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Introduction to the Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” |
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following remarks were added by Adorno as an introduction when he repeated the lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” on 24 May 1962, in Berlin at the invitation of the Socialist German Student Association [Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund] (SDS).
The lecture you are about to hear was given on 6 November 1959, that is, before the filthy wave of anti-Semitism lent it a sad topicality. Permit me to indicate at the beginning that I made the attempt to derive the phenomena, which have unsettled us during recent months, from objective social and social-psychological conditions. So in this case sociological theory to a certain extent has preceded empirical reality and been confirmed by it. To be sure, studies such as the one undertaken in the Group Experiment by the Institute for Social Research, but also the surveys by several public opinion research institutes, have long since accumulated enough material to justify fears of this sort.1 The theoretical anticipation is perhaps not irrelevant for the controversy about the nature and significance of recent events because they were inferred from structural elements that explain more deeply and more seriously than theses that join the symptoms of the day. In particular the ever recurring question of whether what is at issue is a planned and directed undertaking—or just pranks by those whose very characterization as “rowdy kids” in fact already characterizes the actions they then perform—hardly does justice to the events. If indeed, as I will lay out for you, objective conditions and tendencies produce the relapse into catastrophe, then such alternatives surely lose their meaning. On the one hand, there undoubtedly exist groups who identify themselves with these tendencies, who support them and who further them in the service of their own political will to power. In the well-known German love of organizations one can surely assume, without falling into persecution fantasies, that such groups are far more organized than they appear; that they are so difficult to apprehend is probably due to careful organization on their part. On the other hand, the social-psychological elements that in turn follow from the objective societal situation, and about which I will say a few things, create a reservoir of people who can be recruited for the aims of such organizers. There prevails a kind of preestablished harmony between this reservoir and those who exploit it. The two interact such that it is difficult to assign responsibility to one side or the other. Just as even the National Socialist conspirators were not essentially different from the people who flocked to them, rather they simply had the ill-fated gift of being able to find the brazen slogan for what was already lying ready, silently and insidiously, in others. One takes the twelve years of terror all too lightly if all the blame is laid at the feet of Hitler and his paladins and if one overlooks the fact that in their clique something coalesced that reached far beyond their private wills and their special interests. Conversely, that wide reservoir alone never would have gained such destructive power if it had not been channeled and constantly pushed beyond its immediate contents at the time.
So please understand my reflections as a contribution to the attempt to deal with the threat not through fruitless indignation and cosmetic measures, but rather by comprehending it in its deeper dimensions. Some suggestions for praxis nonetheless may follow, even if one does not imagine the path from insight to action to be as short as so many well-meaning people today seem to believe it to be.