Lectures: The Aftermath of National Socialism (March 1945)
Lectures by Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal.
Editor’s note.
“The Aftermath of National Socialism” was a lecture series delivered by the remaining core members of the ISR through the Columbia Sociology Department in March, 1945, possibly in connection with Horkheimer’s own “Lectures on National Socialism and Philosophy” delivered over Spring 1945. (I’ve transcribed four typescripts, dated from February to May, with notes of the minutes for Horkheimer’s “National Socialism and Philosophy” series here. The “National Socialism and Philosophy” lectures are almost unprecedented insofar as the notes suggest Horkheimer explicitly and publicly presented the ‘Marxist’ position as the one closest to his own.) The following transcriptions of Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal’s lectures were made from typescripts found in the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA], Na [654]. To my knowledge, the only lecture in this series that has previously been published is Adorno’s, “The Fate of the Arts,” under the title “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts” in Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music (2002).1 I haven’t been able to find a typescript for Horkheimer’s opening lecture, “Totalitarianism and the Crisis of European Culture,” so I’ve included my own reconstruction from the surviving three pages of handwritten notes. I’ve also included my transcription of a 2-page typescript of a fragment entitled “Notes by Dr. Adorno re: public lectures. March 1945” which is listed as the last of the contents for the sub-section of the folder containing “The Aftermath of National Socialism.”
Instead of an introduction, I want to propose the following thesis: for all of the speakers in this series, the reconstruction and de-Nazification of Europe would have to be much more radical than it was shaping up to be in any of the postwar planning by national power-blocs and new international ‘peacekeeping’ organizations—’democratization’ would either be socialist, whether by reform or revolution, or it would not be democratization at all.2 This was the perspective from which Adorno and Horkheimer still insisted in their last addition to Dialectic of Enlightenment—the seventh and final thesis to “Elements of Anti-Semitism”—on emphatically expressing the tendencies engendered by “liberal democracy” (to them, largely an oxymoron) towards its self-conceived opposite in fascism.3 Their writings from the second half of the 1940s, both published and unpublished, make the repeated appeal to the anti-fascist defenders of liberal democratic societies to finally make good on their democratic promises. Fulfilling these would demand the universal realization of the equality that is only promised by liberal ideals in socialist democracy.4 The socialist horizon of their immanent critique of liberal democracies in their social research on prejudice has been largely neglected in secondary literature to date.5 The developments in critical theory after 1950 are—to a much greater extent than has perhaps been recognized—responses to the fact that the ‘democratization’ promised to Western Europe was only its ‘liberalization.’ The small group, even further reduced from their diminished numbers after 1942/43, that ‘returns’ to West Germany in 1949 would have a range of responses from resigned democratic progressivism with utopian socialist characteristics (Adorno) to the racist paranoia of the reactionary Cold Warrior fighting for the survival of Western ‘civilization’ from the ‘barbarism’ it projected onto the East (Horkheimer, Pollock).6
In the second half of the 1940s, the ISR core authored a series of diagnostic texts on the global postwar situation and (mostly unpublished) speculative sketches for German postwar reconstruction. These documents have a program all of their own—a curious mixture of scientific and utopian socialism in the era of barbarism triumphant in its supposed defeat. As the world was rapidly polarizing into the geopolitical blocs of the coming Cold War, and the anti-fascist popular fronts purged the remaining radicals from their ranks to remobilize as networks of liberal-democratic anti-communist organs of empire, the critical theorists fought one last good fight together for the “shades of socialism”7 that threatened to disappear with the vanishing neither/nor to the false dichotomy ‘East’ and ‘West.’ As Horkheimer remarks in the discussion protocol for his and Adorno’s long-planned but never written sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment:
We see this moment of unity [in the analysis of politics and philosophy] in holding fast to the radical impulses of Marxism and, in fact, of the entire Enlightenment—for the rescue of the Enlightenment is our concern—but without identifying ourselves with any empirically existing group. Our position is, in a sense, a materialism which dispenses with the prejudice of regarding any moment of existing material reality as directly positive. The paradox, the dialectical secret of a true politics, consists in choosing a critical standpoint which does not hypostatize itself as the positive standpoint.8
However right or wrong they were in trying to hold the impossible standpoint of ‘true politics’ in the period of postwar reorganization, all of the speakers in the ISR’s March 1945 sequence on “The Aftermath of National Socialism” were, and would be until their terminal ‘return’ from America, still “unswervingly” committed to the project of rescuing what Pollock below calls that “last desperate attempt to reunite in one system of thoughts the ideals of mankind and scientific work—the philosophy of Karl Marx,” which, despite having “lost its specific theoretical meaning and become one of the reigning slogans rather than an inspiring truth,” is the only remaining orientation of those who seek “to oppose the use of whatever means seems fit to conquer and maintain power.”
—James/Crane (7/9/2025)
Contents.
Notes by Dr. Adorno re: public lectures. March 1945.
The Aftermath of National Socialism.
[Reconstruction] Horkheimer: Totalitarianism and the Crisis of European Culture.
Adorno: The Fate of the Arts.
Pollock: Prejudice and the Social Classes.
Löwenthal: The Aftermath of Totalitarian Terror.
Notes by Dr. Adorno re: public lectures. March 1945.
(1) General introduction pointing out that this war represents a conflict between different levels of the governmental and political organizations of a highly developed industrial society with a paradoxical result that the older political forms, not yet fully adapted to prevailing conditions of today’s capitalism, are about to defeat forms which, though barbarically reactionary, are in an organizatory way more advanced than the victorious ones. Victory has been won in the name of an ideology which, though intrinsically superior and more humane than the opposing one, seems to be less adequate to the socio-economic reality as it is than the other one, while, at the same time, transcending this self-same reality which is left over as the only measure stick within the fascist set-up.
It would be the aim of the lecture to follow up both these aspects, namely (1) what impact this paradoxical situation has upon the post-war world, and particularly upon America’s attitude, (2) how the intrinsic truth still preserved within a democratic ideology can be established and may ultimately check the destructive forces of “boundless” realism.
[ad 1.]
(a) Insofar as fascism is not an accident brought about from outside but the consummation of inherent trends of our society, it will not automatically disappear with victory. It will survive (1) in different kinds of semi-fascist set-ups in European countries (possibly discuss the ambiguous role of Russia), (2) society shows a tendency to bring again and again the same political forms. Here perhaps an analysis of inherently fascist trends in certain liberation movements such as in France may be discussed.
(b) The bad conscience of victory. Reference of guilt feeling of the Allies after the last war. The same thing even more definitely taking shape today. Perhaps some statements such as if Goebbels speaks today a lie it sounds, in a way, as if it denounces existing reality, as if it were the truth; if an allied statesman speaks the truth it often sounds as if it were a lie because of the apologetic and often dogmatically humanitarian element involved. Here the whole question of the indifference of large sectors of our population to the war should be discussed as a potentiality of fascism.
(c) The struggle against fascism has necessarily forced the victor nations to adopt a good many of the ideas and methods of the vanquished which necessarily gain a weight of their own, such as a more or less totalitarian organization of national life despite the formal democracy, the handling of international affairs in terms of mere expediency, the transformation of whole countries and populations into mere “objects,” the complete manipulation of the masses by means of public communications, and so on and so forth. While these processes were historically unavoidable and in order to gear our society into the high speed which was necessary in the fight against fascism, there is an inherent dialectics: all these trends made for fascism [itself].
(d) The carry-overs of defeated fascism may easily assume the character of a myth comparable to the Napoleon one. This is not only due to the tremendous impact of German militarism, the mass psychological appeal of which can hardly be overrated, but also to the fact that fascism in a way may be interpreted as the materialized daydreams of late capitalist society. Since the modern methods of warfare make it at least possible that fascist guerilla centers of resistance may survive in Europe for a long time to come, this myth may be enhanced by the glory of racketeering Freikorps. The memory of Hitlerism will be something infinitely different from the memory of old imperial Germany and there are many reasons to assume that the appeal of defeated German supranationalism will make itself felt on an international scale.
[ad 2.]
Some reflections on how to meet the danger.
(a) Fascist “realism” cannot be replaced by the more or less arbitrary re-introduction of idealist and humanistic ideologies which have been entirely debunked all over the world. What should be done, however, is to confront that realism with reality itself and thus to debunk it in turn. In other words, it will be one of the main objectives of philosophical and political thought and its public communications to point out the ideological element inherent in the modern religion of naked power and to show that all the apparent critique it aims at liberal society essentially does not serve as it claims “the people” but only the interest of a very small clique with the character of a racket (here the digression into the racketeering should be made).
(b) The bad conscience of victory can be overcome, (1) by explaining the mechanism behind it, (2) by following up the positive ideas by not only stating them dogmatically but by developing them out of the context of the inherent critique of fascism.9
The Aftermath of National Socialism (March 1945).
Max Horkheimer: TOTALITARIANISM AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE
Friday, March 2, 4:10 P.M. — Can science deal with the ideological menace of totalitarianism? How far is National Socialism a specific German problem?
Theodor W. Adorno: THE FATE OF THE ARTS
Friday, March 9, 4:10 P.M. — During the Fascist era, European arts underwent radical changes. Will their transformation into instruments of social and political manipulation continue?
Frederick Pollock: PREJUDICE AND THE SOCIAL CLASSES
Friday, March 16, 4:10 P.M. — Does the usefulness of manipulated prejudice in the struggle for political power end with the breakdown of National Socialism?
Leo Löwenthal: THE AFTERMATH OF TOTALITARIAN TERROR
Friday, March 23, 4:10 P.M. — What may we expect to be the impact of ten years of terror on the ethical physiognomy of practitioners, victims and by-standers?
[Reconstruction] Horkheimer: Totalitarianism and the Crisis of European Culture.
Changes in concept of man / economic and social;
Our ideological situation;
The escape into an ideology of progress by means of Marxism;
Germany and the triumph of enlightenment.
The idea of the Greek and Roman citizen [Personality; Domination]
This on the basis of a slave economy. (Slave here is not against any moral concepts).
The Christian Era expands the concept of man. Feudal Lords and Church [made] men children.
(The role of the father past and future. The Ego / modern Ego).
Nineteenth century. Property and therefore command became the typical form of power. The worker is free and ‘hired.’
Modern era (Capitalism). Man not needed for production of his own or society’s life. Becomes redundant, superfluous, uncalled for, too much. The modern concept of administration in contrast to the Middle Ages where man was scarce.
Man has become a subject through property.
The subject is not quite identical with an individual. (Individual = bourgeois.)
The blind mechanism of the market almost superseded the decisions of the individual subject. Therefore the subject is supposed to be no more an individual but humanity as a whole.
But we live in the time before this happens—if it will even happen.
And here is the problem: Fascism and Democracy.
What can we answer to the Fascist who denounces our ideology and sticks directly to power. (Victor nations and totalitarianism set-up—even after the war)
→ Division of labor. Dictate of the market. Finally, dictate of cliques.
We spoke about the economic and racial changes. Let me now say something about the ideological development.
Religion against Germany's history.10
Destruction of mythology as rebellion against Christianity. (Moral Law / Conscience)11
New Insight. Bewegung, Selbstverwirklichung, Selbstbewegung.
The threat to culture by the principle of the market.
Religion—art—made profane.
Finally dictate through monopoly.
Antagonism between this principle and science in the sense of [critical] [inserted: philosophical] theory. [Critical] [inserted: Philosophical] theory:
(1) The development of a doctrine related to historical reality. Neither isolated religion nor conformism nor value propaganda.
(2) Open the eyes relatively free from economic set-up: attack on practical solutions.
The controversy between positivism and neo-Thomism.
None of them attack the real theory—all condemn mythos.
[Note: Kunst Beispiel. (Example from Art.)]
That it cannot be changed on purpose. Philosophy has become ill because it cannot open its mouth without being compelled to justify its existence by giving practical advice. Like the redundant people. Role of the negation is the positive. [Knowing] what is wrong will dialectically generate the right.
Adorno: The Fate of the Arts.
By talking about the legacy of National Socialism within the artistic life of Europe I do not intend to dwell on Nazi terror, or the annihilation of many artists and intellectuals in the conquered countries, nor on the administrative measures by which the Nazi regime has put every cultural activity into the service of the totalitarian set-up. What we are concerned with is the after-effect of the Fascist era and its significance for America rather than the actions or crimes of the regime itself. Our attention is focused on those traces of the Nazi spirit which threaten to survive or to resurrect at a given opportunity. In order to understand these traces we have to cope with what might be called the spirit of Fascism, the structural changes which it has brought about throughout European society rather than with administrative measures which may be remedied. It should be said, however, that there is one aspect in crude reality which is beyond repair, namely the mass murder of intellectuals perpetrated by the Nazis, particularly in such countries as Poland. We do not yet know the extent to which intellectual and artistic groups in great parts of Europe have been liquidated. We do know, however, that the systematic drive carried out by the regime against all potential centers of intellectual resistance will leave its imprint upon the future [and] is likely to result in a vacuum, the impact of which on the whole [of] cultural life cannot be foreseen. Though I am fully conscious, however, that, what National Socialism has done to art, is above all murder, I shall discuss today some less obvious aspects of the situation which seem to me of particular relevance, since they did not result from arbitrary actions of political gangsters but rather from developmental tendencies which are so deep-lying that we may say that they have not only been brought about by National Socialism but are among its causes as well. In order not to lose ourselves in too vast a field I shall concentrate on the fate of music which I had an opportunity to study most closely. I wish to emphasize, however, that music serves here merely as an example for much broader sociological aspects, not as an end in itself.
The idea that there are certain cultural trends which both belong to the presuppositions and to the effects of Fascisms dictates the topics with which I have to deal. I shall first say something about the climate for Fascism in Germany as it showed itself throughout musical life in pre-Hitler days and I shall then point to some of the more obstinate effects of Hitlerism throughout the musical sphere. I am under the impression that we shall be able to understand the structural relationship between Fascism and culture the better the more deeply we are aware of the cultural roots of some of the most terrifying anti-cultural phenomena of our time. It would be naive to assume that the indisputable destruction of German musical culture has been brought about solely by a kind of political invasion from the outside, by mere force and violence. A severe crisis, economic no less than spiritual, prevailed before Hitler seized power.
Hitler was, in music as in innumerable other aspects, merely the final executor of tendencies that had developed within the womb of German society.
However, one can very well differentiate between artistic and philosophical phenomena which tend toward Fascism by themselves and others which were claimed by the Nazis more or less arbitrarily, mainly on account of their prestige value. Moreover, one can clearly distinguish between names to which the Nazis paid only lip service, such as Goethe and Beethoven, and others who represent ideas which are the lifeblood of the Fascist movement, mostly comparatively obscure figures such as Ernst Moritz Arndt or Paul de la Garde.
Nobody can escape the awareness of the deep interconnection between Richard Wagner and German supra-nationalism in its most destructive form. It may be good to recollect that there is an immediate link between him and official Nazi ideology. Wagner’s standard-bearer and son-in-law, the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was one of the first writers who combined aggressive pan-Germanism, racism, the belief in the absolute superiority of German culture—or you may rather say of German Kultur—and militant anti-Semitism. The Nazi bogus philosopher Alfred Rosenberg has confessedly borrowed most of his theses from Chamberlain’s Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts. The book had the blessing of the Bayreuth circle and Chamberlain, as an old man, welcomed enthusiastically the National Socialist movement.
The pedigree Wagner-Chamberlain-Rosenberg is more than just an historical accident. Not only can we discover many elements of rubber-stamped Nazi doctrine in Wagner’s theoretical writings, but we can also spot them, which is more important, throughout Wagner’s works in more or less flimsy allegorical disguise. The whole plot of Wagner’s Ring suggests some kind of a gigantic Nazi frame-up, with Siegfried as an innocent, lovable Teutonic hero who, just by chance, conquers the world and ultimately falls victim to the Jewish conspiracy of the dark dwarfs and those who trust their counsel.
Incidentally, it is ironic enough and not without deeper significance that even the downfall of Hitler is presaged in this metaphysical master plan. We may well say that the whole pan-German movement consummated by the Nazis bore within itself an inkling of the doom it spelled not only upon its foes but also upon itself. This inkling is not of an entirely irrational nature, but is tinged with an insight, however inarticulable it may have been, into the ultimate hopelessness of German imperialism within the given constellation of world power politics. No clear-sighted observer of the early days of Nazism in Germany can have failed to notice an element of uncertainty and even despair underneath the drunkenness of victories celebrated before they were won. It is quite possible that the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Nazi regime, so utterly un-understandable to other nations, is partly determined by this deep sense of futility of the whole adventure. The Hitlerian statement that if his regime should ever collapse he would slam the door so that the whole world could hear it is indicative of something much farther reaching than it seems to express. When we speak of the destructiveness of the German mind we have to understand this not merely psychologically but also politically, in terms of the desperate character of the whole gamble. The Germans permanently anticipate, as it were, the revenge for their own downfall. This may suffice as an example for speculations on the innermost secrets of Nazi mentality and Nazi reality as suggested by the Wagnerian work.
A minute musical analysis of Wagner’s works yields insight into the repressive, compulsory, blind and ultimately anti-individual way of his composing in a very concrete and tangible sense. His music itself speaks the language of Fascism, quite apart from plots and bombastic words.
Yet we should not overrate the importance of Wagner as a formative element of Fascism. Apart from the fact that his work contains forces entirely antagonistic to those which I mentioned his actual influence in Germany was definitely on the decline. Thus, he helped to prepare the climate for Fascism with the generation of our parents. The imagery of his works doubtlessly soaked through innumerable channels into the unconscious of most Germans. However, his work itself had largely ceased to be a living force. This holds for the artists as well as for the public. Since about 1910 at the latest, there started a revolt of all composers of any independence and talent against Wagnerism and all it entailed. One may easily regard anti-Wagnerism as the common denominator of all the different schools that have sprung into existence since the beginning of this century. Concomitantly, Wagnerian philosophy lost its hold on the intellectuals. But what happened with the audience at large is perhaps even more significant. The lack of knowledge of the Wagnerian work among the younger generation in Germany was simply astonishing. The spiritual demands of the Weltanschauungsmusik, the exacting length of the Musikdrama, the spirit of high-fallutin’ symbolism so incompatible with the positivist matter-of-factness spreading over the youth of the whole world—all this helped to bring Wagner into almost complete oblivion. His old Germans became associated with the idea of the “beaver” game. I can give you an example.
In the winter term of 1932/33, immediately before Hitler took over, I had to conduct at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful—which is essentially a defense of musical formalism against the doctrine of Wagner and the Programmatic School. Although the seminar was focused on philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In the first meeting I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most famous of all Wagnerian leitmotifs, on the blackboard. Nobody was.
This little event is symptomatic not only of the oblivion into which Wagner had fallen but of a much broader issue, which has something to do with the rise of Hitlerism and will by no means have been settled by his defeat. You may call it the de-cultivation of the German middle classes, demonstrated in the field of music but noticeable in every aspect of German life.
During the 19th century there existed certain groups which, without being professional musicians or artists, were in real contact with music and the arts, were moved by ideas expressed by music, and were capable of a subtle and discriminating understanding. The attitude of writers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche toward music were not understandable without the existence of such a nucleus of musically truly cultured non-musicians. This nucleus has disappeared. Musical knowledge and understanding has become the privilege of experts and professionals.
I cannot go into the reasons for this process which is deeply connected with certain changes undergone by the whole German middle class. On the basis of their own material interests, they became more and more alienated from the same culture which their fathers and grand-fathers had brought about. It is this de-cultivation, this loss of any life relationship with what is supposed to be the tradition of great German culture, upheld merely as an empty claim that has contributed more to the Fascist climate than the allegiance to even so nationalistic and chauvinistic author as Richard Wagner.
We should be quite clear with regard to what we mean by this process of de-cultivation. It is not simply lack of knowledge or erudition, although the processes in question tend also to lower all acquaintance with the manifestations of culture in a most elementary sense. Nor is it the ever-increasing aloofness of artistic products from the empirical life of society, a process that can be dated back to the time when art lost its locus within the order of the all-embracing Catholic Church. I refer to something much more specific. It may be called the neutralization of culture in general and of the arts in particular.
Since philosophy in the broadest sense, the general consciousness of the people, has been brought more and more under the sway of science and technical civilization, the relationship between art and truth has been profoundly affected. There is no longer any unifying common focus between knowledge or science on the one hand and art on the other, as there is no common focus between science and philosophy or religion. Dr. Horkheimer has pointed this out in his lecture. What has been called the “idea” of arts during the age of great speculative philosophy has come to be regarded as an obsolescent metaphysical prejudice. Instead of being a decisive means to express fundamentals about human existence and human society, art has assumed the function of a realm of consumer goods among others, measured only according to what people “can get out of it,” the amount of gratification or pleasure it provides them with or, to a certain extent, its historical or educational value. This does not merely pertain to the products of today’s cultural industry, but this generally also affects the present attitude towards traditional works. They are, and were long before the rise of Fascism, in a certain way “on exhibition,” things to look at, maybe to admire, maybe to enjoy, perhaps even emotional stimuli, but they became within the general consciousness of the consuming audiences, more or less deprived of any intrinsic and compelling meaning of their own.
This has sucked their life blood away even if their facade was still intact—in German opera houses, concert halls and art galleries. Their own essence was gradually lost, and they were experienced in terms of the want of entertainment which they had satisfied only incidentally. While the public apparently became their master who has the choice among the infinite variety of cultural goods, the public partly was the victim of this whole process since the works became mute to the listener and lost any deeper hold on his experience, his development, and his philosophy. Ultimately consumption of the art became a mere appendage to the business of interests of those who were in command of the market.
We can, therefore, not blame the masses for the process of de-cultivation, the broadest pattern of which I have tried to indicate. The loss of knowledge and interest in the products of art which may ultimately lead to a completely barbarian severance between serious artistic production and universal tastes is not a matter of degeneration or bad will but is the almost unavoidable consequence of the relegation of art into the realm of pure embellishment brought about by the technological development itself.
This process, however, does not only imply a crisis of the general relationship between arts and audience and concomitantly of art itself which is condemned to an ever more threatening isolation, but it also has much more immediate social consequences. For the idea of compelling and objective truth, however differentiated its artistic and philosophical expression might have been, is inseparably bound up with the idea of humanism. German humanism was the most substantial counter-tendency against violent nationalism. This holds for music above all. One may say that the cultural impact of music in Germany was the equivalent of the humanistic tradition in great French literature.
Humanistic philosophy permeates Beethoven’s whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship. The lack of experience of this humanistic spirit—and here I mean experience in a deeper sense than the listening over the air to some standard performance of a standard work—reflects, viewed in broad social terms, a vacuum ready to absorb the arbitrarily superimposed doctrines of totalitarianism. The German boy of our age who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzersonata played by friends of his parents, and who never listened passionately and surreptitiously when he was supposed to go to bed, does not merely miss a piece of information or something which might be recognized as being educational. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of the life phenomenon of the humane. It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven’s own people, into Hitler’s own people.
This is not to say that musical culture in Germany simply died away. It survived within some artists, and even during the first years of Hitlerism the average level of performance was often astonishingly high. But musical culture became under Hitler what it had started to become long before, a museum piece or an export article, somewhat reminiscent of the cultural function of the architecture of Italian Renaissance in today’s Italy. The tie between the idea of humanism, of music as an art, and the actual outward and inward life of the people, was definitely broken.
This is the most essential characteristic of the musical climate for Fascism in pre-Hitler Germany. It is certain to increase, not only in Germany, dangerously with the improvement of the European continent after the present war.
I wish to emphasize that the process in question does not merely engulf the attitude of the masses toward art, but artistic production per se and its inherent values. If we take a quick glance at the most successful German post-Wagnerian composer—as a matter of fact the only one whose fame is internationally established—Richard Strauss, there is clear evidence that the link with German humanism, in the sense I have discussed it right now, has ceased to exist. The fact that Richard Strauss at one time attempted to translate a philosophical work, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, into program music, is no proof to the contrary. One may rather say that philosophy, as well as religion or as the l’art pour l’art doctrine of symbolism, is for sale in Strauss’ music, and that the very way it is treated as a subject matter destroys it as the true life basis of the works which so glibly deal with all kinds of philosophical ideals and values. Everything becomes a cultural good to be looked at, to be bought, to be enjoyed as a stimulus for the nerves of the big but tired businessman. This holds for the whole range of Strauss’ oeuvre: the Archaic Greece of Electra and the smart pervertedness of Salome, the second-hand Goethe edition of the Frau ohne Schatten, and the rococo of the Rosenkavalier which proved to be so convenient for the taste of the German industrial upper-class who got out of this work a mirrored reflection which made them look as if they were a legitimate aristocracy.
What remains, apart from such stimuli made to order of the quickly changing tastes of those German layers with whom Strauss identified himself, is a kind of cult of the elan vital, which has become, in the Schwung of this music, almost synonymous with the spirit of success, recklessness and expansionism fitting only too well with imperialist Germany from Emperor Wilhelm to Hitler. If complete cynicism and relativism are among the foremost characteristics of Fascism, these characteristics come clearly to the fore in an author who is apparently so faithful a child of the liberal era as Richard Strauss. To be sure, his managerial broad-mindedness is quite irreconcilable with the narrow and petty-bourgeois fanaticism of the Nazi movement. Yet he only put the seal under the secret text of his life-work when he grudgingly compromised with the Nazi government.
It is this spirit of pseudo-hedonistic complacency and shallow showmanship—in spite of all the virtuosity of the composer—against which everything rebelled that was productive and responsible in German musicianship. But it is also this very rebellion by which the great music which Germany has produced during this century and of which the life work of Arnold Schoenberg is representative, became definitely and radically antagonistic to the audience and to the whole sphere of commercialized musical life, of the official German Musikleben. It has often been alleged, and also repeated in this country, that it was a kind of guilt or an expression of snobbishness, of the ivory tower idea, that the real musical avant-garde in Germany lost more and more its touch with the audience. The work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern never became familiar to the non-musicians to any extent comparable with Wagner or even Strauss.
In a deeper sense, however, the avant-garde represented the true societal interests against blindness, spite and conventionalism of the actual audience. The musical discord, which became the symbol of so-called Kulturbolschewismus, and which is the conspicuous identification mark of the musical avant-garde, the supposed spirit of negativism and destruction, kept faith to Beethoven’s humanism by expressing in an undiluted way the sufferings, the anguish, the fear, under which we live today long before the political crisis arose, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth. This does not only refer to the expressive sincerity of artists such as Schoenberg, but also to their purely musical qualities, their severe and undisguised construction shunning all ornamentation, embellishment, everything which is not strictly necessary. We know today how deeply the often denounced subjectivism of the so-called atonal avant-garde was bound up from the beginning with functionalism, with those tendencies within art which try to regain its real dignity by purifying it from all the remnants of romanticism which today are nothing but empty pretenses.
This is perhaps the appropriate moment to illustrate by a very specific example the danger of a survival of the Nazi spirit after its defeat. I mentioned before the idea of Kultur-Bolschewismus which served as a means to denounce every artistic impulse which threatened to shatter the conventional belief in the good and natural order of things. Today we find the heritage of this denunciatory notion among some of the sincerest foes of the Hitlerian system. The world has become so ugly and terrifying, so runs the argument, that art should no longer dwell upon distorted forms, discords and everything branded as being destructive, but should return to the realm of beauty and harmony. The world of destruction, terror and sadism is the world of Hitler. And art should show its opposition to it by going back to its traditional ideals.
The amazing similarity of such enunciations with those of the jailors would not be a counter-argument in itself, but it is highly indicative of the perseverance of the Nazi frame of mind, a perseverance which is not merely due to the minds of the intellectuals but to the situation as such. What is wrong about the argument is not that it sounds Hitlerian, but that it is infantile and expresses a general reversion of thinking which goes infinitely beyond the sphere of the arts—and hatred of thinking, hostility against development of independent thought is what makes for Fascism.
The infantile twist is the forthright identification of ugly and beautiful in art with ugly and beautiful in reality, an identification in the style of the Hays Office which regards every unpolished villain on the screen as an encouragement of robbery on the street. Thinking is endangered of losing the power of discriminating between imagery and reality. Goethe, who is supposed to have been a classicist, as well as Hegel the conservative, knew that speaking out the negative, facing catastrophe, and calling it by its name has something wholesome and helpful in itself which could never be achieved by the pretense of a harmony borrowed from the surface phenomena and leaving the essence untouched.
It is just this taboo of expressing the essence, the depth of things, this compulsion of keeping to the visible, the fact, the datum and accepting it unquestioningly which has survived as one of the most sinister cultural heritages of the Fascist era, and there is real danger of a kind of pink pseudo-realism sweeping the world after this war, which may be more efficient but which is certainly not fundamentally superior to the art exhibitions commandeered by the Nazis.
Art should put against those restorative tendencies, even if they are clothed in terms of Parisian neo-classicism, the word of an Anglo-Saxon philosopher who certainly cannot be blamed for Kulturbolschewismus, namely Francis Bradley: “If everything is bad, it may be good to know the worst.”
Simultaneously we should not underrate the issue of aloofness and non-conformity of music, and of arts in general, with regard to its political importance. For this aloofness did not only keep it away from the market but also created a kind of resentment which belongs to the most significant phenomena of the German pre-Fascist cultural climate and which has its strong counterpart in anti-intellectualism and anti-highbrowism all over the world.
This resentment as well as the musical de-cultivation of the German middle classes resulted in certain ill-defined collectivistic tendencies of the pre-Fascist era. They found their quasi-positive expression in the so-called musical folk and youth movement. During the Third Reich, this movement came into a certain antagonism with the Party and seems to have been abolished or absorbed by the Hitler Youth. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this movement had a strong affinity to the spirit of Nazism. No need to stress such obvious aspects as the connection between this musical collectivism and the Nazi folk ideology. But there are less obvious features to which I should like to draw your attention.
There is a strong repressive trend throughout this musical collectivism, a hatred against the individual, the supposedly refined and sophisticated. This hatred is an expression of envy of those whose individuality could not truly develop, rather than a desire for a true solidarity of men which would presuppose those very individual qualities which are taboo to the agitators of musical collectivism. There is, moreover, the wish for simplicity at any price, the contempt of the métier, the unwillingness to learn anything that requires persistent intellectual efforts—a kind of glorification of the supposedly plain, average man which may be transformed into a weapon against anyone and anything that does not conform to his standards.
There is, above all, the display of an aggressive spirit of community as an end in itself, played up artificially so as not to allow any questioning of its real meaning. The idea of collectivity is made a fetish, glorified as such, and only loosely connected with concrete social contents which may easily be changed with every turn of Realpolitik. This last element is perhaps the most important one. It bears witness to the calculated, synthetic nature of this supposed folk music. The more it pretends to be the expression of “we the people,” the more certain we may be that it is actually dictated by very particularistic clique interests, intolerant, aggressive and greedy for power.
I have so far discussed underlying tendencies of German culture as manifested in the field of music which prepared the climate for Fascism or rather were indicative of the same social forces which ultimately made for political Fascism too. I dwelt on these aspects because we have reason to believe that it is they which are likely to persist, though in many ways modified, after Hitler’s defeat. As far as the actual musical situation under Hitler is concerned, I confine myself to some brief remarks.
It would be erroneous to assume that there ever sprung into life a specific musical Nazi culture. What was profoundly changed by the system was the function of music which now openly became a means to an end, a propagandistic device or an ideological export article among many others. However, any attempts to create a music, intrinsically National Socialist by order, were limited to the most fanatic groups of the Nazi movement and never got hold of any responsible artist, nor the bulk of the population, just as official Nazi poetry never became really popular.
As to the production of the younger generation of more or less fervent believers in the Nazi ideology a number of new names appeared but what they actually achieved largely amounted to a feeble and diluted imitation of some of the better-known composers of the Weimar era, particularly of those collectivist composers who had exercised a certain appeal to larger audiences, such as Hindemith or Kurt Weil. The latter’s Jewish descent was no obstacle to one of the more successful Nazi opera composers, Mr. Wagner-Regenyi, who copied Weil’s style with all its mannerisms almost entirely.
The most important characteristic of musical life under hitler seems to me a complete stagnation, a “freezing” of all musical styles of composing and performing and of all standards of criticism, comparable to the freezing of wages under Hitler. Throughout cultural life the Nazis developed a kind of double-edged policy. On the one hand they raged against modernism and Kulturbolschewismus, on the other hand they disavowed what they themselves called their fellow travelers, Mitlaeufer, that is to say all those artists who tried to coordinate themselves quickly to the catchwords of the Nazi ideology without enjoying the privilege of being Party old-timers. Thus the compliant musicians and, above all, the composers, were left somewhat confused. Musical stagnation as well as that of art as a whole did not remain unnoticed by the more intelligent Nazis and even Herr Rosenberg, who generally had to take an attitude of official optimism once suggested the idea that there was no time for great artistic production today and that the energies formerly invested in the arts were now properly absorbed by technical and military ventures. This amounts to a forthright admission of artistic bankruptcy. Subsequently, the restrictions put upon composing were somewhat lifted in order to raise the artistic standards. As soon, however, as the Party allowed any bolder work to make its public appearance, the official Nazi critics spoke threateningly of Kulturbolschewismus. Thus an atmosphere of total insecurity was brought about, comparable to the strange amalgamation of strictly enforced laws and arbitrary illegality so characteristic of the Third Reich. It exercised a paralyzing effect. The best a German artist could hope for was to escape into what has been properly called innere Emigration, internal emigration. Whereas German artistic tradition had evaporated and artistic pioneering had been eliminated at the surface, the Nazis failed completely in building up even a facade of a musical culture of their own. The same people who always had blamed intellectual cliques for modernism in the arts, remained themselves a clique whose folk ideas proved to be even more distant from the life of the people than the most esoteric products of expressionism and surrealism. Paradoxical as it sounds, the Germans were more willing to fight Hitler’s battles than to listen to the plays and operas of his lackeys. When the war catastrophe put an end to the remnants of public German musical life, it merely executed a judgment that was silently spoken since the Hitler gang had established its dictatorship over culture.
What then are we going to expect as an aftermath of the trends which I tried to point out to you? I do not intend to dwell on the question whether economic conditions in Europe as a whole and particularly in Central Europe will allow any artistic culture or whether the apathy of the population after the war will result in their becoming entirely disinterested in the arts. I do not think that the greatest danger lies here. There is no direct correlation between material wealth and artistic production and one might easily imagine situations where material wealth and the tremendous machinery of cultural industry may be a threat to artistic spontaneity rather than enhance it. The present stage of technical civilization may call for a very ascetic art developed in the loopholes of poverty and isolation, as counterbalance against the business culture industry which tends to cover the whole world. Instead of dwelling on the crude economic issues, I want to finish this lecture with an attempt to briefly formulate four of the deeper-going tendencies towards a survival of the Fascist spirit in the arts.
(1) The propagandistic aspect of all the arts which has been emphasized by the Nazis and which has destroyed almost completely artistic autonomy is not likely to disappear automatically. To be sure, European art after this war will not be allowed to serve the purpose of Fascist propaganda and the freedom of artistic creation will be restored at least formally. What is likely to remain, however, is the prevailing idea that art is essentially a force of manipulation, something that is to be directed this or the other way, that has to follow a set ideological pattern. The very fact that everything, that carries with itself associations of Fascism, however faint they may be, must be eradicated, is a symptom of an almost inescapable danger of artistic control. What threatens to develop in Europe as well as in the rest of the world may be called the end of the artistic subject. The artist is no longer called upon in order to express independently his experiences, visions and ideas, but has come to understand himself as a sort of functionary who has to fulfill a social and productive duty. It is possible that this very fact destroys the true function of the arts. Certainly, the idea of the artist blindly following his intuition without thinking in technical terms and without conscientious work on his material is a romantic notion. Every true work of art has, what one might one call malevolently a manipulative element about itself. But it makes all the difference whether this manipulative element remains a means of realizing the essence of the work, or whether it is put into the service of molding public opinion. As an aftermath of Fascism, the latter seems to be more and more emphasized, not only because of the external pressure put upon the artist but because the artists themselves nourish the illusion that, by surrendering to the calls made upon them and becoming functionaries or employees, they could escape their isolation and regain contact with broad social tendencies. But art does not fulfill its function in society by acting as a social functionary. Everything will depend on whether there will be loopholes enough left to the artists in order to dodge this evermore threatening danger. It should be added, cautiously, that the consciousness of this danger today seems to increase.
(2) The aspect of being a functionary and expressing himself according to the wants and necessities of powerful social groups and tendencies is an aspect mainly affecting the artist. There is a no less dangerous tendency with regard to the attitude of the public. The foremost cultural organization of the Nazis bore the title Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy). This barbarian name, which defines the arts, as Dr. Horkheimer says in one of his studies, in terms of message, is significant of something which probably will be alive long after the philistines of Kraft durch Freude will no longer command any official organization. Music, art and literature tend to become recreational activities, the means to help the tired masses to gain new strength and to get away from the drudgery of their practical existence. Fascism has taken up consciously this trend which automatically came to the fore all over the world long ago. The misery of the European post-war world as well as the vacuum left after the collapse of Nazi ideology is likely to strengthen rather than to weaken this tendency. What I envisage here is that the arts in Europe as far as they have contact with the broad masses, above all moving pictures, radio and popular literature, will indulge in a kind of streamlining in order to please the customer, a sort of pseudo-Americanization with poorer means and less efficiency, which even before Hitler could be noticed in European capitals such as Berlin and, to a certain extent, also Paris. The idea of being up-to-date by giving the people what they are supposed to want or rather what amounts to the line of least resistance against big business is likely to triumph everywhere.
(3) The trend toward collectivism for its own sake so heavily emphasized by the Nazis is likewise apt to survive within their foes. The more sacrifices the resistance forces and underground movements had to make, the more likely there are to arise demands for popular appealing art, intrinsically incompatible with the developmental phase reached by autonomous art itself. We must protect ourselves against the repressive implications for such a call for subordination and obedience of the individual to the demands of the majority and the so-called plain people, if we should not experience a revival of Nazi tendencies under an entirely different political label.
(4) There is a last danger apparently contradicting the ones I so far pointed out, but nevertheless threatening enough. I may call it the danger of the transformation of European culture into a kind of National Park, a realm tolerated and even admired, but mainly in terms of its quaintness, its being different from the general standards of technological civilization, but by this very act of tolerance being subject to its norms. Whereas we have to fear on the one side the danger of standardization and manipulation of European culture, we have to be equally on our guard against the danger of its artificial preservation, its being put on exhibition, its being enjoyed for the sake of its uniqueness rather than for any inherent qualities. What happened to certain artists of the Boulevard Montparnasse, whose colorful appearance made them lovely to look at, but at the same time put upon them the stigma of being fools, may happen to European culture as a whole. It may share the fate of old European style furniture or of European titles.
All these dangers can be met only by a strength of resistance surpassing anything non-conformist artists ever had to muster before. They must guard themselves against the leveling trend of the machinery as well as against adaptation to the market by outdated, and hence fashionable provincialism, and even by spectacular non-adaptation. Who really wants to be an artist today should neither be a commercial designer, in the broadest sense, or a stubborn, blind specialist. His relationship to technological civilization is utterly complicated. While resisting its standardizing impact he cannot dodge the deep and shocking experiences brought about by this civilization upon every living being. He must be in complete command of the most advanced means of artistic construction. He thus has to be both an exponent and a sworn enemy of the prevailing historical tendency. There is no recipe for how to achieve this. The only thing to stick to are those inherent qualities of the work itself mentioned before. To the artist, they appear mainly in terms of inner consistency. But their faithful pursuit is the only means of maintaining, or regaining, that relationship between essential philosophical truth and art, or science, the abolition of which is at the hub of the Fascist spirit. An artist who still deserves the name should proclaim nothing, not even humanism. He should not yield to any pressure of the ever more overwhelming social organizations of our time but should express, in full command of meaning and potentialities of today’s process of rationalization, that human existence led under its command is not a human one. The humane survives today only where it is ready to challenge, by its very appearance and its determined irreconcilability, the dictate of the present man-made but merciless world.
Pollock: Prejudice and the Social Classes.
“The power of most of the great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual level.” —H.G. Wells12
Introduction.
The topic of this afternoon’s lecture is an attempt to answer the question: Does the usefulness of manipulated prejudice in the struggle for political power end with the military defeat of the Nazis?
During the years of their rise to power and their domination of Europe, the Nazis have shown that skillfully manipulated prejudice can be used as an utterly effective weapon for establishing and cementing a totalitarian order, whether incorporated in the theory of a master race or the singling out of the Jews as a cause and incarnation of everything bad. While it would be unwise to interpret every utterance based on a belief in race supremacy, every anti-Semitic slogan as a symptom of systematic preparations to establish a totalitarian dictatorship, I believe that every attempt to overthrow democracy in one of the major democratic countries and set up a fascist regime would be characterized by the widest use of manipulated prejudice as a means of coming into power and maintaining it.
Among all prejudices against religious or racial minorities, anti-Semitism seems destined to play the decisive role in any new totalitarian bid for power. It is often asked why the Jewish minority should be singled out for persecution and why an American fascist leader may not well choose the Negroes, or the Catholics, or the Japanese, or the Mexicans. I believe that such a question overlooks the essential difference between the Jewish minority and any other minority.
The Jews differ from all other minorities because they adhere to irritating religious and ritual patterns, because of their specific role in Christian religious tradition, and because of the particular vulnerability of their economic position.
But that is not all. Through historical coincidence the Jewish minority is one which is traditionally considered to be powerful but really is weak. It therefore can be persecuted without being able to hit back and without its persecution causing any severe shock to the social structure. On the other hand, it can be painted as a scheming utterly dangerous foe of mankind striving for world domination and a great number of people will believe it. Even for the most simple mind the claim that the Negroes or the Irish would aspire to world domination would sound somewhat fantastic. Furthermore, anti-Semitism appeals specifically to the status-conscious, threatened, disinherited, or dispossessed middle-class groups.
The use of anti-Semitism in Nazi domestic and foreign policy is not the outcome of the persecution mania of paranoiacs who have swept into the government of a great nation as a result of desperate political situation, nor is it connected with specific traits of the German character, traits which don’t exist anywhere else. While the degree of susceptibility to anti-Semitic propaganda may vary in other countries depending upon the strength of traditional values and the tensions of the general situation, I claim there is no country that is immune to cleverly manipulated anti-Semitism.
[I.] The Social Functions of Manipulated Prejudice in Pre-fascist and Fascist Society.
In a democratic society, integration is achieved through a series of compromises and adjustments among the basic social and economic groupings and interests of the country. When conflicts and antagonisms become too deep, the system of compromises ceases to function. Democratic ideology then becomes precarious. For groups striving for power, it becomes necessary to destroy democratic traditions and to create a new integration of divergent forces, based no longer on the accommodation of the interests of the various groups, but on the subjugation of all specific group interests in favor of an alleged, mystic national unity. But this oppression of antagonisms cannot be achieved by mere violence—neither by violence from below, prior to the seizure of power by dominant forces, nor by violence from above, after the new rule has been established. A way must be found by which dissenting groups can be incorporated first into the new totalitarian movement, later into the new government structure.
To build such a totalitarian “nation,” old ideologies and old social relationships and loyalties must be destroyed, submerged by an ideological transformation and superseded by new ties of creed and of spiritual dependence.
To effect this, antagonistic groups traditionally are given a common enemy on whom to concentrate. Such an enemy should appear powerful, but should not be too powerful. The enemy should be a group which it would be easy to depict as alien and parasitic, rather than as performing any normal, useful, or socially indispensable function within society.
Once the role and the special qualifications of the “national enemy” required by the movement are understood, one sees how perfectly the Jewish groups seem to fit the part because of their unique economic and social position.
So far we have covered only the basic social functions of anti-Semitism in a pre-totalitarian and totalitarian society. There are many more; some of them we shall consider in our discussion of the Nazi practices. In order to understand fully our problem we must remember two specific traits characteristic of modern man. These traits have come to the foreground in Europe since the end of the Victorian era, and have been developing in this country since the great depression: the individual’s longing for an acceptable and easy explanation of what causes his misfortune and his need for an outlet for his pent-up rage. Both stem from the growing insecurity and anxiety prevailing in the independent middle-class or the dependent labor group. The process of concentration of economic and political power threatens the individual in these groups with the loss of his business, or with unending unemployment. The causes for his plight are difficult to understand and access to them is systematically denied by a continuous barrage of apologetic propaganda. The frightened and desperate individual looks for an easy explanation. It would be very difficult for him to put the blame on any of the groups which are traditionally vested with dignity and authority. From this difficulty arises a genuine social need for an easy interpretation of his sufferings compatible with traditional philosophy. Large masses of European workers accepted the socialist interpretation that not only explained everything, but made their lives meaningful and made capitalism responsible for their grievances. Other groups of workers, and particularly, the independent middle-class which traditionally owes allegiance to our economic system, were unwilling to accept the socialist explanation and when the need for an answer to their distress became urgent they eagerly grasped anti-Semitism as a substitute to the socialist answer. As early as the nineties of the last century, anti-Semitism was described as “the socialism of the dolt,” as an easy and acceptable answer to the question: Why are things so much worse than they could be? With the deterioration of economic conditions, with mass suffering and fears growing more acute, with the political bankruptcy of the Second International during the First World War, with the growing complexity of the economic and social life, the chances for a more general acceptance of the anti-Semitic formula grew infinitely.
The second factor in the psychological structure of modern man which makes him accept violent anti-Semitism is the state of rage, resentment, and aggression in which he finds himself as the result of his frustrations and fears and which he must normally suppress. The greater the suffering, the greater his fear for his own and his family’s future, the more his rage and aggression accumulate and cry for a socially accepted outlet.
The traditional motives of a religious or economic order may be sufficient to explain certain basic anti-Semitic attitudes but they do not give us a satisfactory explanation for the readiness of large groups to accept totally inconsistent anti-Semitic propaganda at its face value. This we can understand only when we recognize at its roots the readiness, nay the craving, to accept open or veiled appeals to violence. When the fear of the future is rampant, when men are haunted by the threat of being driven out of business, of losing their jobs because of forces which they cannot understand, but which they no longer accept as natural laws, the result is a state of frustration and hatred, and an urge for retaliatory destruction.
The essential characteristic of anti-Semitism under conditions of social disintegration is hatred—hatred against the type of civilization which seems to offer nothing but disappointments, and this hatred is directed against the Jews by the political manipulators of prejudice.13
[II.] How the Nazis used Political Anti-Semitism.
[Of the many popular explanations of Nazi anti-Semitism, the scape-goat theory is the most common. Nazi anti-Semitic activities are seen as directly caused by periods of crises of the Nazi regime. However the facts do not justify such simple interpretation. For example, the pogrom of November 1938 was staged not at a time of weakness and failure, necessitating alibis and diversion, but immediately following the victory of Nazi-imperialism at Munich. Another wide-spread opinion holds the chief motive of Nazi anti-Semitism as purely economic—to create jobs for unemployed followers and private fortunes for higher-ups. But the final exclusion of Jews from all business took place not at a period of unemployment, but at a time when the expanding preparedness economy was badly in need of new workers. The greater part of individual profits made by the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses was transformed into fiscal revenue, but the sum total of the value involved was altogether negligible in terms of the national budget.
It is equally wrong to understand Nazi anti-Semitism in its range from political discrimination to physical extermination as a premeditated policy based on the “unchangeable” party program. But extermination never was a part of this program. Nor do the facts support the theory that popular demand forced the Nazi’s hand in their anti-Semitic policies.]14
No single explanation can account for the many functions of the anti-semitic instrument within Germany. As situations changed, and new possibilities unfolded, new and expanded uses for anti-Semitism were found. Whenever anti-Semitic measures were introduced in a newly occupied country the accumulated experience was immediately adapted to the conditions prevailing in the new territory.
A summary of the changing anti-Semitic manifestations, alternating between terroristic persecution and legal “consolidation,” necessitates of course a high degree of over-simplification. Description of a new function does not mean that anti-Semitism does not continue to serve the old purpose side-by-side with the new one. But there is a perceptible evolution: anti-Semitic policy develops from a crude and comparatively harmless-looking weapon to one of the most refined, versatile, and deadly instruments of civil war and psychological warfare. I mention the most characteristic phases.
Whipping up the followers and creating a unified ideology.
This period ends in June 1934, when the SA as a mass organization was destroyed. The June purge marks the beginning of the end of the only German anti-Semitism rooted in genuine belief.
Anti-Semitism as a means of discrediting labor leaders and justifying terror against labor and other opponents.
As late as the Reichstag-fire elections in March 1933, anti-Nazi parties, mainly composed of labor, had cast more votes than the Nazis, and this in spite of the virtual Nazi monopoly of all means of propaganda. Branding every trade-unionist, socialist, or communist, or every worker who dared oppose the new regime, as Jewish, or in the pay of the Jews, proved to be a convenient camouflage for disguising the real target of Nazi terror.
Institutional Anti-Semitism as an instrument for appeasing world opinion.
The precarious safety the Jews enjoyed during later 1934 and up until 1938 was dictated by the aim to appear respectable during the period of rearmament, and came to an end when the Nazi regime felt strong enough to challenge the Western powers.
Anti-Semitism as a weapon to destroy democracy at home and abroad.
Even during the years of appeasement the Nazis systematically used anti-Semitic propaganda as a spearhead to destroy democratic convictions and middle-class ethics at home and abroad. This technique received a classic formulation in the speech of SS General Best, German ambassador and virtual dictator of Denmark. The speech was published on July 27th, 1942, in a Nazi newspaper:
The Jewish question is the dynamite with which we shall blow up the concrete forts where the last liberal guerillas are hiding. The nations which give up their Jews thereby abandon the philosophy of life which is subjected to Jewish influences and mistaken ideals of liberty. At such a stage, they can easily be integrated into the new world order.
Terror against the Jews as a means of terrorizing the middle class.
The display of the regime’s unlimited terror against the Jews in November 1932 was designed to drive the middle-class groups into line. Better than all verbal threats, they would learn by the enacted scenes of warlike destruction that the Nazi government, in the pursuance of its goals, would not be stopped by any respect for the generally accepted code of private or public morals. In their terroristic measures against the Jewish minority the Nazis demonstrated their utter disregard for constitutional guarantees of life and liberty as well as for all property rights.
Anti-Semitic terrorism as a means of intimidating world opinion.
A gesture of arrogant might, addressed to the West.
Mass murder of Jews as a means to discredit the conservative groups in Germany.
The crest of the wave of the slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe coincided with the beginning of the Russian offensive in the fall of 1942. The nightmare of a two-front war began to haunt the military. At precisely the same time, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews seems to have been designed as the Nazi party’s answer to a real or anticipated attempt of moderate German groups, business and military alike, to negotiate over its need for peace with the Western powers.
[Disclosing mass murder as a means of compulsory integration.]15
Disclosing of mass murder of Jews, Poles, and Czechs as a means of integration of the German population and of maintaining their will to resist in the face of a lost war. In claiming that every German would be made responsible for all the misdeeds of the Nazis, every German man and woman was made a compulsory party to what was aptly called the “Covenant of the Gangsters.”
To give just one short illustration of how manipulated anti-Semitism functioned in occupied countries, I want to quote from the excellent book, “Racial State,” by Gerhard Jacoby, published last year in New York. This book describes in detail the transformation of Czechoslovakia, now called the “Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia,” into a state whose social structure was based on a racial hierarchy with the Germans at the top, the Czechs holding an inferior middle status, and the Jews at the very bottom. In discussing the functions of the anti-Jewish laws in the Protectorate, Mr. Jacoby comes to the conclusion that they not only paved the way for German resettlement and the wholesale looting of all Jewish property, but that in addition they
served important propaganda functions in the total Nazi plan for policing the Protectorate. The special anti-Jewish measures were intended, it seems, both to serve as a warning upon the Czechs and to deceive them as to the nature of German aims. The difference in the treatment of Jews and non-Jews was, at once, a form of bribe and subtle threat. It reminded the Czechs that there was one group of the Protectorate population which had even less rights than they. In this way notice was given that however bad things might be for the Czechs, they had still not fallen to the lowest station possible in Bohemia-Moravia, and that, consequently, cooperation with the Reich could only be to their advantage. The economic privation of the Jews was a concrete demonstration of what might be the Czech fate if they proved recalcitrant. This moral was even more cogently preached by the German campaign of depopulation, directed in full against the Jews, but also applied in certain aspects to the Czechs.
The other propaganda function of the anti-Semitic economic laws was the familiar one of suggesting that the extreme Nazi methods were ordinarily reserved only for the Jews… By proceeding against the property and the whole economic position of the Jews with special severity and speed, they apparently hoped to create the illusion that their policy of “legal” confiscation was simply an application of the well-known anti-Jewish policy of the Reich and need not affect the Czechs, so long as they maintained a relatively ‘correct’ attitude. Thus, the attention of the non-Jewish Protectorate subjects might be diverted from the other measure which, working more slowly and hidden by phrases concerning the “common interest” of the Reich and Protectorate, were directed against the economy of the protectorate as a whole. They might be led to believe that it was only the Jews whose economic destruction was being plotted. (l.c. 209 f.)
[III.] How the population reacted to the political manipulation of prejudice.
For several years the Institute of Social Research has tried to obtain factual evidence of the attitude of the population in Germany and the occupied countries toward the Nazi’s use of political anti-Semitism. While our material is insufficient to justify a final judgment and is almost completely lacking for the years after 1942, it allows some conclusions. The first general conclusion may be best formulated in the negative. There was no uniform, nation-wide acceptance or rejection of Nazi anti-Semitism on the territory of Greater Germany. The picture is extremely complex: susceptibility or resistance to anti-Semitic propaganda and actions vary with age, community, region, religious denomination, and social status, and former political allegiance, to mention some of the most important influencing factors. They vary also with the nature of the anti-Semitic program and are, of course, particularly modified by the degree of terroristic measures used against those who opposed the anti-Semitic policy by words or deeds.
(1) German youth seems to be thoroughly permeated with anti-Semitism. Children and adolescents of school age have participated individually and in groups in anti-Jewish actions,16 directly ordered or indirectly instigated by National Socialist organizations and personnel.
(2) Rural Populations [in] villages and small towns offered the least protection to the Jews. Resistance to the orders of the Nazi machine or even reluctance to obey them were extremely dangerous and, accordingly, rare. Non-Jewish storekeepers and middlemen took advantage of the official invitation to get rid of their Jewish competitors. A great number of the rural proletariat and the small farmers had already joined the Nazis before 1933 and industrial workers living in small places were, as a rule, not sufficiently strong.17
[Handwritten Insert: It fits our idea that the susceptibility to manipulated prejudice is proportionate to the acceptance of pragmatism. The fact that we find most resistance among the two groups which have conserved substantial residues of a non-pragmatic philosophy: Catholics and organized labor.]
(3) Catholicism emerges clearly as a force of resistance to Nazi anti-Semitism, especially in its violent forms, judging from all the evidence we possess. All observers speak of Catholics as a mitigating element and as potential allies of the Jews in the defensive struggle against National Socialism. Our witnesses don’t differentiate between lower and higher clergy, whose united rejection of Nazi paganism is generally attested in their reports. Part of the younger Catholic generation, especially in rural districts, apparently were not as immune to Nazi ideology in general, and anti-Semitism in particular as the older Catholics were.
(4) German organized labor proved to be the strongest bulwark against Nazi anti-Semitism in its propagandistic and terroristic forms. From all available sources it seems to be established, at least for the period covered by our material, that the workers of the cities were either not interested in anti-Semitism or [were] opposed to it as [a] recognized device of the enemies of labor. There is evidence that as late as 1941, non-Jewish workers refused to discriminate against Jewish co-workers, despite all Nazi efforts to the contrary.
(5) The attitude of German officialdom seems to have been for the most part determined by its traditional order and correctness. Most reports on particularly considerate officials show, at closer analysis, nothing but an absence of Nazi sadism. Fresh Nazi appointees, some in high government positions, were often the leaders in anti-Jewish activities. Many members of the old civil service who did not actively participate in violent anti-Semitism seemed to have shown nothing of opposition but disgust with the Nazi’s bad taste and a cynical regret that such measures were necessary.18
(6) During the first years the higher brackets of the professions, business, and landed gentry quite frequently challenged official anti-Jewish regulations. Old forms of social anti-Semitism had a tendency to change into an attitude of ostentatious solidarity with the victimized Jews. But there are also instances reported where the reverse became true. In the long run it seems to be decisive whether or not the individual belonging in this group had made his peace with the new regime and become its accomplice, sharing in the great economic advantages it had to offer them.
(7) The middle class. The bulk of our evidence supports the claim that the greatest readiness to take full advantage of the economic and psychological opportunities offered by Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and terror was to be found within the middle class.19
(8) The pogrom of November 1938, the first exhibition of large-scale violence against the Jews, their synagogues, and their personal belongings confirms the general impression that up to that date only a comparatively small minority of the German people had accepted the Nazi anti-Semitic program, with its violent consequences. All our sources of information are in complete agreement that this program was initiated and carried out according to a centrally directed plan and that the terrorists were members of the Nazi party and its armed organizations.20 A great part of the population seems to have reacted to the terror with a feeling of resignation, horror, and apprehension. But there seems to have been little active opposition.
The pogrom brought about the final segregation of the Jews. Says one of our witnesses: “We had to learn the hard way that the decency of the common man, rejection of race hatred by him, even compassion, is not enough to make impossible the most cruel happenings of a resolute minority which comes to power and succeeds in setting up a terror regime.” Most observers, however, agree that even after the pogrom up to the time of the mass deportations the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution found some help, sympathy, and moral encouragement in almost all strata of the German people. Open opposition and resistance, however, were broken up to the extent that fear of terroristic consequence came to overshadow every other factor. It will be one of the main topics of our next and last lecture to show how deeply fascist terror can change the individual’s pattern of behavior. Resistance to violence, injustice, oppression—a natural reaction within liberal society—becomes unnatural, suicidal, once the universal system of institutionalized terror has been established.
However, it seems appropriate to make an important restriction to this general conclusion. It seems to hold true only when the terror is instituted by the national government. In the cases where the anti-Semitic policy was imposed and enforced by the foreign conqueror it seems to have been rejected by the majority of the population in all those countries where anti-Semitism had not been firmly established before the arrival of the Nazis. This difference in the attitude of the population of greater Germany as compared with the behavior of the peoples of most of the occupied countries can, in my opinion, not be explained by differences in the national character but in the fact that collaboration with the enemy, in whatever field, seemed a disgrace to the majority.21
[Handwritten Insert: Despite all of the exceptions enumerated above, the Nazi anti-Semitic policy was a success inside and outside Germany. It functioned as one of the strongest means of integration and intimidation in Germany and of terroristic pressure over the occupied countries.]
[IV.] The susceptibility to manipulated prejudice in the postwar period.
That people in the occupied countries are not immune to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda by virtue of their national character is indicated by a series of news items coming from these countries, all of which report a surprising flare-up of anti-Semitic incidents. Anti-Semitic demonstrations have taken place recently at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the university at Bucharest. (NY Post, March 6, 1945.) It is reported (l.c.) that information from Europe “indicates that Jews are beginning to feel that their position in the liberated areas is unsafe and may get worse, although the new governments do their utmost to stop anti-Jewish excesses.”22 Reports from France which reached this country in January and February tell of anti-Semitic propaganda making its appearance as a reaction to the steps undertaken to restore the expropriated Jewish property.23 One leaflet
“… complains that the Jews now direct the political parties, the press, the radio, the ministries, the cinemas, and the expurgation committees. It urges the French people not to permit unfortunate refugees to be thrown out on the streets to vacate apartments which ‘the Jewish tenants had bravely deserted during the occupation.’ The leaflet uses the usual figures in support of its allegations that Jews controlled trade and commerce in Paris before the war (...).24 It warns that unless they are checked, the Jews will completely evict the French from the political and commercial life of the country. ‘The French have nothing to choose between the Hitlerian pest and the Jewish cholera’, the leaflet declares. It concludes with a demand that the Jews leave France and go to Palestine.” (J.T.A. News, January 26, 1945.)
Another report from London (January 23, 1945, J.T.A. News) states that
“Anti-Semitism, which has been practically non-existent in Holland prior to the German occupation, has begun to grow in the liberated sections of the country, according to reports reaching Jewish circles here.”
All these reports would mean comparatively little if it could not be shown that it is just such a development, an increased susceptibility and extraordinary readiness for aggressive feelings and actions against the Jewish minority, which is to be expected all over the world during the postwar period, [Handwritten Insert: wherever might be heavy suffering and a struggle for political power.]25
Manipulated anti-Semitic propaganda and the susceptibility to it could be expected to disappear in the postwar world only when it has lost its social function. The defamation of the Nazi philosophy and the outlawing of discrimination against any minority would not suffice. This means that either the situation which had generated hate and aggression will have disappeared or that a truthful explanation will be accepted by the majority and aggression consequently channeled against the real causes. Furthermore, the interplay between the social classes will have to become such that no group can be tempted to try again to manipulate prejudice as a tool for seizing power.
A look into the probably postwar situation of most European countries shows good reason to expect that manipulated prejudice would find eager acceptance and determined adherents during a serious depression. Economic distress and abject poverty will be widespread, political disappointment will be numerous, new sources of irritation will develop, and in the struggle for power the old collaborationists in the liberated countries will launch the complaint that the Jews “again control everything,” and that the “Jewish cholera is not better than the Hitlerian pest.”
Many additional factors may contribute to aggravate this situation. To mention a few: an ideology, once institutionalized, is likely to live on for quite some time even after its instigators have become inactive. (And it is by no means certain that systematic Nazi propaganda will not be able to continue from underground.) It is even more likely to expect such a development for the reason that the Nazis will not have been beaten on the ideological plane.
There is one other factor which may have tragic consequences: that millions of Jews could be exterminated like vermin and that this catastrophe, probably unique in human history, could occur without generating any serious opposition. Modern man reacts to such weakness and defenselessness not so much with sympathy for the victim as with a realization that such misdeeds can be done, and with some kind of contempt for those who go into the gas chambers.
In the course of research conducted in this country on what workers think about what the Nazis did to the German Jews, we have found many expressions of horror but as many voices saying that people are not slaughtered wholesale without any cause, and that, most probably, the German Jews had asked for it.
To add just one more factor which may play a part: preparations to restore to the European Jews some of their former rights are widely being regarded as Jewish claims for extra rights in the face of general sacrifice, extra rights which often can be obtained only at the expense of others.
From all this we draw the conclusion that in Europe the image of the Jew as painted by the Nazis will continue to be the best weapon for undermining humanistic philosophy and the respect for the individual. Under conditions of general distress and despair, manipulated anti-Semitism has probably not lost much, if anything, of its usefulness as a means of ideological mass domination.
If we turn now the the American scene, the outlook is, of course, brighter than in war-devastated Europe. But what would happen if a serious postwar depression marked the final failure of the free enterprise system so dear to the hearts of most Americans, if hundreds of thousands of veterans, after opening small shops, were to lose their last cent, and millions of others their jobs? Such a depression would find a majority of the American people in a condition where under the tensions of the war and the phony full employment they have already developed a substantial amount of anti-Semitic feelings. Even now many think that the Jews are not doing their duty in the war effort, that the Jews are draft-dodgers and war profiteers, and that this war is essentially a Jewish war. These attitudes are easily superimposed on the traditional concept of the Jew developed within American civilization which is such that it lent itself to the fantastic accusations.
I am afraid that under conditions of grave economic and social tensions the case for manipulated anti-Semitic prejudice among the social classes in this country can be stated like this:
(1) It could easily function as a simple explanation of all grievances and as a target for an enormous accumulation of hate and aggression.
(2) It could serve to create a pseudo-unity, to confuse the desperate many, and to undermine a democratic philosophy for totalitarian purposes.
Before we discuss the counter-forces against such a development I want to present here in very sketchy outlines a test case which supports the above statements.
[V.] A Test Case in the American Scene: A Study on the Susceptibility of the American Worker toward Anti-Semitic Propaganda.
The Institute’s study, conducted during the last year, is by no means fully conclusive because the sample is much too small from a statistical point of view. However the inner consistency of our findings combined with supporting evidence from other sources has led us to the conclusion that our study comes as close to the true situation as is possible under present conditions. We have tried to explore the nature of anti-Jewish feelings among American workers and have found that there are many and often very deep-reaching roots, and that there are a number of rational factors involved, some of them causes for genuine irritation. The Institute expects to publish its findings in the near future. At this point of our lecture you will not want me to go deeper into the matter than presenting a few general statements.
(1) A substantial majority of American workers seems to be unfriendly towards the Jewish minority. In our samples we have distinguished the following types:
(2) The image of the Jews seems to be essentially the same among all groups but the last one. While they behaved differently, their critique, resentment, hostility, and hatred are directed at the phantom Jew. Most workers seem to see the Jew as a cheating store-keeper, a merciless land-lord or rental agent, an unscrupulous pawn broker, or an installment salesman and insurance collector who will take away the collateral or let the insurance lapse at the first delinquency. To this is added the idea that the Jews own all business and that at least most Jews are in business. All of this is so because the Jews are money-crazy, selfish, grabby, take advantage of others, cheat, chisel, lie, are ruthless, unscrupulous, and so on.
Most workers plainly refuse to acknowledge the existence of a large group of Jewish workers. Either there are no Jewish workers, or they don’t work and merely pretend to be workers. In addition Jewish workers are accused of escaping hard work, passing the buck, catering to the bosses, doing everything for individual advancement, doing nothing for their fellow workers. Finally they are reproached with displaying superior attitudes, having bad manners, knowing everything better, being ambitious and arrogant.
All the war-time accusations (with one significant exception) have been found in our sample. They need not be repeated here. The curious exception is that our interviewers met practically no worker who blamed the Jews for being mainly radicals and communists.
(3) Our material seems to indicate that anti-Semitism among American workers has to a large degree the function of the socialism of the dolt. The craving for an outlet for frustration and aggression seems to be widespread and is likely to increase in leaps and bounds under conditions of a serious post-war depression.
From the findings of which the above statements give only a rather meager account, we draw the conclusion that the American worker seems to be highly susceptible to manipulated anti-Semitic propaganda. It appears to be quite possible that he is no more immune than the classical target of the anti-Semitic demagogue, the despairing member of a decaying middle class.
However, in this whole analysis one factor has been omitted which may well change the whole balance if the economic and social situation does not become absolutely unbearable. There are the democratic elements in the American tradition. There is hardly any country on the European continent where fairness and tolerance and the distrust of the politician and his propagandistic devices have retained such a strong hold in the common man as in this country. This tradition may well set up an insurmountable wall against anti-Semitic feelings developing into anti-Semitic violence.
[VI.] The Crisis of Western Civilization.
[This crisis] is the explanation of the past success and the future opportunities for the use of ruthlessly manipulated prejudice and maintaining political power. The essence of this crisis has been demonstrated in Dr. Horkheimer’s lecture as the lack of a rational criterion to decide right or wrong. If there is nothing which can replace the function of religion in the middle ages, if the humanistic philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is no longer accepted as the ultimate truth, if the last desperate attempt to reunite in one system of thoughts the ideals of mankind and scientific work—the philosophy of Karl Marx—has, even with many of his followers, lost its specific theoretical meaning and become one of the reigning slogans rather than an inspiring truth, what remains to oppose the use of whatever means seems fit to conquer and maintain power?
Instead of a rational criterion, modern man bows to the most irrational of man’s actions: sheer force in domestic and international affairs finally decides what is right or wrong.
Upon a solution to this problem, the finding of a generally accepted criterion that decides on what is right or wrong, depends not only the ability to resist the temptation to use and the weakness to succumb to manipulated prejudice; upon this solution depends the future of civilization.
Löwenthal: The Aftermath of Totalitarian Terror.
Please do not expect from me either history or prophecy. I have neither the time nor the equipment to present to you a comprehensive and overall picture of the stages and functions of Fascist terror during the last decade—or better decades—of European history. And for theoretical as well as for psychological reasons, I would not venture to forecast how people will think, react and behave after the imminent destruction of the most destructive system of which documentary evidence exists.
The most I can try to do is to sketch shortly the general historical and cultural background which may help to explain the emergence and consolidation of a continent-embracing system of terror, to point out then the main phenomena of this system of domination in terms of what is happening to people living and dying under it, and finally to speculate about the results which the terroristic transformation of human beings may have had and still may have on the present and the coming generation.
It is with uneasiness and reluctance that I approach the subject with which I have been charged for this afternoon. But I don’t consider this hesitancy purely a personal matter. This unwillingness to face history today (and I may say that I consider the phenomena of terror the very key and essence of present-day history) is shared by a great many people inside and outside the realm of fascist domination.
The whispering, or even complete silence, prevalent in Axis-dominated Europe concerning terrorism is itself a central phenomenon of terror. Secrecy about what happens to those who by any game of chance—biological, political, ideological—are trapped in the net of fascist practitioners, heightens anxiety, fear and finally very often respect for and internal acceptance of an authority the omnipresence of which is felt and experienced in all conscious and unconscious, in all public and private situations.
The fact that people became benumbed, rigidly frozen into fearful silence, bodily and mentally motionless, is a psychological after-effect of terror which from the very beginning was a principal aim of terorristic manipulation. For, a system of modern terror consists in the total integration of everybody into formations, organizations, collectivities, and at the same time in atomizing all members of these collectivities, depriving them of the psychological means of direct communication, in spite and because of the tremendous setup of communications to which they are exposed. The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He displays rigidity not only toward his neighbor, but eventually toward himself: he loses the power of spontaneous reactions, rationally as well as emotionally. Thinking becomes a stupid crime: it endangers one’s own life. The dialectical consequence is that stupidity (not to think) itself spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population when its members act smartly according to the necessities of life under a system of terror.
Whoever lives under the terror is inclined not to speculate about it or to increase his knowledge about the facts.
I believe that for different reasons we can observe a similar phenomenon outside the fascist orbit. In the face of what really has happened in recent European history and is happening every day, the source material available, public discussion, penetration of public opinion, seem ridiculously disproportionate. If you try to collect data on the perpetration of terror by the Germans and their henchmen, you will have to study mostly little pamphlets or primitively mimeographed compilations of reports, you will have to interrogate people who might know—and you do not have the same difficulties if you want, for instance, to get a picture of the economic trends or the organization of welfare institutions in Germany. Lots of respectable books and periodicals can guide those who crave for specialized knowledge in such fields and—of course with the exception of technical difficulties due to war conditions—you can indulge in empirical, comparative, statistical, historical evaluation within the framework of the different social sciences.
Nothing of that kind as far as the phenomenon of terror is concerned. The fact-conscious world of western civilization has exercised a remarkable reservation and resignation before the facts of terror and has stopped short of becoming aware of events which truly would lend themselves to the most refined social, psychological, historical, and—even if you want to—statistical evaluations.
One wonders whether an uncanny, contagious sickness has jumped over from the fascist camp into the other sphere, our sphere of life. One wonders whether people living under and profiteering from one institutionalized order of political and legal equality are afraid of the intellectual and emotional uproar into which they may be dragged if they were fully conscious of their contemporary history. The numbness of self-preservation in fascist countries seems to be matched by a psychological mass repression, an unconscious mass-flight from truth, in the free world.
I do not share the opinion that the fascist terror is just an ephemeral episode in modern history. I believe that it is deeply rooted in the trends of modern civilization and especially of modern economy. I will try to explain that with a few words, although I’m afraid it needs more clarification than can be achieved here.
Civilization has reached an extremely paradoxical situation: in the course of technological developments which almost surpass imagination and the products of which are very visibly demonstrated by the reports from the war production fronts, and the war fronts, too, for that matter, mankind has reached a stage where it has become so-to-speak almost superfluous. Modern machinery and modern methods of organization have brought about conditions where only a very small minority of managers, technicians, skilled labor, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole apparatus going. Modern society has reached a stage of potential mass unemployment, and many data could be presented for the fact that mass employment becomes ever more a manipulated product of the state and state-like powers, which by public works, including armies and huge official and semi-official political organizations, channel surplus mankind into a frame where it can be kept alive and at the same time kept under control. The whole system of market economy, where the masses could sell and had to sell their labor-power for the production and reproduction of society as such, has become more and more meaningless. The economic relations, however unsatisfactory they have been between the working population and the social product, are more and more replaced by an administrative system of providing food and order and regulating the necessities of production, carried on within a very small social sector. It is this cleavage between the machinery of production under modern conditions of private property and social inequality and the social and economic vacuum of the masses which creates the conditions of terror.
Terror is the institutionalized administration of large strata of mankind as surplus. Almost everybody has become a solider in the army of industrial reserve. Terror simply demonstrates to the people that they have to consider themselves as superfluous and as dependent on the good or bad graces of the administration which can let them live or starve.
Once the terror system has been established, it aims at breaking the continuity between the past—its reality and its dreams—and the present. Formulated or not formulated, terror achieves the destruction of the concept of mankind which had conceived itself as a large producing unit, destroys the memory of mankind and of the individual as an incorporation of the idea of mankind. Terror is the manipulation of the collectivity of mechanically reacting and mechanically manipulating atoms, monads, in the last analysis, purely physical entities.
I may quote a historical example to show—of course on a very reduced scale—the connection between a compulsory social system and economically necessary functions of larger strata of the population. The fate of the serfs during the middle-ages was horrible. But there was a period where they experienced respite: during the outbursts of the black plague in the 13th and 14th centuries the serfs simply left the feudal states and started wandering through Europe, and feudal lords overdid themselves in offering all kinds of conveniences in the working and living conditions if the serfs would only stay or return to the land.
I should like to indicate a few more specific cultural tendencies, emerging from the crisis of the liberal era, which have helped to facilitate the establishment of fascist terror:
(1) Under the impact of mass production, people have learned not only to live within a patterned framework of material goods and habits—like housing, clothing, eating, leisure-time activities—but have also become mentally patterned. They accept wholesale one way or the other an entire system of opinions, reactions, attitudes. The word “stereotype” which is used very often to characterize this phenomenon, is probably not sufficient. A stereotype is just one element which we could describe as the result of a short-circuit in thinking: the current of reasoning has become dead and the concept thereby has become blind. But the blindness of one stereotype is coordinated with many other stereotypes and forms with them one inseparable configuration. People nowadays tend to react as if ideological tie-in-sales were forced upon them. They are following a cultural band-wagon whatever it may be: if somebody happens to be a progressive, he is automatically for democracy, for labor unions, for the New Deal, for the Negroes, for the Jews, for Russia, and for many other things. If he is or was an isolationist, he is not only against America’s participation in the war, but against Russia, against England, against the intellectuals, against the Jews, and against a few other things.
It is not so much that people believe in stereotypes, but that they become stereotyped, rigid participants, appendages of a huge cultural or political monopoly. Content, reason, consistency, are no issue anymore. Experience has become completely overwhelmed by powerful psychological mass institutions. One could say, for instance, that there are no anti-Semites anymore, because it is not so much anything specifically Jewish that was experienced as such and led to a certain attitude, as it is a behavior pattern which is tied-up with the adherence to a specific cultural ticket. And it may be said that this shrinking of genuine experience makes it the more difficult to counteract distorted, perverted, fallacious stereotypes.
The cultural monopolies integrating a whole chain of attitudes, exercise themselves a psychologically terroristic impact to which the individual yields.
(2) However, the moral concepts of middle-class society are still there: the individual still adheres to values like conscience, decency, self-respect, dignity of man, and so on. But the social foundations in which these concepts were rooted are crumbling. In the face of the overwhelming quantity of power, bigness, destruction, extermination, these moral problems, scruples, conflicts, become more and more disproportionate to reality. To give a very drastic example:
The ethical issue involved in a play like Hamlet which may be considered a classical document of morality after the dissolution of medieval culture, the question whether the wrongs of this world can be righted or not, if Hamlet becomes the judge and the executioner of the judgment against the murderer of his father, seems to become nearly ridiculous in the face of present-day physical and moral catastrophes.
(3) This inadequacy between moral tradition and modern reality has left modern man in a vacuum. He realizes—in various degrees of consciousness—that not much depends any longer on his decisions—materially or spiritually. He becomes the frightened man alone without heritage, again materially and spiritually, and being an heir was a basis of existence in liberal society.
In this atmosphere of a material and moral vacuum, modern man tends to become sick. All systems have broken down to which an individual could have taken refuge. He is exposed to tremendous fears and that means also to the readiness for tremendous fury and aggression. Modern man has potentially become a paranoiac.
In this condition, he has become ready to accept the most senseless, the craziest ideologies and patterns of persecution and domination. He becomes pliable to terroristic manipulation which satisfies paranoiac tendencies and he looses first the inner and then the outer resistance to manipulated power and terror.
(4) This context and affinity between potential material poverty and real spiritual poverty has been spotted by the fascist manipulators. They have realized that in order to subjugate and manipulate the surplus population, one has to burn into them the awareness of physical and mental menace and to extirpate the whole frame of moral and emotional reference with which people hitherto had tried to survive personal catastrophes.
I can quote none less than Hitler himself who, in a conversation with Rauschning, once spoke of the necessity of terrorism and brutality:
“He had not the slightest liking for concentration camps and secret police and the like but these things were simply necessities from which there was no getting away. ‘Unless you are prepared to be pitiless, you will get nowhere… Domination is never founded on humanity, but, regarded from the narrow civilian angle, on crime. Terrorism is absolutely indispensable in every case of the founding of a new power. ... Even more important than terrorism is the modification of the ideas and feelings of the masses. We have to control those.’” (Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London, 1939, p. 274-75)
I will now try to point at some of the main phenomena of terror in action.
(1) Directness and Omnipotence.
A friend of mine with whom I once discussed the topic of terror, ventured the opinion that structurally the fear to be fired from a job the next morning and the fear to be arrested by the Gestapo in the early dawn, are identical. But I think there is a very decisive difference: the fear to lose a job can be reasoned out in terms of a specific situation: there is a factory which may find itself with less orders on hand than it used to have, or the worker may, for certain definable causes, fall into disgrace with his boss. He may become unemployed, he may find another job, he may be reinstated. Everything that happens to him is in a relatively clear-cut relation to his person. But to be arrested by the Gestapo has all aspects of anonymity, incalculability, inescapability. One of the first and foremost functions of terrorism is to wipe out the compatibility between individual fate and public decisions. The wholesale arrest of people during the first stages of fascist terrorism, the mixing in the concentration camps of the most diversified elements of the population for the most diversified reasons, fulfills just this function of the elimination of individual differences and claims before the apparatus of power. The individuals are then thrown into the maze of one powerless collectivity. The problem whether one is actually caught and subjected to terroristic punishment or not caught and only subjected to fascist domination outside the camps is not any longer the qualitative difference as it was between the penal prisoner in a jail and the rest of the population. Instead of the individual violation of the law which determines the selection of penal prisoners, the principles of selection of the compulsory workers in the concentration camp is direct terroristic calculation. They were mostly trapped in big mass actions with no question of individual guilt involved and no hope of limited punishment. The individual compulsory worker of the concentration camp to a much greater and qualitatively different degree than the penal prisoner is a typical representative of the whole population. This is made ominously clear by the fact that the compulsory workers in the camps are not under the supervision of specialized civil servants (like the inmates of prisons), but of the SS units, who are also the suppressors of the population at large.
This interruption of the causal nexus between what somebody does and what happens to somebody, this assimilation of the individual to a terrifying and terrified collectivity, leads to another extremely important terroristic phenomenon.
(2) The Breakdown of the Continuum of Experience.
With the breakdown of legal rationality and its transparent relation to individual fate, this fate itself becomes enigmatic for its bearer. He doesn’t know what he may experience, and whatever he has experienced so far in his life is of no importance for his person and for his future life. The normal rhythm of youth, manhood and old-age, of building up a career, of success or of failure, is completely disrupted and replaced by the experience of something that comes from nowhere, leads to nowhere, and never ends. Fantasy, imagination, memory become meaningless and shrink almost completely where these creative human faculties cannot bring about desired changes or desired conservation.
Of course, this transformation from a continuity of experience and memory as the essence of a human being to a unit of atomized reactions, to a cluster of shocks, is more realized by the trapped victims than by the rest of the population. And since we cannot deal with all the differences within the terrorist camp, we shall narrow down our examples to the trapped victims—being conscious however that what is happening there is always being experienced as the potential fate of everybody.
The breakdown of memory and experience has been described by the German psychologist Curt Bondy,26 who was himself for a while in a concentration camp:
“One important factor in the destructive effect of all internment camps is the ‘indeterminate sentence’... The uncertainty about the duration of the imprisonment is probably what unnerves the men most…”
“... Uncertainty, as a whole, exercises a depraving effect on the personality of the internees…”
“They try to forget. The past becomes uncertain and nebulous, the picture of their family and friends indistinct. Here are the roots of hopelessness, apathy, indifference, despair, distrust, and egocentricity.” (Problems of Internment Camps. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 4, October, 1943, pp. 464-65)
Thus life becomes a chain of expected, avoided, materialized shocks, and thus the atomized experiences heighten the atomization of the individual. A paradoxical situation presents itself: in a terrorist society in which everything is planned most carefully, the plan laid out for the individual is exactly this: to have no plan anymore, to become and to stay only an object, a bundle of conditioned reflexes to manipulated and calculated shocks.
One can formulate this dialectical relationship also in the following way: fascism in its first stage [politicizes] a nation by coordinating private and public existence, by driving home with all means of propaganda the connection between the fate of the whole and the fate of the individual. But in doing so it [de-politicizes] the people because it impresses on them that to exist is already a possible reason for indictment by the terror machine. The borderline between “to be” and “not to be” cannot be drawn any longer by individual decisions but is drawn by the striking, lightning-like and planned operations of the machine.
(3) The Breakdown of Morals and Passions.
The destruction of the continuity of the individual leads with necessity to the destruction of [interpersonal] relationships. In a system where life becomes just a chain of shocks and avoided shocks, of reactions to bodily or mental stimulae, the personal intercommunications tend to lose any meaning. The superego in which people had accumulated the mechanism of moral decency is repressed by what I would like to call a Hitler-ego, meaning that all inhibitions produced by conscience are replaced by inhibitions or drives produced by mechanical reactions and imitations. The terrorized and the terrorizing subject alike are no longer personalities in the traditional sense: they are material conforming [to] the situations which are created utterly independent of themselves.
In an underground report published by the Polish Labor Group, an escaped prisoner from one of the Polish camps reports:
“The most terrible element to be found in these pages is perhaps the fact the camp system, in many cases, destroyed every social tie in a victim and reduced his spiritual life to a fear-driven desire to prolong existence, be it only for a day or for an hour.” (Oswiecim, Camps of Death, New York, 1944, p. 11).
A keen observer, Dr. Bettelheim, now with the University of Chicago, has studied this transformation from [interpersonal] relationships to a complete loss of vital passions:
“This outside world which continued to live as if nothing had happened was in the minds of the new prisoners represented by those whom they used to know, namely, by their relatives and friends. They hated them. But even this hatred was very subdued in the old prisoners. It seemed that, as much as they had forgotten to love their kind, they had lost the ability to hate them… Since the old prisoners did not show much emotion either way, they were unable to feel strongly about anybody.” (Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, l.c., pp. 442-43).
From the other side of the fence, although within the confines of the concentration camps, a similar shrinking of personality to a cluster of conditioned reflexes has been observed: I speak of the guards. As another Polish prisoner reports on them:
“Men can always be found who are ready to destroy and kill their fellow men. I never saw them show any compassion or regret. They never evinced any pity over the fate of innocent victims. They were automatons, who perform their given tasks as soon as some higher-up presses a button…” (Yankel Wiernik, A Year in Tremblinka. Published by American Representation, General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, New York, p. 17).
Again we may quote Bettelheim who has observed and experienced the dehumanization of the practitioners into executors of ordered reactions under prescribed conditions:
“... having been educated in a world which rejected brutality, they felt uneasy about what they were doing. It seems that they, too, had an emotional attitude toward their acts of brutality which might be described as a feeling of unreality. After having been guards in the camp for some time, they got accustomed to inhuman behavior, they became ‘conditioned’ to it; it them became part of their ‘real’ life.” (p. 432, n. 14).
(4) Darwinism in Action.
What is left after such destruction of the mental and moral constituents of the individual? Is the question still meaningful—what people are living for—, once they have lost the outer power and the inner possibilities of forming and molding their own life or influencing the life of others? The answer is that every single moment of life which is experienced as endless and at the same time only as moments becomes the only still perceivable reality. The old system of culture from abstract philosophical metaphysics to the institutions of education had the purpose of permeating mankind with the idea that only rational behavior which included respecting the rights, claims and needs of other people, would guarantee one’s own survival. Fascist terror has disposed of the whole cultural and ideological apparatus and has put the individual before the naked force of nature, that means of denatured nature, in the form of the all-powerful machinery. While under the conditions of civilized life, the individual could safeguard his own existence solely by mutual acts of coordination and even of subordination of his desires to those of others, under fascist conditions consideration and mutual respect may be equivalent to annihilation. It is in the interest of the manipulating powers that people are concerned consciously, or better instinctively, only with their own atomized isolated fate, only with their own survival: of course, this attitude was always rudimentarily in existence even at the peak of cultural, moral and religious wealth.
What terror brings about and wants to bring about and enforces by its tortures is that people in a way act in harmony with the law of terror itself: namely that their whole calculation has only one aim: to perpetuate oneself. The more people become ruthless practitioners of their own survival, the more they become psychological pawns and puppets in a system which knows nothing else but of keeping itself in power.
We have reports from the camps which confirm this process of self-preservation brought to the threshold of Darwinian (or should we say infantile?) regression:
“The urge of self-preservation, bestial fear, hunger and thirst led to a complete transformation of the majority of the prisoners. … In many cases the sense of responsibility toward others disappeared entirely, as well as the least feeling of consideration of their common lot. Many a prisoner carried on a wild, ruthless, and thoroughly senseless struggle for his individual survival (C. Bondy, l.c., p. 455).
“Bad behavior in the labor gang endangered the whole group. So a newcomer who did not stand up well under the strain tended to become a liability for the other prisoners. Moreover, weaklings were those most apt eventually to turn traitors. Weaklings usually died during the first weeks in the camp anyway, so it seemed as well to get rid of them sooner. So old prisoners were sometimes instrumental in getting rid of the unfit.” (Bettelheim, l.c., p. 448)
(5) Reduction to Nature.
I just said that the wild craving for survival is in the planned interest of the masters of the terroristic systems. What they have to fear most is that people may become aware again of belonging to a whole, to history, as a continuous experience of mankind and as the only hope for the future dreams for oneself and one’s children. A complete victory of fascism would be identical with the complete forgetting of history, would be identical with a state of mankind void of any reflection, or in other words of mankind as solely nature. Once more I want to quote Hitler himself:
“A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey… I intend to have an athletic youth—that is the first and the chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.” (Hitler Speaks, l.c., p. 247)
If we dispose of the flowering adjectives, we have a classical admission of fascist aims and ends: mankind having become superfluous, has to be part of the over-abundance of nature. By becoming nature, mankind becomes indeed material, material for exploitation where needed or for annihilation where not needed. Fascist terror looks at people always with the eyes either of the big monopolist surveying the raw materials or with the eyes of the mortician anticipating the disposal of the human corpse as useless nature.
To give you an example of terror as a manipulating agent of exploitation, I want to quote from reports which describe the initiation of inmates in Eastern European concentration camps:
“At one side we surrendered our baggage; at the other side we had to undress and to surrender our clothing and pieces of value. Naked, then, we went into another barrack, where our head and beard was shaved and disinfected with Lysol. When we walked out of this barrack, each of us was given a number. They began with number 28,600 and were successive. With these numbers in our hands we were chased into a third barrack where the reception took place. This “reception” consisted in that our numbers were tattooed on our left breast. Then they proceeded to take the data of each person and brought us, divided in groups of hundreds, in a cellar, later in another barrack, where we were given striped prisoners’ clothes and wooden shoes.” (Die Judenausrottung in Polen. Augenzeugenberichte. Dritte Serie, Ed., by Dr. Silberschein, Genf, 1944, pp. 77-78.)
You may translate this description of what is happening here to people, [into] a description of what is happening to merchandise shipped into the inventory rooms of a large department store or a big plant. It is a planful handling of raw materials or manufactured goods for certain purposes.
To continue this parallelism: the system has become so streamlined that tags are only given to human merchandise which is really useful: he who gets no number is stigmatized as a reject. He is disposed of:
“There were about 1600 people in the transport, of which 400 men and about 200 girls were brought to the camp and numbered, while the other 1000—women, old men and above all children—were brought directly, without ado, to the birch-woods where they were gassed to death and burned.” (l.c., p. 94)
And as it may happen in any oversized administrative unit, nobody wants to take the blame for the mistakes. Even if the merchandise has been rejected by mistake, it is destroyed:
“Since the prisoners were checked according to numbers and not according to their names, an error could easily be made which would be disastrous. If the ‘block-writer’ had marked ‘dead’ a number which in reality was still alive—a thing which can happen in these extreme cases of great mortality—the mistake was corrected by putting to death the holder of the number. Because no correction could be made in the reports.” (l.c., pp. 87-88)
One can hardly find more telling evidence for the reconversion of the human being into the prospective corpse than the following quotation from an escaped prisoner from a death camp:
“It was a continuous coming and going, and death without end. I learned to look at every live person as a prospective corpse in the nearest future. I appraised him with my eyes and thought of his weight; who was going to carry him to his grave; how severe a beating he would get while doing it. It was terrible but, nonetheless, true. Would you believe it that a human being, living under such conditions, could, at times, smile and jest? One can get used to anything.” (Wiernik, l.c., p. 17).
These are hard facts. But such a formulation makes no sense within the grammar and logic of the language of terror. Here one would better say that man himself has become a fact, an element of dead nature, an anticipated corpse. Death gains rationality: the rationality of putting nature to use. To quote again from the same source:
“It turned out that women burned easier than men. Accordingly, corpses of women were used for kindling the fires.” (l.c., p. 28)
Or from another source, this time an official Russian report:
“The Germans carried out mass round-ups of Jews in the city at Lwow. They spared neither men, women or children. The adults they simply murdered, while the children were given away to Hitler Youth squads as shooting targets…” (quoted in News Bulletin, Representation of Polish Jury, American Division, No. 1/2, Jan.-Febr. 1945, p. 49).
(6) Assimilation Between Executioners and Victims.
The peak of the practical success of the terror regime has been achieved when the borderline between the victim and the victimizer disappears, when the victims themselves become so completely assimilated to the conditions under which they live that they accept the conditions as they are. The most primitive historical force, imitation, becomes again openly prevalent in the nature-like dehumanized atmosphere of fascism. We may get an inkling of what has happened to the majority of European people who have not experienced a concentration camp and yet have been exposed to a system of terror, when we hear what could happen and has happened in the concentration camps. We wonder whether we do not read a description of a very large part of all people in the Axis orbit when we read the observations which Bettelheim has made in a camp:
“A prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo… From copying the verbal aggressions of the Gestapo to copying their form of bodily aggressions was one more step, but it took several years to make this step… Old prisoners who seemed to have a tendency to identify themselves with the Gestapo did so not only in respect to aggressive behavior. They would try to arrogate to themselves old pieces of Gestapo uniforms. If that was not possible, they tried to sew and mend their uniforms so that they would resemble those of the guards. The length to which prisoners would go in these efforts seemed unbelievable, particularly since the Gestapo punished them for their efforts to copy Gestapo uniforms. When asked why they did it, they admitted that they loved to look like one of the guards. (...) Prisoners prided themselves of being as tough as the Gestapo members. This identification with their torturers went so far as copying their leisure-time activities. One of the games played by the guards was to find out who could stand to be hit the longest without uttering a complaint. This game was copied by the old prisoners, as though they had not been hit often enough without needing to repeat this experience as a game… Other problems in which most old prisoners made their peace with the values of the Gestapo included the race problem, although race discrimination had been alien to their scheme of values before they were brought into the camp…” (Bettelheim, l.c., pp. 447-50)
It sounds like the greatest triumph which any system of power may be able to realize: the voluntary mental introjection of the values and commands of the powers-that-be by those who are their powerless victims.
[-o-]27
What may be the possible consequences and results of the terror regime? Only a few remarks:
(1) The Structural Change of Hopes and Dreams.
It belongs to the inner dialectics of a terroristic system that its tools and practices increase in strength, quantity and cruelty. But the consequence of this increasing suppression is that the suppressed lose completely the hope for the end of terror. They are atomized and endangered and oppressed to such a degree that they are only looking forward to alleviation of the terror, not to its end.
The terror achieves by its own compulsory situation a very useful effect: people lose the power of anticipating a different order of life. People in a terrorist world have become absolutely dependent, materially and spiritually. They are receivers of a dole, beginning with the “Strength Through Joy” benefits, down all the way to the spoiled food and water of the concentration camps. They become completely forgetful of spontaneity. If we look for historical parallels which, of course, are extremely weak and feeble in the face of fascist terror, we find after the abolition and breakdown of dictatorial systems with terroristic aspects a craving for continuation of its authoritarian aspects; I may remind you of the period after Cromwell or after the regime of the Terreur in the French Revolution. Just the other day I was shown a letter from an American officer from France. He writes:
“I was especially interested in the stories, the 24-year old daughter told. She worked for more than two years in the French Underground. Finally she was caught and was for one and one-quarter years in a German prison. She was in solitary confinement and had to undergo quite some beating… We talked about many things. Least of all they want a Europe dominated by Russia. They even said that before that happened they would fight together with Germany to prevent it. That was, I think, the strangest statement I got. After all the manifestations of hate, it surprised me. I write it down to give you an impression of the feelings here. Again I found that democracy is really nothing which appeals to them and for what they would fight. Here again I heard that what they want is leadership by a strong man, who is able to make France great.”
It is my opinion that the hostility displayed toward Russia is a relatively thin rationalization of much deeper-lying tendencies: the very power of historical imagination, of the concept of freedom, of spontaneous and autonomous building-up of individual life and the life of a community, has been destroyed and replaced by a readiness to surrender to such a degree as we can hardly imagine from here.
(2) The Emergence of an Infantile Collectivity.
The terroristic atomization of people within and outside of the camps has resulted in an almost complete destruction of the old institutionalized forms of collective life. The decomposition of the family which already had taken on considerable proportions in post-war Germany must have gained tremendous momentum. The regimentation of youth, their army life beginning at the early stage of the Hitler Youth organization, the complete dependence of the fathers from the whims of the planned strategy of terror in production as well as in administration, the destruction of family ties by deportation of innumerable millions of foreign workers and by the extermination of millions of people, must have resulted in a complete transformation of values and expectations concerning the warmth and security of an established pattern of family life. We may see a tremendous upsurge of a feeling of collectivity as it may be observed among adolescents, among gangs of teenaged boys or girls. Descriptions which have come to my attention about the behavior of inmates and guards of concentration camps speak an unmistakable language of psychological homosexuality. –
The concept of the father has become eradicated to a probably unimaginable degree and has been replaced by the image of a cynical, ruthless, destructive, cruelly joyful and probably extremely resentful community which, to quote Hitler again ironically, is nothing else but brutally domesticated and therefore brutal nature.
(3) The Protective Mechanisms of Numbness and Rigidity.
[These mechanisms,] of which I have spoken in the beginning, have probably created an atmosphere of indifference toward anything and everybody and especially toward theory and reason which will make human intercommunication extremely difficult.
[I’d] like to quote from an article by Max Horkheimer:
“What fascism does to its victims it selects as examples for its unlimited power seems to defy all reason. Its tortures transcend the power to perceive or imagine; when thought attempts to comprehend the deed it stiffens with horror and is rendered hopeless. The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.” (Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, 1941, p. 384)
I want to illustrate this theoretical statement by a very concrete quotation describing conditions in Eastern Europe:
“People in the Warsaw Ghetto were still hypnotized by the magic power of these papers which could spell life. But all this did not last long. The abyss of death opened. The Nazis had achieved their purpose. The Ghetto inhabitants, awakened to deadly fear, were deprived of willpower, made incapable of action. As the Polish government report puts it: ‘Through the streets of Warsaw wandered pale shadows, their eyes frightened, visionless… They ran from street to street, in the delusion that perhaps on the next street the danger might not be as great…’” (S. Mendelsohn, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Yiddish Scientific Institute, New York, 1944, p. 9).
If we can generalize from the reports coming from the conquered sections of Germany, we may say that the behavior of the population toward the occupational powers is the continuity of frozen reactions. The aloof attitude or the idiotic polishing-up to the military powers who anyway have not the intention of continuing Nazi practices is an hilarious and utterly embittering example of the complete indifference toward any genuinely experienced values and convictions. The contempt which probably these Germans encounter confirms only the self-contempt which they must have and which is a direct outcome of the terroristic atomization and depravation of the individual.
(4) The Terroristic Heritage in the Resistance.
From the few facts available we may infer that the pattern of terroristic suppression has not been without influence on the behavior of liberated groups and individuals. It is not our task to moralize about the legitimacy and appropriateness of revenge. But it must be said that enjoyment of acts of victory and triumph over the hated enemy by means which betray still a relationship to the means of the enemy is a phenomenon of far-reaching significance for the tasks ahead. We all have read or seen those wretched French girls whose hair were shorn because they had been indicted for intimate relations with German army personnel. Many of you have read the remark of a Polish girl, member of the Underground, to Karski which he relates in his “Story of a Secret State” where she said there is only one way to change everything:
“The moment the Germans are defeated, a ruthless mass terror must be organized. The imported Germans must be expelled from the vicinity by the same methods by which they were settled here—by force and ruthless extermination. The problem of de-Germanizing Poznan will become insoluble if we agree to any compromise, to plebiscites, repayment of damages, property exchanges.” (Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State. Houghton, Mifflin, 1945, p.)
It is only a slight consolation that we, in this country, have been fortunate enough not to face similar moral problems. I don’t know the answers.
(5) The Blurring of the Borderlines Between Life and Death.
To quote again from Horkheimer’s article:
“To men in the bourgeois era, individual life was of infinite importance because death meant absolute catastrophe. Hamlet’s line ‘the rest is silence,’ in which death is followed by oblivion, indicates the origin of the ego. Fascism shatters this fundamental principle. It strikes down that which is tottering, the individual, by teaching him to fear something worse than death. Fear reaches farther than the identity of his consciousness. The individual must abandon the ego and carry on somehow without it.” (l.c.).
One of the Gestapo officers examining Karski told him: “I assure you, after a few of our caresses, you will regard death as a luxury.” (l.c.) Life has ceased to be the absolute value which it had become in modern times after the weakening of religion, and death has ceased to be an evil, but has not become again the promise of redemption which religion once offered to mankind. This religious concept of eternal life has been replaced by the earthly reality of eternal death. People in Europe have experienced it, have heard about it, or have refused to hear about it. However it may be in the individual case, I believe that a leading European scholar and statesman was right who said the other day that the very facts of terror have poisoned everybody in Europe.
I have started out by saying that it is only with the greatest reluctance that I speak this afternoon. I suppose that what I had to report is the best explanation of such reluctance. But it is only in the attitude of applying theory and reason to what has happened to mankind that mankind itself can hope to tear loose from the most pathetic fate which it ever became involved in. Everything in rational and material goods has been at the disposal of men and nearly everything has been lost. To quote from a courageous philosopher:
“Mutilated as men are, in the duration of a brief moment they can become aware that in the world which has been thoroughly rationalized they can dispense with the interests of self-preservation which still set them one against the other. The terror which pushes reason, is at the same time the last means of stopping it, so close has truth come.” (Horkheimer, l.c., p. 388).
Hegel once said in a speech: “How fortunate the institution which has no history.” Our age of terror is history. But the happiness of mankind is also embedded in the historical soil. Whatever has been suppressed by terror could only be suppressed because it has been alive: the dreams of mankind have belonged to this life and may become reality, truly history, when people free themselves from the nightmare of terror and the nightmare of its aftermath.
Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 373-390.
In the much later “Foreword” (1967) to the collection Critique of Instrumental Reason, the the anti-communist (since the mid-to-late 1950s) ‘late’ Horkheimer writes accurately (and therefore condescendingly) of his own postwar “scientific socialist” optimism throughout the late 1940s: “At the end of the Nazi period (I thought at the time) a new day, the beginning of an authentically human history, would dawn in the developed countries as the result of reforms or revolution. Along with the other founders of Scientific Socialism, I thought that the cultural gains of the bourgeois era—the free development of human powers, a spiritual productivity—but stripped now of all elements of force and exploitation, would surely become widespread throughout the world. My experiences since that time have not failed to affect my thinking. The ‘communist’ states, which make use of the same Marxist categories to which my own efforts in the realm of theory owe so much, are certainly no closer to the dawn of that day than are the countries in which, for the moment at least, the freedom of the individual has not yet been snuffed out.” In: Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays Since the End of World War II, by Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others. (Continuum : Seabury Press, 1974), ix.
For Adorno and Horkheimer’s debate with Löwenthal and Paul Massing on “Elements,” see: Debating Thesis VII of the “Elements”: Democracy and Fascism; Liberalism or Communism (Summer-Fall 1946).
As Horkheimer writes in “The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration” (1938), his critique of the ‘liberal socialism’ of Siegfried Marck:
That social system of the last century so named was the unrestrained domination of the capitalist law of value; enlightenment, transposed in practice of the principle of competition. […] In the modern era, inequality has vanished behind the concept of the citizen. The transition to this mode of economy was a historical step forward which ushered in a period of productivity and horror. The history of this period contains not only the chapter of Jewish emancipation, but also that of the ‘Workhouse Tests,’ the brutal repression of the commune, and the terrors of colonial administration. The continuation of their ideology is no more possible than that of their economic foundations. The objection that classical liberalism at the very least had the right ideas, and that it is only a matter of applying them today, can hold no water here. Whoever says ‘freedom’ today must make very clear what, exactly, he means by it. Freedom in abstracto is all too compatible with the remissions of French police prefectures and the redemption of our Austrian brothers.
The isolated use of such categories has become impossible since Hegel. They are true only in the totality of cognition—namely, as critical functions, negating particular truths and conditions, pushing them beyond themselves. They do not prove themselves by virtue of being proclaimed or presented for the approval or disapproval of others. The presentation of that which prevails as a contradictory, inadequate, and bad actuality, one which has yet to come to its senses, and the practice which corresponds to this—this is the only legitimate use of ideas. In the time of the French Revolution, the slogans of the rights of man did not yet correspond to the goals which were sought in their name. In the 19th century, however, speech of freedom and equality had already become neo-humanistic, not because the goals had already been realized, but because any clear connection to the historical present and activity had disappeared. They degenerate into ideals. In liberalism, the ideal transfigures the reality before which it is held; the dominant form of society, which is driving towards collapse, appears as a moment of unbroken progress. The ideal exerts a moralizing influence. The commitment to freedom, which retains its meaning “precisely because it is never fully realized,” sanctions the unfreedom that always is. The masses, however, would not be held back by this.
For an exception to the rule, see Eva-Maria Ziege’s analysis of the ISR’s neglected ‘Labor Study’ (Anti-Semitism Among American Labor) of 1944/45 which forms the basis of Pollock’s lecture above.
Eva-Maria Ziege, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie. Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. (Suhrkamp, 2009).
For an exceptional recent account of the ‘late’ Horkheimer’s conservative—if not reactionary—and revisionist redefinition of ‘critical theory’ into an apology for Cold Warrior imperialism in the 1960s, see:
Ryan Crawford, “Critical Theory Consolidated: Foreword Regression in the Late Work of Max Horkheimer and Its American Reception.” In: Critical Historical Studies, Vol 12, No 1 (Spring 2025), 79-118.
Horkheimer’s phrase in the conclusion of his 1948 UNESCO speech “The Lessons of Fascism,” published two years later in:
Tensions that Cause Wars: Common statement and individual papers by a group of social scientists brought together by UNESCO. Edited by Hadley Cantril (University of Illinois Press, 1950), 209-242.
Horkheimer (1946), quoted in: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 241.
The quote (translated by Jephcott for the 2002 English edition of DoE) was first published in:
Horkheimer and Adorno, “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussion über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik” (1946), in: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 12 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 597-599·
Editor’s note: The document ends with: “(Not continued).”
Horkheimer’s note: Citation of Ludwig Feuchtwanger (204)
Editor’s note: likely a reference to: “Conscience in Western Thought and the Idea a Transmoral Conscience,” by Paul Tillich. Included in the container—[MHA], Na [654]—of materials for the 1945 ISR Lecture sequence on the “Aftermath” and Horkheimer’s “Idea of Philosophy” course, delivered winter 1945/46.
Editor’s note: Pollock’s epigraph.
Editor’s note: Incomplete sentence, cut off by splicing and reshaping earlier draft: “In the United States, only a minority—perhaps a larger one than you think—has reached this state of mind. But let the postwar prosperity …”
Editor’s note: These two ¶s are crossed out in the copy of the lecture in the MHA.
Editor’s note: In lieu of a title for this bullet point, which receives several formulations that are both redundant with one other and the paragraph as a whole.
Cut from lecture draft: [Cases of cruel behavior against Jewish class-mates during the first years of Nazi anti-Semitism are numerous, although examples of juvenile solidarity with humiliated friends are not entirely missing. For the period covered by our witnesses there is no evidence that individual or group acts of anti-Semitic violence sprang up spontaneously, without being directly ordered or indirectly instigated…]
Cut from lecture draft: [(3) Certain regions of Germany are outstanding for particularly violent forms of anti-Semitism, among them Frankonia and Hessia; both belonged to the few German districts where genuine anti-Semitism existed long before the Nazis came to power. This tradition has not only facilitated the rise of the Nazis but the development of violent forms of anti-Semitism never known in modern times in these regions.]
Cut from lecture draft: [... were necessary to keep the populace in line. It might be added here that the use of terroristic measures, both “The execution of morally objectionable measures rarely fell within the jurisdiction of the permanent officials, few of whom had anything to do with them.” As a rule they were entrusted to special party organizations. (Arnold Brecht: Prelude to Silence, New York, 1944.)]
Cut from lecture draft: [Especially in their lower strata, anti-Semitic tradition had been strong and grown under the impact of the blows dealt by inflation, cartelization, and depression. On the other hand, it seems to be a mistake to assume that—always speaking of the period extending to 1942, and excluding the last years about which we know very little—the middle-class formed a uniform pattern of anti-Semitic behavior and ideology. Teachers, for instance, are reported to have been on the one hand the most violently anti-Semitic, and, on the other hand, the most considerate sympathizers with the Jewish victims. Evidence of extreme professional disloyalty on the part of gentile physicians toward Jewish colleagues and former friends alternate with reports on courageous acts on behalf of the victims of discrimination.]
Cut from lecture draft: [But even among these groups the reluctance to take an active part in anti-Semitic violence was sometimes so great that units from out of town had to be called in to do the dirty work.]
Cut from lecture draft: [The following news item, to which numerous others could be added, tells an eloquent story of how even the bloodiest terror and the most vicious propaganda could not prevent non-Jews from actively helping Jewish victims: “Early in November 1943 the Prague special German court condemned to death eight persons, including two women, for assisting Jews in crossing the frontier ‘thus sabotaging the measures taken by the government to solve the Jewish problem in Bohemia and Moravia’...” (Racial State, p. 260)]
Cut from lecture draft: [A sharp protest against the continued anti-Jewish propaganda in France, which largely revolves around the question of restitution, is published in ‘le Franc-Tireur’, another resistance publication, by Father Elie Corvin, who was a chaplain with the Maquis forces during the occupation. The article quotes leaflets which have been distributed here and warns that this is not a question for the Jews alone. In 1940, he recalls, anti-patriotic agitation began as a campaign against foreign Jews and was then extended to French Jews and eventually to all of the French resistance. The present campaign, he concludes, can be extended ‘to all who desire to clean and purify France.’]
Cut from draft: [... Jewish property, or to vacate apartments from which the Jewish tenants had been expelled.]
Cut from draft: [... before the war as published in the publications of the ‘defense’ organizations.]
Cut from draft: [Another symptom of the continued usefulness of manipulated anti-Semitism even after the Jews have been expelled is the uninterrupted beating of the anti-Semitic drum in Nazi Germany. I have here an issue of Streicher’s paper “Der Stuermer” of January 24th of this year. In spite of the paper shortage it still has six pages, most of them dedicated to anti-Semitic propaganda. The editorial under the title “The Danger” states that without permanent vigilance the younger generation, which has no personal experience with the Jewish conspirators, might forget that the “Jewish Problem” has not yet been solved. Two full pages are dedicated to an enumeration of ritual murder cases allegedly quoted from old chronicles and starting with the case of … century. And all this is being done after every German must be convinced that there is not a single Jew left in Germany and after it has become common knowledge that millions of Jews have been exterminated in the scientifically organized earth camps. For those of you who would like to believe that “Der Steurmer” is a pathological case, I should like to add that all the leading Nazi papers still carry anti-Semitic propaganda and that almost all recent Hitler speeches contained many more vicious outbursts against the Jewish plutocrats than can be found in the versions published by the American press.]
Editor’s note: Bondy, C. (1943). Problems of internment camps. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38(4), 453–475. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056860.
Abstract: “The psychologist author summarizes his experiences in Buchenwald during the Jewish roundup of 1938. He considers bad food and housing responsible for the greater breakdown to insanity and animalism in this camp than in others. However, one organized group of 20 boys held together and survived without breakdown. The typical personality changes of internees were the result of degradation and isolation from the world. Suggestions are made for the serious postliberation problems of handling those who have been in concentration camps and those who must live in large camps pending reconstruction and repatriation. Reconstruction workers must be trained, sympathetic, and patient. Local helpers must be widely used. The after effects of internment and of Nazi education should be studied.”
Editor’s note: section break.