could serve as an alibi; Bachman’s poem does the opposite. It tells us that it is no longer possible to remember Germany’s lyrical poetic heritage without also remembering its crimes. It is a poem that displaces and estranges the world – the task that, in Minima Moralia, Adorno had insisted was necessary for philosophy but which poetry such as Bachman’s could do just as well.
The Austrian poet and Adorno became friendly, particularly after she gave poetry lectures in Frankfurt in 1959. By 1966, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno would revise his opinion of a decade earlier:
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt put on him who was spared.29
In Negative Dialectics, too, Adorno expressed better what human duty was in the wake of Auschwitz than he had a decade earlier. ‘A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.’30
AS HE SURVEYED his native land on his return, Adorno saw little that made him think that the German part of unfree mankind was capable of acting in line with that categorical imperative. Not only were the new bosses silent about, or former allies of, Hitler, but the rest of Germany still bent the knee to power. He wrote to Thomas Mann in June 1950:
The inarticulate character of apolitical conviction, the readiness to submit to every manifestation of actual powers, the instant accommodation to whatever new situation emerges, all this is merely an aspect of the same regression. If it is true that the manipulative control of the masses always brings about a regressive formation of humanity, and if Hitler’s drive for power essentially involved the relationship of this development ‘at a single stroke’, we can only say that he, and the collapse that followed, has succeeded in producing the required infantilisation.31
Fascism had been overthrown in Germany but the personality type that supported it had survived. The notion that those likely to be seduced by fascist leaders were infantile was a long-running theme of Adorno’s work before he returned to Germany. But another important theme of the Frankfurt School after the war, and one that scandalised in particular those who had fought for the Allies against the Nazis, was that there were parallels between how the National Socialists controlled the German people and how the seemingly free citizens of putatively liberal democratic states such as the United States were robbed of what they took to be their collective birthrights, freedom and autonomy.
At a symposium of psychoanalysts and sociologists in San Francisco in 1944, before he returned to Europe, Adorno had accounted for the success of fascist propaganda by saying that ‘it simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today’s standardised mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity’.32 There were similarities, he argued, between Nazi propaganda and the radio broadcasts by Californian preachers whom he called ‘would-be Hitlers’. Both tried to gain authority over their audiences by a two-stage rhetorical process – first, professing their own weakness and thus identifying with the weak recipients of that message; second, stressing their status as one of the chosen few whom their listeners could join if they would only submit to their authority. To be a successful Führer or an effective charismatic radio preacher, Adorno argued, one must be what he called the ‘great little man’, enough like the follower to appeal to those elements of narcissism which remain attached to the follower’s own ego, and yet also embody their collective hopes and even virtues. Hitler’s genius, Adorno suggested, was that he ‘posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber’.33
This symposium led to Adorno’s work in the development of what became known as the Californian F-scale, a personality test he developed in 1947 with researchers working at the University of California at Berkeley, that was published in 1950 in a book called The Authoritarian Personality in the Studies in Prejudice series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. F stands for fascist, and the idea worked from the hypothesis Erich Fromm had similarly sought to test in his study of German workers nearly two decades earlier, that to investigate the character types most likely to succumb to fascism, researchers would have to penetrate the manifest dimensions of personality to get to the latent structures beneath. Like Fromm’s study, the Berkeley project involved a Freudian developmental model: the authoritarian personality was unable to confront their harsh and punitive parents, and instead identified with authority figures. More dubiously, the authoritarian personality was linked to the suppressed homosexuality taken to be common to sadomasochists. ‘The forbidden action which is converted into aggression is generally homosexual in nature’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. ‘Through fear of castration, obedience to the father is taken to the extreme of an anticipation of castration in conscious emotional approximation to the nature of a small girl, and actual hatred to the father is suppressed.’34
But while Fromm’s worker study was initiated to investigate the likely strength of German workers in resisting fascism and their amenability to revolutionary socialist ideas, the Berkeley study investigated the personality types that were likely to succumb to anti-democratic ideas and those that were not. One reason for this change was that, as we have seen, while in America the Institute dared not use the M word (Marxism) in its essays or research, for fear of alienating potential sponsors. As a result, ironically, the values and behaviours that had been associated with successful revolutionary Marxism in Fromm’s study were now associated with support for democracy in the Berkeley study.
But there is more to this shift in taxonomy than self-censorship – the disappearance of the language of Marxism from the Institute indicated the Frankfurt School’s declining faith in the proletariat and in revolution. Lukács had written in History and Class Consciousness: ‘The fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness.’35 The Frankfurt School didn’t believe in revolution any more, precisely because the proletariat was unlikely to come to ideological maturity. As Fromm put it in his 1956 book The Sane Society: ‘The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones – and the eternally disappointed ones.’36 Ideological maturity was unlikely in such a world. The manipulative control of the masses always brings about a regressive formation of humanity, wrote Adorno in a 1950 letter to Thomas Mann.37 He was writing about Hitler’s impact, but the Frankfurt School’s growing belief was that such control and regression were features of the societies that had only recently allied against Hitler.
The F-scale was devised as part of a research project to explore what Adorno and his team called a ‘new anthropological type’, the authoritarian personality. It involved a set of questions designed to measure fascist potential, by means of testing nine personality variables as set out in The Authoritarian Personality, which Adorno described as follows:
Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealised moral authorities of the ingroup. Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. Power and ‘Toughness’: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalised attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalised hostility, vilification of the human. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’.38
The questionnaires invited respondents to state the extent to which they agreed with such statements as:
-Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
-What this country needs most, more than laws and political programs, is a few courageous, tireless, devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith.
-What the youth needs most is strict discipline, rugged determination, and the will to work and fight for family and country.
-There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
-Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped, or worse.
-The true American way of life is disappearing so fast that force may be necessary to preserve it.39
Respondents were allowed to make graduated agreement or disagreement with these and other statements and the responses entered on a scale that went from +3 to -3. From the 2,099 people – all white, gentile, middle-class Americans – who filled in the questionnaires, those who scored high or low on the F-scale were invited to take part in longer evaluative interviews. Adorno used information from these interviews to draw up a list of six types of authoritarian personality, and five types of non-authoritarian personality.
Authoritarian personality types included the ‘tough guy’ (whose ‘repressed id tendencies gain the upper hand, but in a stunted form’ according to Adorno) and the ‘crank’ and ‘manipulative’ types (both of whom, Adorno thought, ‘seem to have resolved the Oedipus complex through a narcissistic withdrawal into their inner selves’). Adorno also devised a typology for respondents who scored low on the F-scale. Non-fascist types included the ‘protesting’ type (whose ‘undercurrent of hostility against the father, leads to the conscientious rejection of heteronomous authority instead of its acceptance. The decisive feature is opposition to whatever appears to be tyranny’) and the ‘genuine liberal’ (who ‘may be conceived in terms of that balance between superego, ego, and id which Freud deemed ideal’).40
Adorno didn’t specify which type he belonged to, but the safe money says he would have described himself as a genuine liberal.41
When The Authoritarian Personality was published in 1950, the F-scale was criticised for many things, not least for its assumption that conservatism and authoritarianism were related. It was also attacked because clever people could second guess the significance of the questions, react in a more suitable manner and skew the results. The University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils wondered why authoritarianism was linked to fascism rather than communism in Adorno and his team’s work. Would a C-scale be very different from an F-scale? Surely in 1950 the real opposition was between liberal democracies and totalitarianism, be that fascist or communist? The Cold War had begun and so what was needed was not to understand the personality types that supported Hitler, but the personality types that supported Stalin and his successors and, quite possibly, to weed out those with communistic tendencies. Retooled, the F-scale could become the R-scale (R standing for Red); and another scale could be calibrated to investigate the desirable types who would resist the Red menace. The idea may have been to pit the unfortunate sadomasochistic hordes of the Soviet bloc against the free, virile individual personality types who thrived in the free west, but Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School refused to contrast Soviet totalitarianism with the individualist non-ideological libertarian west. They saw domination everywhere – in fascist, socialist and liberal capitalist polities.
Indeed, in The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno went so far as to suggest that the rhetoric of individualism, deployed during the Cold War against Soviet collectivism, was itself a tool of domination. ‘Individualism, opposed to inhuman pigeonholing, may ultimately become a mere ideological veil in a society which actually is inhuman and whose intrinsic tendency towards the “subsumption” of everything shows itself by the classification of people themselves.’ Adorno bracingly argued that humans were little more than instances of types in class-ridden society. ‘In other words’, he wrote, ‘large numbers of people are no longer, or rather never were, “individuals” in the sense of traditional nineteenth-century philosophy … [O]verpowering social processes … leave to the “individual” but little freedom for action and true individuation.’42