Those impelled by blind murderous lust have always seen in the victim the pursuer who has driven them to desperate self-defense, and the mightiest empires have experienced their weakest neighbor as an intolerable threat before falling upon him.
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

This summer, I spent two months as a visiting fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), living next to the Goethe University. Academic events and meetings had me regularly strolling through adjacent parks to reach its attractive Campus Westend around the former IG Farben headquarters, an imposing structure completed in 1930 by the world’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical company. Notoriously, IG Farben collaborated with the Nazi regime, including at Auschwitz, where it supplied Zyklon B and utilized slave labor in its own gigantic chemical factory camp. Taken over by US forces as a military base, the building and grounds were given to the university after the Cold War.

It became immediately apparent that this university campus differs from many other institutions of higher education in Germany. Tributes to the legacy of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—the famous Institute for Social Research—dot its sprawling grounds: Theodor-Adorno-Platz and a gleaming building dedicated to the institute’s most prestigious spin-off, the Research Center Normative Orders. Fittingly, its address is Max-Horkheimer-Straße 2, a stone’s throw from the Adorno Monument, a large glass box encasing the philosopher’s imagined work desk.

This recognition and memorialization perform German rehabilitation after National Socialism by a deft act of mnemonic polishing rather than erasure: a university whose central building was constructed by a company implicated in Nazism’s worst crimes honors two of the Jewish academics forced to flee Germany—Horkheimer losing his professorship—who returned to Frankfurt to resume their critical inquiry. They are honored as Jews rather than as Marxists; only the former status can perform the desired absolution. The presence of the Jewish intellectual legacy on the campus encapsulates German post-Holocaust identity by enabling a morally viable university. The Nazi stain and its antithesis thus share space in an explicit tension that only a self-confident normative order can resolve.

As the German politicians’ Bundestag speeches on the annual celebration of Israel’s founding explicitly declare: in view of the Nazis’ genocidal project, Germany’s historical purpose can only consist in supporting the reconstruction of Jewish life in Germany and in Israel. With Israel’s gift of friendship—and the return of Horkheimer and Adorno to the university—Germany and its institutions of higher learning were given a second historical chance on the international stage. The former chancellor Angela Merkel’s postulate that guaranteeing Israel’s security is part of the German “reason of state” (Staatsräson) expresses the essential role of Israel in enabling and stabilizing Federal Republican identity.

“A Sociological Study on the Political Consciousness of Frankfurt Students”

Much of this infrastructure did not exist when I visited the old Bockenheim Campus in the late 1990s to interview the Institute for Social Research’s former director, Ludwig von Friedeburg (1923–2010), for my doctoral dissertation. A U-boat commander and son of the head of the German navy during the war, von Friedeburg told me that he was afterwards drawn to critical social research to understand his experiences. I had travelled to Frankfurt to speak with him about a book he cowrote with Jürgen Habermas and others in 1961 called Student und Politik, a study that continued the empirical social research trajectory begun by the first generation of critical theorists. It was, as the subtitle put it, A Sociological Study on the Political Consciousness of Frankfurt Students. The authors had surveyed students to test their democratic political orientation. The results were sobering.

The authors found that a majority of the students, who were born during the war, were not particularly committed to democracy, and they doubted whether these young West Germans would defend republican institutions if antidemocratic forces arose once again. Habermas observed that many students held pragmatic, potentially authoritarian political views devoid of “utopian impulses.” The students, von Friedeburg concluded, had drawn no lessons from the country’s experience with National Socialism; they were hostages to “consumer coercion” and were beguiled by the “culture industry.” It was necessary, therefore, for education to take a “critical” approach, a project that von Friedeburg attempted to implement as the Social Democrat education minister of Hessen between 1969 and 1974 when he supplemented the three-track academic and vocational secondary schools (Gymnasium, Realschule, Hauptschule) with comprehensive high schools (Gesamtschule).

This analysis was, of course, informed by Horkheimer and Adorno, especially their books Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947) and The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a multi-author empirical study commenced by Adorno at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of the “Studies in prejudice” project. The problem of West German authoritarianism concerned Habermas (who became Adorno’s assistant in the second half of the 1950s), von Friedeburg, and their collaborators—an issue highlighted by another former Institute member, Franz L. Neumann (1900–1954), in his The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (1957). A rash of antisemitic incidents across West Germany, the UK, and the US in 1959 and the increasing popularity of far-right politics galvanized Adorno. He went on the radio that year to instruct listeners on “what it means to work through the past,” thundering against the widespread desire to be finished with recent history, or “draw a line” beneath it, as the Germans say (Schlussstrich). By reminding listeners that “National Socialism lives on,” he argued that the “disguised fascist revivals will cause war, suffering, and privation under a coercive system” unless the forces behind Nazism were confronted. He elaborated on these themes six years later in another radio lecture called “Education after Auschwitz.” These texts have become canonical in the Federal Republic, informing (re)education over the decades to inoculate young Germans against Nazism.

The Dialectic of (Re)Education

I recalled these essays as I waited for colleagues at the Adorno monument, which had become the university’s favored meeting spot. His encased desk is strewn with signs of active work, as if the philosopher had stepped out momentarily to the nearby Sturm und Drang restaurant. What would he tell me, I wondered, if he sat there now? How would he assess the state’s and German universities’ reactions to the pro-Palestinian student protests that have been taking place since late 2023, given his own ambivalence about the student movement of the late 1960s? What would he say about the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the German government’s Staaträson: its virtually unconditional support of Israel? To answer these questions—questions that many are asking today—we need to take a closer look at “Education after Auschwitz.”

Much of the text is understandably dated in its heavy reliance on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents to explain mounting social frustration as the source of fascist potential. Revealing Adorno’s aversion to plebeian and mob-like social action, he believed that farmers and working class “rowdies” were a major problem, even calling for the “debarbarization of the countryside.” At the same time, much also remains fresh and brimming with insights. Even as Adorno argued that the Holocaust was morally and historically distinct, he noted that barbarism—the old-fashioned term he used in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg (“Socialism or Barbarism,” she asked Europeans in 1915)—was far broader than Auschwitz alone. Its potential was inherent in bourgeois civilization: hence, the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno mentions that the atomic bomb “belongs in the same historical context as genocide,” and that genocide “has its roots in this resurrection of aggressive nationalism that has developed in many countries since the end of the nineteenth century.” In his lectures the year before (Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme), he included Vietnam. Together, they constituted “a hellish unity” (höllenhafte Einheit). Logically, then, antisemitism was not a singular prejudice but was related to what he and Horkheimer called “ticket thinking,” meaning that it was conjoined to the hatred of other groups. As they wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, not only are victims interchangeable, but they can also become perpetrators if they feel they represent and can impose dominant norms.

“The blindness of anti-Semitism, its lack of intention, lends a degree of truth to the explanation of the movement as a release valve. Rage is vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected. And just as, depending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, so each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm.”