Appendix 1

Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”

 

 

 

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The first published version of “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” includes the following transcription of the discussion that followed the lecture.

Professor Adorno’s lecture was first discussed in four study groups. Each of these groups prepared several questions, which were then presented to the lecturer in the plenary meeting.

FIRST QUESTION:	Would the question of coming to terms with the German past arise if there had not been a National Socialist period?
PROF. ADORNO:	I can only respond to that by saying that Hegel handled this problem with the concept of “abstract possibility.”1 I mean, I simply cannot answer this question. If world history had not been shattered into pieces, then the problem of collective amnesia probably would not have arisen, but in the end it is no coincidence that everything happened the way it did. I would like to propose that we set this question aside, because I think answering it will not help us much.
SECOND QUESTION:	The focus of our discussion was on the concept you called the “self-alienation of society.” Could you please explain this in a bit more detail?
PROF. ADORNO:	I spoke of the self-alienation of society here in connection with the problem of democracy, and I meant that because of the preponderance of innumerable societal processes over the particular individuals, people in their societal role are not identical with what they are as immediate, living people. Democracy, according to its very idea, promises people that they themselves would make decisions about their world. But democracy actually prevents them from this “deciding for oneself about the world.” In other words, with the concept of self-alienation—and perhaps I should not have done so—I was really referring to a very fundamental philosophical state of affairs, in terms of social philosophy, that perhaps we should not go into here, because I don’t think that here, where we are of course concerned ultimately with deriving applications, that within such a group we have the possibility of coming to grips with this phenomenon of self-alienation in the real world. However, I don’t want to evade your question. I think that this question can be changed into something far more empirical, which to be sure is only indirectly related to this highly theoretical concept of self-alienation I allowed myself to use in a sentence just that once. It is in fact a pedagogical-psychological question I have in mind here. You must excuse me, if I churn butter out of the Milky Way and now speak directly terre à terre. It seems to me to be the case that in the development of children, their first experience of alienation generally is when they enter school. For the first time the child is torn away from the protection of the family, from the extended womb, so to say, and comes to feel the coldness of a world with which he or she is not identical. And it seems to me to be the case that genetically the first expressions of anti-Semitism or of racial hatred at all, as for instance the persecution of black children or red-haired children or whatever it may be, takes place precisely at this stage. Now in part this has the quite solid reason that in school, for one reason or another, there is always a child who has already picked that up from home—this prejudice—and who then spreads it further. But I think that generally a factor comes in here, that people have the tendency to pass onto others whatever has happened to them, to do once more to others what was done to them. Thus, the child who in school experiences coldness, anxiety, the pressure of the collective, psychologically saves himself by displacing it onto others, and groups form in order, as it were, to pass this burden of alienation onto others. I would at least construe as a problem—God knows I would not presume to solve it, but I would like to mention it for the educators among you—whether, if possible, precisely in the first years of school forms might not be developed that would prevent this oppression of the individual, and moreover of every individual, by the collective. Perhaps thereby at a very crucial place genetically in the development of the child one could counteract the emergence of racial prejudices. Here I would like just to toss these thoughts into the debate, so to speak, as a first practical application of the problem of alienation, for indeed here one could really, as it were, get at the alienation. I mean here, that is, here one could really come to grips with it in manageably small groups, whereas of course the socially dictated alienation within society at large, in which we live, cannot be overcome through any kind of educational work.
THIRD QUESTION:	Within the system underlying your observations, where is there room for individual responsibility? To what extent are the societal processes and conditions so overwhelming that for the individual there remains no possibility whatsoever to make one’s own decisions and to act with personal responsibility?
PROF. ADORNO:	I think this question in fact repeats the question I raised myself. It would be extremely irresponsible and careless of me to say to you: yes, but the individual’s responsibility is something inalienable, but it really is curtailed precisely under the preponderance of this process, and when I told you that the reflections I’ve shared with you are not of an edifying nature, but rather very earnest, then I was referring exactly to this. Nonetheless I think that if people finally are able really to see through their entanglement in the objective conditions I tried, however sketchily, to explain to you, that the consciousness that raises itself above this compulsion by seeing through it at the same time also produces the potential that can be used to resist it. I would say, and I also tried to suggest this in the last sentence of my lecture, that what you have termed autonomy and self-responsibility today essentially consists altogether in the resistance of people, in that they try to see through these mechanisms and that they themselves yet somehow rebel against these mechanisms. Morality has transformed itself nowadays into the resistance against this blind force, against this predominance of the merely existent, under which in fact we all must suffer today. This is of course very abstract and unsatisfying, and is no fanfare at all, for how far this resistance goes, that’s another story. But I would still like to say, if one once at some point or other—and I return to what I said about the paranoia being infectious—pursues something specific with a little bit of craziness, if you will allow me, without letting oneself get all confused, then strangely enough one comes further than in fact would be expected if one reflected about these things objectively. I could give you quite curious evidence of this from my own experience, I don’t want to do that, lest it divert us from our subject. I really believe that when one has this power of consciousness on his side, that is, when one really has the better insight on his side and when one today is committed—a word I do not like at all—that the scope of such a commitment is larger than the mere analysis of objectivity would lead one to suppose. We are not only spectators looking upon this predominance of the institutional and the objective that confronts us; rather it is after all constituted out of us, this societal objectivity is made up of us ourselves. In this doubleness, that we are subject and object of this society, surely lies precisely also the possibility of perhaps changing it.
ADDITIONAL QUESTION:	If the conditions of society remain unchanged, then the latent danger of a resurgence still exists. Does this danger also exist in other countries with similar societal conditions?
PROF. ADORNO:	I would answer with an emphatic yes: that the danger also exists in other countries, and it is even probably important for the practical work in Germany that the issue is not a purely German phenomenon and that it is not a matter of some particular characteristics of the German national character, but that this threat lies precisely in a society where simply the immense concentration of economical and administrative power leaves the individual no more room to maneuver, that the structure of such a society also tends toward totalitarian forms of domination. But it is better to indicate this danger and become conscious of it than to act naively and innocently as though the danger did not exist.
FOURTH QUESTION:	What possibility do you see of lessening the universal anxiety? Someone in our group said that rational means don’t work against feelings and that distinctions must be made between older and younger people, since the latter surely have less anxiety.
PROF. ADORNO:	I think that any irrationality that is recommended for rational reasons, that is, because people cannot be changed by rational means, is always something very dubious. Irrationality that, as it were, is rationally prescribed—that is exactly what I described in my short characterization of propaganda—introduces into the work, which is so vitally important for us, an element of dishonesty and ambiguity that would give me serious pause. Well, I would say, and I agree completely with you, one cannot simply overcome very strong irrational forces by rational means. I said this over and over again in my lecture as well. So, psychologically speaking, in terms of the economy of drives there exist needs for things like racial prejudices that are simply far too powerful for one to be able deal with them by making clear to people that Rothschild did not start the battle of Waterloo and that The Protocols of Zion are counterfeit. By the way, the fact that the general refutation of the Protocols did not alter in the least their effectiveness is in itself a very interesting thing. But that does not condemn us to irrationality; instead the consequence to be drawn would really be what I tried to characterize as the turn to the subject, that is, the crucial thing is to be rational, not in the superficial sense, as when people who believe untrue things for irrational reasons are then confronted with the truth, but instead that people be brought to the point in themselves, through self-reflection, of gaining insight into what they can do in this respect. And this seems to me certainly to be the most important task for education that would begin relatively early in childhood, that is, rationality not in the sense of a rationalistic insistence on facts, but rationality in the sense of people being led to self-reflection and thereby being prevented from becoming blind victims of this instinctual impulse. By the way, I of course do not want to speak in favor of a crude and philistine rationalism, rather I mean only that the irrationality, which I consider a very serious danger, of course does not lie in the fact that people have instincts and passions and whatever else, but rather that the irrationality—and perhaps I have not stressed this enough, in the emphatic sense, in which I meant it as something negative—this irrationality is the instinctual impulses and the affects that are repressed—I simply must speak Freudian here—and that teem about in the darkness and emerge again in distorted, twisted, altered form as aggression, as projection, as displacement, all those things we are so familiar with, and wreak havoc. And so when I spoke of the need to resist irrationality, I meant irrationality in this repressed, this twisted sense that was first wonderfully described by Nietzsche and then thoroughly analyzed by Freud. I therefore do not mean that people should become merely cold rationalists and shouldn’t have affects and passions any more. On the contrary, if they have more affects and more passions, they will have less prejudices. I would like to say, if they allow themselves more of their affects and passions, if they do not once again repeat in themselves the pressure that society exerts upon them, then they will be far less evil, far less sadistic, and far less malicious than they sometimes are today.
ADDITIONAL QUESTION:	Would you please briefly address the question of whether young people suffer less from universal anxiety than the older generation?
PROF. ADORNO:	One can answer such questions only with reservations if one really does not want to speak irresponsibly. I would say that nonetheless the young people have also received a great deal of this anxiety. The anxiety itself—I tried to explain this—has its basis in reality. The anxiety today is not at all neurotic anymore. The anxiety that people have, that they will be killed by atomic bombs—for that I don’t need any existentialist philosophy that issues mysterious statements about the essence of anxiety. This anxiety is in itself quite reasonable. The excessive need for security, for safety, that can be seen in many people, that they always want to be holding something solid in their hands, that they are anxious about getting involved in anything they cannot get an overall view of beforehand, the tendency to marry as soon as possible, before one is mature enough—I could provide countless other, and above all intellectual moments—all this seems to me to indicate a repressed anxiety, and this repressed anxiety certainly is closely connected to this potential for disaster. I don’t believe that here a great distinction can seriously be made between the forty-year-olds and the twenty-year-olds today.
FIFTH QUESTION:	How can the working-through succeed if self-examination already assumes abilities the majority of people doesn’t have?
PROF. ADORNO:	This is of course correct. And here you precisely define the problem, that is, it would be wholly wrong if we were to preach self-examination and then expect that because of this sermon people will examine themselves. That is illusory. What we can do is give people contents, give them categories, give them forms of consciousness, by means of which they can approach self-reflection. The question you pose seems to me in turn to be extraordinarily grave because we know from psychology that something like analysis and also self-analysis faces extraordinarily great difficulties for reasons I do not want to go into here. I know the forces that repress the unconscious are the same forces that then prevent us from becoming conscious of these things, and to be sure when we talk here we cannot forget what we have learned from psychology. In our work we must not, so to say, be more naive than the most advanced psychology. But I think, we should be a little more liberal on this point. For example, as I could observe in America, if something has once been established in public opinion, for instance, that anti-Semitism is bad, that anti-Semitism is a symptom indicating that something is wrong with the person himself, then certainly these potentials will not be cured at the level of depth psychology, but, and I intentionally am expressing myself a bit casually here, people won’t dare to do it anymore. And I think, in a sphere where murder occurs, it is nevertheless pretty good if people won’t dare to do it anymore.
SIXTH QUESTION:	In our group there were questions about standards of value. How far do you believe the ethical values of Christianity can be brought to bear in the intellectual exchange with anti-Semites? If in your opinion the preconditions for fascist thinking are still present today, don’t we need to ground our behavior more deeply in terms of ethics?
PROF. ADORNO:	Well, you are putting me in a difficult position as a professor of philosophy. Ex officio, so to speak, I would be obliged to speak for such an ethics. However, I am terribly sorry, I cannot do it. First, because I believe the problem of a correct life cannot be expressed in a doctrine of value. I certainly think that Christianity, simply because it is a power in the tradition and also in its contemporary organizational form, is also a part of those forces that check anti-Semitism, although I am honest enough to tell you that I think Christianity has fed a whole series of motives into anti-Semitism. But I do not think one gets very far with anti-Semites by appealing to Christianity, because they in fact confirm a condition, they bring to a culmination a condition in which the binding force of all these things no longer exists. If one reads the book by Kogon on the SS state,2 stories play a great role in it, stories like: there’s smoke coming out of the crematorium again, probably it’s some serious Biblical scholar winding his way up to the heavens. It’s in all the Nazi atrocities, for instance, also in that they hauled off eighty- and ninety-year-olds into the camps and killed them, even this is part of it, as it were to challenge the Christian or Jewish God: come on, show us what You can do. And if He allows it and there’s no bolt of lightning, then it is a sort of triumph. I mean by this that the people who do it, that is, the actually dangerous types, are from the very beginning those who have already extirpated in themselves precisely the element of truth that is present in the great religions, they have already annulled beforehand the motive of pity, the motive of reconciliation. And I’d have to wholly ignore this syndrome were I to presume that these people are responsive to this approach. They would be responsive only if they could be brought somewhat to self-reflection, and they are responsive to the demonstration that their entire practical reason they apply ultimately brings disaster upon them as well. By appealing to a religious tradition they in fact already have rejected and against which they already react with a kind of spite, I don’t think one will get to them. I don’t want to deny that in particular cases it can be otherwise. There are of course many people, for instance, those of conservative intellectual temperament, who stand in the Christian tradition and on the other hand precisely in connection with their conservatism indulge in a certain social anti-Semitism. Such people can of course be made aware of this contradiction and probably can also be motivated to change. In general I do not think this will do it, but rather that the consciousness of anti-Semites really is precisely the regression into a crude rationalism. And I think it can only be fought on its own ground, that one applies the standard of ratio that at bottom is the only standard anti-Semitism acknowledges.
ADDITIONAL QUESTION:	One probably cannot convince incorrigible anti-Semites with a Christian or another religious ethos. They will also hardly react to utilitarian arguments of advantage, for they received enough advantage during the years of Hitlerism. Perhaps the problem should be put this way: do you believe that the youth can be convinced by a religious ethos rather than by utilitarian arguments?
PROF. ADORNO:	You see, we’re getting at a very difficult matter indeed. One cannot pronounce something like a religious ideal for the sake of the effect it has. There is only one legitimation for pronouncing an ideal, and that is its own truth. I would say that the collective role Christianity plays today in a large measure is that people seek and accept it because they believe they find a bond in it. But not at all for the sake of its own truth, and I think that in this tendency there is something that is extraordinarily dangerous for these very religions. And I think, the theologians would grant me this most heartily, that enlisting so to speak religious motives in order to confirm something else, as long as these religious motives are not entirely transparent and as long as they are not based on the truth, that this is a very double-edged matter. But here we are at an extremely difficult juncture, and I know far too well that many among you, and precisely among the most impassioned, do this out of specifically Christian impulses, and so I do not dare draw from that fact general conclusions, which would be completely illegitimate. You asked me, and I, who am not involved in such a bond, cannot answer otherwise. But to be sure religion should not be used in any sense as a means to an end, neither on account of the religion nor on account of the cause for which it is used.
SEVENTH QUESTION:	Doesn’t the claim that the appeal to purely blatant interests can contribute more to the overcoming of fascism than the appeal to ideals contradict our conception of education?
PROF. ADORNO:	Yes, I’d like to say something here generally about the question of education. Of course, our education contains something that could be called ideals, although in general I prefer to avoid using this word. We educate people toward the possibility of something better, instead of having them swear an oath to what exists. But I also really did not speak of our fundamental idea of education. I agree with you wholeheartedly, we must educate people toward the idea that they are more than what simply exists. Otherwise education is altogether complete nonsense. Rather I really spoke from familiarity with the specifically susceptible character type, and I certainly would say that this type is characterized by the fact that he is constantly talking about ideals, and the really archetypical anti-Semite, if he were here among us, would say that we lack ideals. At the same time he would also be the person who in an emergency would have not the least respect for anything that turns out not to belong to the sphere of power, reality, and realism. And since here it comes down to dealing with this potential, I would say—the subjective aspect, of reaching people, is indeed only a small part of the whole problem—but as soon as it’s about that, one must in God’s name tell people that this pitiful reason, which racial prejudice, which fascism and everything connected with it obeys, precisely is so particular and narrow that it is also at the same time unreason and that it turns against the people who proclaim it; and by making this narrow reason transparent as such and by juxtaposing to it, first of all according to its own standard, a higher reason, through this probably one would really achieve in education what is meant by the concept of ideal.
ADDITIONAL QUESTION:	Instead of speaking in general of ideals, could we take one concretely, namely the ideal of justice? Do you see a possibility of building up reserves against totalitarian thinking by drawing on legal thought and people’s sense of justice?
PROF. ADORNO:	Here I would say, I indeed think that the concept of justice occupies such a privileged position among the ideals because the concept of justice always also includes one’s own interest, that is, because when they are referred to the concept “justice” people see that their own interests are sublated into the general interest. That is probably why the concept of justice should really be invoked. But at this point I would like to say something that will perhaps surprise you, after I’ve spoken so much about enlightenment. For I don’t know whether one doesn’t end up in a hopeless position when one goes into these things in the discussion, for instance, to say that certainly it really is an absolute norm that no one should be killed, but in war people are killed, and there do exist exceptional situations—which norm, which ethical law contains the ultimate justification for them? I think, when one gets involved in, I would like to say, adolescent discussions, in such infantile discussions, where the most drastic things are at issue, when one right away asks about the stars and the absolutely ultimate values, then one is already in the devil’s kitchen, and I think that in answer to this a certain minimum amount of enlightenment suffices, namely, when one simply says, listen, whether one should murder people or not murder people, that’s something I won’t discuss, that is a vulgarity I cannot abide—that this is basically also philosophically the higher standpoint, rather than if one were to derive from a system of ethics, first, second, and third volume, that is, general, specific, and very specific parts, that one should not murder the Jews. I mean, to get involved in theoretical discussions about whether people should be tortured or not, let’s rather stop that. I think that then certainly in a higher sense breaking off rationality at such places better serves reason than a kind of pseudo-rationality that erects systems where it is first and foremost a question of immediate reaction.
EIGHTH QUESTION:	You said that conditions of our society have changed only superficially. But haven’t these changes also had more profound effects? You said that objective societal preconditions are a necessary but not sufficient cause for National Socialism. This leads to the question of what should be seen as the final cause for the emergence of National Socialism and whether it is possible to overcome National Socialism when the objective societal preconditions have remained unchanged.
PROF. ADORNO:	I cannot recall that I said the necessary but not sufficient precondition. You are probably thinking of my having said that I do not consider National Socialism to be a specifically German phenomenon. I would respond to this by saying that here probably the sufficient explanation was the worsening of the political-economic situation in Germany and also certain theological traditions. I also actually feel that in relation to the militant nationalism that was found everywhere in the Germany of the Weimar Republic people have now somehow become gentler. Above all, certain traditions of a certain militant nationalism have grown weaker. This is probably connected with the fact that Imperial Germany plays only a very slight role in collective memory and also with the objective situation that people no longer seriously think that we will defeat France and that people can no longer imagine that Germany can conquer the world, simply because of the whole reality. To that extent I think that something certainly has changed, and moreover in the sense that we are genuinely becoming more similar to America, which I by no means put down to the so-called American influence, but rather to the fact that in countless aspects the structure of German society is approaching that of American society. On the other hand, I would say that in comparison with the Germany of 1933 the decisive cause of fascism, namely the concentration of economic and administrative power on the one side and complete impotence on the other side, has progressed. But I would still think that this altered subjective potential nonetheless can have as much force as it does in America. After all, for the last fifty or sixty years America has been the country of trusts and trust-legislation, of this immense concentration of economic power, and nevertheless the democratic rules have functioned so well up to now that the danger of fascism in America is, at the moment in any case, very slight. I don’t see why at least such a chance shouldn’t exist for us, where indeed there live so many “burnt children” in the fullest sense of the phrase.3 Excuse me, the answer came out a bit complicated and complex, but the world simply is that complex, and it is not always possible to reduce these things to a simple and easy formula.
NINTH QUESTION:	It was said that even exaggeration is a means for teaching and education. Could you explain this a bit more?
PROF. ADORNO:	I would like to try to forestall a misunderstanding. I would not be able to accept the responsibility for recommending exaggeration in education. On the contrary, where consciousness is so sensitive, as in these places, if someone says, say, that six million Jews were killed and not five million, then the five million wouldn’t be believed either. With this I only wanted to say, in consideration of the by no means optimistic overall picture that I gave, that I perhaps exaggerated and this exaggeration seems to me to be a necessary medium for social-theoretical and philosophical presentation, because the moderate, normal surface existence in general conceals such potentials and because in the face of neutral, average everydayness to indicate the threat lying below it at first blush always has the character of exaggeration. I would urgently warn against exaggeration in pedagogical work, for instance. On the contrary, I would say the less the idea of propaganda here even arises, the more stringently one holds to the facts—which God knows speak for themselves, or against themselves—the better. If you will recall from the war, which I of course did not experience in Germany, the authority the BBC, the English radio, enjoyed precisely because it did not make propaganda but because one knew that it was telling the truth, then I think this expressed something very central to our problem.