posted 12-21-2003 07:09 PM            

THEODOR ADORNO (1903-1969)
EDUCATION AFTER AUSCHWITZ

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April 1966 radio presentation;
translation based on Shreier and Heyl (eds.), Never Again! The Holocaust's Challenge for Educators (Hamburg: Krämer, 1997), 11-20.
note: this document begins on the 5th page of the translation, from the bottom of p. 15 to the end of the essay.
Translation amended and headings added by H. Marcuse, for use in the 1999 CHSSP, and Fall 2000 Comp. Lit 186ee

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The educational value of "hardship" (back to top)
According to Boger [a guard at Auschwitz who devised brutal means to punish inmates], using hardship to educate people to discipline is necessary in order to make people the way he thinks they should be. This notion that hardship is education, which many people thoughtlessly accept, is thoroughly perverse. The notion that manliness consists in enduring a maximum amount of pain long ago became the cover image for a masochism that-as psychology has shown-is all too easily a component of sadism. This praised being-hard-on-them, which is the goal of such education, means indifference to all pain. Thus the difference between one's own pain and that of others is not even clearly established. People who are hard toward themselves buy themselves the right to be hard toward others as well, and avenge themselves for the pain they were not permitted to show and had to repress. This mechanism is to be made conscious just as much as an education is to be promoted that no longer places premiums on pain and on the capacity to endure pain as was done before. In other words, education would have to put into practice a thought that is in no way foreign to philosophy, namely, that fear is not to be repressed. When fear is not repressed, when one admits actually having as much fear as the reality of the situation deserves, then precisely in this way much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced fear will probably disappear.

Enduring pain and inflicting pain (back to top)
People who blindly adapt to collectives already make themselves into something like material and extinguish themselves as autonomous beings. The willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass fits with this. In my book The Authoritarian Personality [1950] I called people who behave in this way the manipulative character, even before [Auschwitz Commandant] Höss's diary and Eichmann's sketches were published. My descriptions of the manipulative character date back to the final years of World War II. … The manipulative character-everyone can check this in the available sources about those Nazi leaders-distinguishes itself by obsession for organization, by its general inability to have direct human experiences, by a certain kind of emotional callousness, and by overvalued realism. At all costs this personality type wants to pursue seeming, albeit illusionary Realpolitik. Not for a second do such people think or wish the world to be other than it is, possessed as they are by the will "of doing things" and indifferent about the content of such doing. Such people make out of activity, out of so-called "efficiency" as such, a cult that is suggested in advertising for active persons. If my observations do not deceive me and if a number of sociological investigations permit generalization, this type has become far more widespread than one might think. Today we can establish in a great many people, for example, in young criminals, gang leaders and such, about whom we read every day in the newspaper, what at that time only a few Nazi monsters exemplified. I will try to reduce this type of manipulative character to a formula-perhaps one should not do it, but it may be useful for coming to some understanding-I would call it the type of the thingified consciousness.

The Manipulative Character: People as things (back to top)
People who are conditioned in this way have first made themselves, in a way, into things. Then, when they can, they equate others with things. The expression "to finish," just as popular in the world of young rowdies as in that of the Nazis, expresses this notion quite exactly. The expression "to finish" defines people as artificial things in two ways. According to the insight of Max Horkheimer, torture is the peoples' adjustment to collectives, which has been taken into administration and to an extent accellerated. Something of this lies in the spirit of the times, even if it has little to do with spirit. I simply cite the words spoken by Paul Valéry before the last war. Valéry said that inhumanity has a great future. It is especially difficult to combat thingified consciousness because manipulative people, who are actually incapable of experiences, show precisely for that reason traits of unresponsiveness that connect them with certain mentally ill persons or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.

Preventing Auschwitz by understanding its creators (back to top)
In attempting to work against the repetition of Auschwitz, I think it would be essential first to clarify how the manipulative character comes about in order then to prevent its development as much as possible, by changing the conditions of its origin. I would like to make a concrete suggestion: to study the guilty persons from Auschwitz with every method available to science, especially with years of psychoanalyses, in order to try to bring out how a person becomes this way. What these guilty persons can still do for the good, is when they, contrary to their own character structure, contribute something towards Auschwitz happening again. This would happen only if they would want to help in the investigation of their genesis. To be sure, it might be difficult to get them to talk. In no case could anything resembling their own methods be applied for the purpose of learning how they got this way. In any event they feel-precisely in their collectivity or in the feeling that they are all old Nazis-so safe that scarcely a one has shown even the least feelings of guilt. However, even in them, or at least in some of them, psychological points of contact presumably exist by which this could be changed, such as their narcissism, or more bluntly, their vanity. They may fancy themselves to be important when they can speak about themselves unrestrainedly, like Eichmann, who apparently filled entire libraries of tapes. Ultimately, we can assume that when we dig deeply enough, remnants of the old instance of conscience that is frequently in disintegration today are also present in these persons. However, once we know the inner and outer conditions that made them this way-if I may suppose hypothetically that this can in fact be determined-then we may indeed be able to draw practical conclusions to prevent its recurrence.

Will understanding alone suffice? (back to top)
Whether the attempt will help somewhat or not will only become evident after it has been undertaken. I don't want to overestimate the possibility. We must realize that people cannot automatically be explained by such conditions. Under the same conditions some people turn out one way and others quite differently. Still, it would be worth a try. A clarifying potential might already lie in merely posing the question how people become this way. This is so because it is part of the ominous state of consciousness and unconsciousness that we falsely consider our being a certain way-that we are like this and not some other way-to be our nature, an inalterable given, and not something that has come into being. I mentioned the concept of the thingified consciousness. It is above all else, however, something that blinds itself toward any process of having come into being, toward any insight into our own conditionality, and posits everything that is as an absolute. If we could break this obsessive cycle, something-I think-would be gained.

How technology changes behavior and consciousness: the inability to empathize (back to top)
Further, in connection with the thingified consciousness, we should also carefully observe our relationship to technology, and not only the relationships of particular small groups. It is as ambivalent as our relationship to sports, with which it is related, by the way. On the one hand, every epoch produces the characters-types of distribution of psychic energy-that it needs socially. A world in which technology has such a key status as it does today produces technological people, that is, people in tune with technology. This has its good reasons. In their narrower area they will not stand for any nonsense, and this attitude can also affect the more general domain. On the other hand, something exaggerated, irrational and pathogenic lurks in our present relationship to technology. This has to do with the "technological veil." People tend to consider technology to be the issue itself, the goal in itself, or a force with its own being and thereby to forget that it is the extended arm of human beings. The means-and technology is an epitome of means for the survival of the human species-become a fetish because the goals-a decent human life-are hidden and cut off from human consciousness. As long as one says this as generally as I just formulated it, the point should be evident. However, such a hypothesis is still much too abstract. In no way do we know definitively how technology becomes a fetish in the individual psychology of individual people, or where the threshold is between a rational relationship to it and the overvaluation that ultimately leads to the fact that someone who devises a train system that brings victims to Auschwitz as quickly and smoothly as possible, meanwhile forgets what happens with them in Auschwitz. The type of people who tend to fetishize technology are, simply stated, people who cannot love. This is not meant sentimentally or moralizingly but describes their deficient libidinous relationship to other people. They are cold through and through and must also deny, with their innermost being, the possibility of love and withdraw their love from other persons from the start before it has even begun to unfold. They must apply whatever of the capacity to love survives in them to technological instruments. The biased, authority-bound character types we studied in the "Authoritarian Personality" in Berkeley provided many examples of this. One experimental subject-the word is itself already a word from the thingified consciousness-said of itself, "I like nice equipment," no matter what equipment it was. This person's love was absorbed by things and machines as such. What is alarming about this-alarming because combating it seems so hopeless-is that this trend is coupled with the trend of civilization itself. To fight against it is equivalent to fighting against the Zeitgeist. But I am just repeating what I anticipated at the beginning as the most difficult aspect of an education directed against Auschwitz.

Self-interest vs. the search for human relationships (back to top)
I said that these people are cold in a particular way. Certainly, a few words about coldness in general are permitted. If coldness were not a basic feature of anthropology, thus of the nature of people as they in fact are in our society, and thus if they were not deeply indifferent toward what happens with all other persons except for the few with whom they are closely connected and even connected by obvious interests, Auschwitz would not have been possible and people would not have accepted it. Society, in its present form-and probably for centuries past-does not rest, as has been assumed ideologically since Aristotle, on attraction, but on the pursuit of one's own interests against the interest of all others. This is reflected in the very essence of human nature. What opposes this, the herd instinct of the so-called "lonely crowd," is a reaction to it, a banding together of cold people who cannot bear their own coldness, but are unable to change it. Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved because every one is too little able to love. The inability to empathize was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the occurrence of something like Auschwitz amidst fairly civilized and harmless people. What is called "parasitism" (going along) was primarily business interest, looking after one's own advantage before all others and, indeed, simply in order not to endanger oneself by speaking too freely. This is a general law of the way things are. Silence under terror was merely its consequence. The coldness of the social monad, of the isolated rival, was, as indifference toward the fate of others, the condition for the fact that only a very few resisted. Torturers know this; they also continually put it to the test anew.

Breaking the vicious circle of coldness: a futile endeavor? (back to top)
Do not misunderstand me. I would not want to preach love. I consider preaching it to be in vain. No one would even have the right to preach it because the lack of love - as I already said - is a lack in all people without exception as they exist today. To preach love already presupposes in those to whom one turns a different character structure than the one that one wants to change. This is so, for people whom one is to love are in fact themselves incapable of love and on this account are for their part in no way so deserving of love.

To eradicate this all-pervasive coldness was one of the great impulses of Christianity, an impulse not immediately identical with dogma. However, this attempt failed, probably because it did not touch upon the social order that produces and reproduces coldness. Probably the warmth among people for which everyone longs has not yet existed in history except for short periods and within very small groups, perhaps also among some peaceful savages. The much maligned utopians saw this. Thus, [the utopian philosopher] Charles Fourier defined attraction as something that is to be produced by a social order worthy of human beings. He also recognized that this state is possible only when human desires are no longer repressed, but realized and released. If anything can be a remedy for coldness as a condition of doing harm, it is the insight into its own conditions and the attempt to work against these conditions preventatively in the individual sphere. We might think that the less that goes wrong during childhood and the better children are treated, the greater the chances of success. However, here too illusions threaten. Children who know nothing of life's cruelty and harshness at all are, once released from protection, all the more exposed to barbarism. Above all, however, parents who are themselves products of this society and bear its marks cannot be animated to warmth. The challenge to give children more warmth turns on warmth artificially and thereby negates it. Moreover, love cannot be required in professionally mediated relationships like that between teacher and pupil, physician and patient, or lawyer and client. Love is something immediate and opposes primarily mediated relationships. The exhortation to love-especially in the imperative form that people ought to do it-is itself a part of the ideology that eternalizes coldness. The compulsion and suppression that work against the capacity for love are inherent to it. On this account, the first thing would be to help coldness become conscious of itself and of the reasons why it came into being.

Possibility I: Knowledge of common pathological traits (back to top)
In conclusion, permit me to comment briefly on several possibilities for making conscious in general the subjective mechanisms without which there scarcely would be an Auschwitz. It is imperative be familiar with these mechanisms, and with the stereotypical defense that blocks such knowledge. Whoever still says today that it was not so bad or not quite so bad is already defending what happened, and this person would unquestionably be ready to watch or participate if it happens again. Even if rational enlightenment-as psychology well knows-does not directly resolve unconscious mechanisms, it at least strengthens certain counter instances in preconsciousness and helps create a climate that is unfavorable to the extreme. If our whole cultural consciousness were permeated by a faint awareness of the pathogenic nature of the traits that came into their own in Auschwitz, perhaps people would control these traits better.

II: Recognizing the possibility of recurrence (back to top)
Additionally, the possibility of displacing what raged in Auschwitz ought to be clarified. Tomorrow it can be the turn of a group other than the Jews, perhaps the elderly, who were barely spared in the Third Reich, or the intellectuals, or simply divergent groups. The climate -- I hinted at this -- that most supports [Schreier/Heyl mistranslates as fordern] such a resurrection is reawakening nationalism. It is so pernicious because in the age of international communication and supranational blocks it cannot completely believe in itself anymore and has to exaggerate boundlessly in order to convince itself and others that it is still substantial.

III: Using examples of resistance (back to top)
Concrete possibilities for resistance could at least be shown. For example, the history of euthanasia could be taught. In Germany, thanks to the resistance against it, euthanasia was not committed as extensively as the National Socialists had planned. This resistance was limited to its own group, which is an especially striking, widespread symptom of universal coldness. But it is still stubborn in the face of the insatiability that lies in the principle of persecution. Absolutely every person who does not directly belong to the persecuting group can be affected. Thus there is a drastic egotistic interest that could be appealed to.

IV. Knowledge of history (back to top)
Finally we could investigate the objective historical conditions of the persecutions. So-called movements of national renewal in an age when nationalism is outdated, seem to be especially susceptible to sadistic practices.

V. Critical examination of power in political education (back to top)
Finally, all political instruction should be centered on Auschwitz not repeating itself. This would be possible only when without fear of offending any power it openly concerns itself especially with this matter of utmost importance. For this purpose, political instruction would have to transform itself into sociology, thus it would have to instruct about the social power play that has its place behind the superficiality of political forms. To offer just one model, a concept as respectable as that of the reason of the state [Staatsräson?] should be treated critically. In that the right of the state is put above that of its members, terror is potentially already in place.

posted 12-21-2003 07:12 PM            

P.Bush was instrumental in helping I.G. Farben set up Nazi death camps.