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Returning from Forced Exile: Some Observations on Theodor W. Adornos and Hannah Arendts Experience of Postwar Germany and Their Political Theories of Totalitarianism
BY LARS RENSMANN

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In recent years, the German-Jewish theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt have often been described as two of the most important social philosophers and political theorists of the twentieth century. While the former figure had gained such a status by the 1960s, which is to say already during his lifetime, it took until the 1980s and 1990s for Arendts multi-faceted work to receive a truly broad reception. By then it had gained its place in the canon of modern political thought, in many ways surpassing Adornos (declining) influence on American and European social and political philosophy. However, despite many biographical, intellectual and theoretical affinities, the work of Arendt and Adorno was subject to different, even mutually hostile cultures of reception. These reproducedand certainly in part emerged fromthe mutual aversion the two eminent intellectuals cultivated during their lifetime.1 A posthumous dialogue has only recently begun.2 In spite of the intellectual and personal tensions between them, both Adorno and Arendt have also frequently been labelled witnesses of a century, and for good reasons. Starting in the 1940s, each figure self-consciously acquired the position of a public intellectual, in the full Gramscian sense: that of an active theoretician repeatedly taking sides in contemporary public and political debates. Each thus became an outstanding international commentator on a century in turmoila century shadowed by unprecedented social, cultural and political transformations, new and hideous forms of warfare and, indeed, human catastrophes on an unimaginable scale.
1The

lack of mutual respect between Arendt and Adorno is documented in their limited correspondence of 1967; see Library of Congress, Manuscript division, Folder Arendt; for copies see Hannah Arendt Archive Oldenburg, General Correspondence, Theodor W. Adorno, 1967,7.1; at one point Arendt described Adorno as a half-Jew and one of the most disgusting people that I know and as a stringpuller in public campaigns against Martin Heidegger; for these and other such comments on Adorno see Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 19261969, Munich 1993, pp. 670, 679 and 673 (Arendt to Jaspers, 18 April 1966, 29 April 1966, 4 July 1966). 2The dialogue was initiated with a conference at the University of Oldenburg in 2000 (Witnesses of a Century); see most recently the approach put forward in Dirk Auer, Lars Rensmann and Julia Schulze Wessel (eds.), Arendt und Adorno, Frankfurt am Main 2003.

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Theodor W. Adorno
By courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Gisela Dischner

Hannah Arendt c. 1936

For both thinkers, the experience of forced emigration from Germany to America in a quest for refuge from Nazi persecution was crucial.3 But, foremost, it was the catastrophe of the death camps, or rather its retrospective contemplation, that influenced most of their further thought. The Holocaust, both argued, had forced a readjustment of all philosophical and historical thinking in the West. As Arendt put it, the death camps had exploded the continuum of our history and the terms and categories of our political thinking.4 In this light, Nazism and modern totalitarianism soon occupied the centre of Arendts and Adornos theoretical endeavours and intellectual interventions. For obvious reasons, with both Adorno and Arendt deeply marked by Germanys and European Jewrys fate, the European and especially the German problemcoming to terms with and thinking about the road of European and German history, political culture and the continents and Germanys futurealso became an important focus of their political commentary. This article will discuss some of the reflections offered by the two migrs in response

3On

the intellectual migration of Arendt and Adorno see Anthony Heilbuts instructive Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, Cambridge, MA 1993, pp. 160174 (Adorno) and pp. 395437 (Arendt). 4Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprnge totaler Herrschaft, Munich 1986, p. 705. It is striking that find this passage only appears in the German edition.

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to their experiences in the Germany of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The article will also consider the intellectual processing of these experiences by both intellectuals in the last decades of their careers. I will suggest that their experiences in postwar Germany induced some limited questioning of their own modernist paradigms and interpretations of the Holocaust, in particular with regard to the role of democratic and anti-democratic mentalities and traditionsbut that they also point to shared tensions within their approaches to both the twentieth centurys catastrophes and to ambivalences in relation to their own German cultural and intellectual heritage. I The analytical perspectives that Arendt and Adorno developed in their wartime American exile largely placed the Nazi dictatorship in the context of modernity. Although Arendts political and Adornos social theory offer quite different approaches to a critique of modernity, they also display a great deal of common ground; both theories can be viewed as representative of a critical European humanism of their time. In general, their modernist approach focused on the distinctly modern dynamics enabling totalitarian rule, Arendt and Adorno thus emerging as advocates of a universalising approach to Nazism and the Holocaust. Their primary focus is on the historical rise of unprecedented modes of modern capitalism, bureaucracy and imperialism. Their approaches are linked to the modern experience of permanent change, upheaval and catastrophic loss: an experience shared with many fellow intellectual migrs. For all of them, the Nazi revolution was of interest less as a specific political-cultural process than as an expression of the abyss of the modern condition. In turn, this view is marked by a consciousness of radical insecurity, with both Arendt and Adorno conceptually addressing the rapid political, cultural and social changes unfolding in the first half of the twentieth century. The phenomena and events they addressed ranged from increasingly rapid industrialisation, and the concomitant evolution of a mass society and mass culture, to the October Revolution, two world wars, and the establishment of three entirely different political orders in Germany alone: a chaotic historical dynamic transcending all previous societal limits and appearing to culminate with the Nazi state and its annihilatory project. In light of such a development, for Arendt and Adorno along with many other European intellectuals, nothing seemed predictable any more, apart from permanent discontinuity and insecurity. From such a perspective, modernity came to represent new excessive constraints, permanent transformation, and the very unpredictability of the social world. With the traditional social order now dissolved, for Arendt as for Adorno, into an aggregate of reified and atomised masses, individuals, formerly agents of social action and rational reflection, were now threatened with absolute powerlessness in the face of overwhelming social processesat its extreme, with absorption into a machinery following the principles of division of labour and instrumental logic. Totalitarianism and the loss of the world (Arendt) could only take hold under these distinctly modern conditions. This is the context for Arendts famous (or, depending

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on ones perspective, notorious) understanding of Eichmannand with him of the typical Nazi perpetratoras a petty-bourgeois administrator driven by little or nothing other than a sense of blind bureaucratic purpose and petty career ambitions. It is also the context for Adornos typological definition of the bureaucratic manipulative character as the ideal-typological Nazi organiser of genocide and, simultaneously, as the ideal type of modern subjectivity.5 To be sure, Arendts idea of totalitarianism and her interpretation of the eclipse of reason followed an independent historical-genealogical pathalbeit one strongly indebted to Kant and Heidegger. Arendt saw the iron band of terror, ice cold reasoning and the suprahuman logic of nature (Nazism) and history (Stalinism),6 as modern, totalitarian substitutes for expressions of human solidarity, interaction, and reasoning traditionally manifest in both public and private spheres. Totalitarian logic, then, was unique and unprecedented; but it was also preconditioned by modernitya kind of radicalization of the same loneliness it seems to have produced.7 This lonelinessin its most modern, radical form, the experience of a vanished private and public life, indeed of not belonging to the world at allwas the common ground for terror closely connected with [the] uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our time.8 Adorno also pointed to a structural atomisation of the individual as a precondition for Nazism. His own emphasis was on a loss of individuality and individual experience, rather than on a critique of individualisation or privatisation (as argued by Arendt)an emphasis deriving from a socio-economic rather than Arendts political perspective. However, according to Adorno and similar to Arendts general interpretation, totalitarianism is viewed as the most radical expression of the transformation of individuals into powerless masses lacking consciousness and conscience, eager to get involved in a totalitarian dynamism. In 1946, he observed that:
Totalitarianism means knowing no limits, not allowing for any breathing spell, conquest with absolute domination, complete extermination of the chosen foe. With regard to this meaning of fascist dynamism, any clear-cut program would function as a limitation, a kind of guarantee even to the adversary. It is essential to totalitarian rule that nothing shall be guaranteed, no limit is set to ruthless arbitrariness.9

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Despite the somewhat different vantage point, this analytic definition has strong similarities with Arendts view of the inherent dynamic and drive of totalitarian movements, implicitly sharing her emphasis on the secondary role played within them by specific ideologies.

5See

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York 1965, pp. 2155 and pp. 234279; Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, New York 1982, pp. 355ff. 6Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, CA 1966, pp. 465ff. 7ibid., p. 474. 8ibid., p. 475. 9Theodor W. Adorno, Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 397407, here p. 400.

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It is important to note that although the strong influence of Kants three critiques marks another similarity of Adornos mature perspective with that of Arendt,10 Adorno was strongly influenced by the European heritage of Hegelian-Marxist dialectical materialism that Arendt categorically rejected. Nevertheless, the view of totalitarianism held by both these German-Jewish intellectuals is unmistakably stamped by Max Webers theory of bureaucratic rationalisationmore specifically, Webers well-known notion of an iron cage emerging from modern labour-oriented modes of action, administrative evolution and radical rationalisation. It is as if, in the Holocausts wake, both Adorno and Arendt put aside Webers emphasis on the necessarily ambivalent nature of this cage, its function as a metaphor of the burden always accompanying the positive aspects of democratic individualism and the modern sceptical spirit, reading it instead as a metaphoric encapsulation of a totally reified objective world. In contrast to this Weberian vision, and in spite of their belief in modernitys post-metaphysical emancipative potential, for both Arendt and Adorno, the modern condition itself, its paradigms and culture have led to an alienation between individuals nothing short of barbarian.11 For Adorno, the principles of modern society, organised around abstract exchange value, have fostered a subjectivity oriented at control and domination, in the process robbing the subject of essential cognitive and moral qualities. In the end, this leads to in what he terms a subjectivity without subjectivity within a totally rationalized and socialized society, the universal condition of late capitalism, with blinded men robbed of their subjectivity set loose as subjects.12 Reflecting their shared rejection of any explanations for the Holocaust attempting to take account of particular historical conditions and dynamics within Germany, both Arendt and Adorno, emerging from exile, initially strongly defended German culture in public statements and private letters. Even later, albeit in the context of a critique of conventional research on national cultures, Adorno would lay emphasis together with Max Horkheimer on the absence of any German problem, and of any uniquely German political-cultural issues, furnishing an explanation for either Nazi-totalitarian antisemitism or the Holocaust. In the straightforward words of Adorno and Horkheimer, totalitarian anti-Semitism is not a specifically German phenomenon. Attempts to deduce it from a questionable entity such as national characterdownplay the inexplicable that needs to be understood. The problem needs a social explanation, and this is impossible in the sphere of national particularities.13 Immediately after the Second World War, Arendt used similar if not identical language: The real problem is not the German national character but rather the disintegration of that character, or at least the fact that this character does not play any role in German politics any more. It is as much a part of the past as German militarism and nationalism.14
10Stefan

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Mller-Doohm, Adorno, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 493ff, also points out the general lack of attention to this Kantian dimension of Adornos thinking. 11Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York 1994, p. 161. 12ibid., p. 171 (emphasis added by L.R.). 13Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Vorwort zu Paul W. Massings Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 128. 14Hannah Arendt, Das deutsche Problem: Die Restauration des alten Europa, in idem, Zur Zeit: Politische Essays, Berlin 1986, p. 31ff.

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In this respect, it is noteworthy that in preparing the second volume of Origins of Totalitarianism, completed at the end of 1947,15 Arendt had in fact already discussed the very specific role played by the weakness and collapse of the Weimar Republics party system, with its peculiar coalition between the mob and the lite, in the triumph of Nazism; she had also analysed specific forms of vlkisch-romantic imperialism centred in Germany and Russiacompensation for a lack of national unity and lost coloniesthat contributed to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship. And in 1945, she was one of the first social-political theorists to suggest that the belated development of the Germans to become a nation and their lack of any sort of democratic experience were important aspects of the Nazi rise to power.16 This particular dimension, however, largely disappeared in Arendts generalised theory of modern totalitarianism, as developed in volume three of the Origins, completed in 1950, with its strongly universal focus. This is even more the case for the works final chapter, Ideology and Terror, which Arendt wrote in 1958 for its second edition. In the framework of the Cold War, a rather conventional view of totalitarianism resonates here, conceptualising and focusing on parallels between Stalinism and Nazism as mere examples of closed modern societies.17 A similarly universal and generalising approach is evident in Adornos most eloquent and sophisticated philosophical text, the Negative Dialectics of 1966. Here the Holocaust emerges as a master moral paradigm,18 one leading to a radical adaptation and postwar revision of the Kantian imperative: In the state of their unfreedom, Hitler has superimposed a new categorical imperative on humans: to adjust their thinking and action in a way that Auschwitz will not be repeated, that nothing similar will happen.19 Taking Auschwitz as a new, unprecedented starting point of historical perception and action, this formula is not only tied to revised Kantian cosmopolitan-universalistic premises but also embedded in the concept of a general human Verfallsgeschichtean approach to modern history as a negative process reaching its negative climax with the Holocaust. Despite his relentless insistence on historical contingency and possibility and his explicit challenge to Hegels notion of a universal history,20 Adornos theoretical foundations, as echoed in his Negative Dialectics, themselves represent a universal Hegelian historical outlook, conceptualising a general historical movement in which the Holocaust is presumably rooted. In retrospect, it is quite clear that the approach to the Holocaust generally presented by both Arendt and Adorno reveals many of the limitations of perspective inherent in any radically generalising stance. If modern social conditions in general constitute the Holocausts main sourcemore specifically, universal socioeconomic conditions (Adorno); modern paradigms of action that have destroyed the res publica and being in the world (Arendt)then all questions of democratic and legal

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15See

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: Leben, Werk und Zeit, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p.290. p. 28. 17See Hauke Brunkhorst, Hannah Arendt, Munich 1999, p. 53. 18On a parallel development within the American public sphere, see Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Oxford 1999. 19Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 358. 20ibid., p. 313.
16ibid.,

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theory, the role of political culture and (anti)democratic tradition, human action and responsibility, and in this case specific German culpability, are in effect left by the wayside. It is equally evident that maintaining such a position made it far easier for Arendt and Adorno to return to Germany in the early postwar period without any strong reservations. I will now argue that although neither Arendt nor Adorno would ever abandon their basically universalistic intellectual-ethical values, the experience of this return did lead to a shift, albeit one that was limited, contradictory and fragmented, in their analysis of totalitarianism in generaland of the historical, political and cultural dynamics of the Nazi final solution in particular. II Although Arendt clearly remained attached to Germany and Europe and was concerned about the fate of both, she found her new home in America and never really intended to move back; for his part, Adorno had never given up the hope of return during his exile years.21 He would later on explain that he returned because he belonged to Europe and to Germany and simply wanted to return to the place of his childhood.22 In addition, he had the feeling that in Germany he could do some good things to help prevent a repetition of disaster.23 He also believed that Germany would re-emerge as the place where dialectical philosophy could best be practised; he looked forward to teaching German students committed to this philosophy and initially encountered a passionate participation regarding these questions and matters, a participation that has to make a teacher happy.24 While Arendt herself made the decision to return to Europe, she would return only for visits: initially for a longer periodher first return to Europe after the war extended from August 1949 to March 1950then for almost regular, sometimes substantial visits that went on for the rest of her life, albeit with no consideration of staying. In fact, during her first longer stay in postwar Germany, Arendt felt homesick for America. This visit was commissioned by Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a newlyfounded agency with a centre in Wiesbaden.25 Working at the agency, Arendt also travelled across Germany by train and took several journeys across Europeto France, Germany and Switzerland, where she visited Karl Jaspers in Basel.26 Adornos first return lasted for three years, from the autumn of 1949 to the autumn of 1952.27 He arrived in Frankfurt on 2 November 1949 and was

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21Theodor

W. Adorno, Auf die Frage: Warum sind Sie zurckgekehrt, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol.20.1, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 394395, here p. 394. 22ibid., p. 395. 23ibid. 24Theodor W. Adorno, Die auferstandene Kultur, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.2, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 453464, here p. 454. 25See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: Leben, Werk und Zeit, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 344. 26ibid., p. 337 and p. 305. 27See Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung, Munich 1988, pp. 507f; for a more recent and more extensive account see Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: Ein letztes Genie, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 240ff and Mller-Doohm, pp. 496ff.

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immediately confronted with heavy professional responsibilities.28 From the onset, his time in Frankfurt partly served to prepare his remigration and the reestablishment of the Institute for Social Research, which soon came to be envisioned as Germanys new central sociological research institutionsomething promised by Adornos close friend and fellow remigr Max Horkheimer.29 During this time Adorno taught philosophy classes and lectured at the University of Frankfurt; he also conducted or participated in several empirical studies, including a study of the community of Darmstadt and its rural surroundings and the Group Experiment, a qualitative study of German postwar attitudes towards Nazism, re-education, and German guilt.30 As a naturalised American citizen, Adorno was forced to return to the United States in October 1952 in order not to lose his American citizenship which he strongly wanted to keep. Deeply committed to the idea of re-establishing the Frankfurt institute together with Horkheimer, he left with an endlessly heavy heart,31 travelling via Paris to New York and Los Angeles. He would only remain ten months before finally resettling in Frankfurt in August 1953, eventually being appointed supernumerary professor for philosophy and sociology.32 Following this second remigration Adorno would never return to America. Despite all its recent horrors, Arendt and Adorno both initially arrived in Europe and Germany with a sense of hope for the possibilities of the countrys political and moral renewal, and a sense of belief in the cultural and human resources for such renewalfeelings that inform several of their early postwar essays and writings.33 Immediately after his return to the German classrooms, Adorno praised the intellectual passion34 of his German philosophy students, as documented in an essay of 1950 called Die auferstandene Kultur (The resurrected culture), though Adorno simultaneously acknowledged that the students apolitical Vergeistigung, their orientation towards philosophical and spiritual matters, might be considered an ambivalent process from a democratic perspective.35 In 1965 Adorno would look back on such early sentiments regarding his native country:
At no moment during my emigration did I relinquish the hope of coming back. And although the identification with the familiar is undeniably an aspect of this hope, it should not be misconstrued into a theoretical identification for something that probably is legitimate only so long as it obeys the impulse without appealing to elaborate theoretical supports. That in my voluntary decision I harboured the feeling of being able to do some good in Germany, to work against the obduration, the repetition of the disaster, is only another aspect of that spontaneous identification.36
28See

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Claussen, p. 242. p. 514; Horkheimer to Adorno, 13 March 1953. 30ibid, p. 504 and p. 526. 31ibid, p. 508; Adorno to Horkheimer, 20 October 1952. 32ibid, p. 520. 33See two texts written by Arendt in 1945: Approaching the German Question, in idem, Essays in Understanding 19301954, ed. by Jerome Kohn, New York 1994, pp. 97126; The Seeds of a Fascist International, ibid., , pp.140150; for Adorno see two texts written in 1949: idem,Die auferstandene Kultur; Toward a Reappraisal of Heine, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.2, pp. 441452. 34idem, Die auferstandene Kultur, p. 453. 35ibid. 36Theodor W. Adorno, On the Question: What is German?, in idem, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York 1998, pp. 205214, here p. 209.
29Wiggershaus,

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Furthermore, at the onset of his return it appeared to Adorno, as if in Germany, of all places, an autonomous culture would still be possible and not only a lost idealistic illusion emerging from a German tradition.37 Adorno was not only initially enthusiastic about his new German students, these young people, the academic youth, as he wrote to Thomas Mann in a letter dated 28 December 1949; in general, the intellectual climate in Germany appeared to him quite seductive, as he explained to Horkheimer in a letter written one day later.38 Adorno was looking forward to teaching German philosophy to committed native students, and in German, the only language he considered fully suitable for dialectical-speculative, anti-positivistic thinking.39 Following his successful escape and survival in exile, he also hoped to finally find conditions that would, as he put it, impair his work as little as possible40conditions he deemed only present in his native environment. On a theoretical and political level, it is worth noting his recollection that the conception that the Germans as a people are guilty was alien to me and his insistence that Nazism should not be seen as deriving from a German national character.41 In contrast to Adorno, Arendt, as indicated, never seriously considered moving back to Germany permanently. Still, she herself expressed her desire and commitment to help the Germans build a new societyone based on a truthful acknowledgment and working through of the past.42 This desire and commitment, apparently driven by a firm if ambivalent affection for her society of origin, is documented in private letters and attested to in her carefully thought out decision to return temporarily to Germany and engage in difficult Hundsarbeit 43 for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. In Germany, however, neither Arendt nor Adorno were offered the reception they expected, each instead encountering a society that maintained a collective narcissism of a nationalist nature: one whose basic values were still heavily influenced by Nazism and that, in fact, harboured strong hostility towards all Jewish returnees. The response to this encounter on the part of both German-Jewish intellectuals was an increasingly sharp analysis of the particular social, psychological and political dynamics manifest in the postwar West German scene; the response was presented most pointedly by Arendt in her well-known essay, The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany (1950), and her observations concerning the Auschwitz trials, Der Auschwitz-Prozess (serving as an introduction to Bernd Naumanns book Auschwitz, published in 1966); 44 and by Adorno in his dissection of German society
37Claussen, 38Cited

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p. 243. in Mller-Doohm, p. 504. On Adornos correspondence with Thomas Mann see ibid., pp. 474489. 39Adorno, On the Question: What is German?, pp. 212f. 40See ibid., p. 211. Adornos former colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Leo Lwenthal and Herbert Marcuse, chose to stay in the United States. 41Adorno, Auf die Frage: Warum sind Sie zurckgekehrt, p. 394; see also Alex Demirovic, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 99f. 42Arendt, Approaching the German Question, in idem, Essays in Understanding, pp. 97126, pp.114; Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Arendt and Jaspers, Briefwechsel, p. 89. 43See Young-Bruehl, p. 344. 44Hannah Arendt, Preface, in Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz, New York 1966; published in German as Arendt, Der Auschwitz-Prozess, in idem, Nach Auschwitz: Essays und Kommentare I, Berlin 1989, pp. 99136.

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entitled Schuld und Abwehr (Guilt and Defensiveness) as well as his broadly received, most prominent critical intervention with the Kantian title Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (The Meaning of Working through the Past).45 In her Report from Germany, Arendt came to terms with her experience of living for six months in postwar Germany. She expressed shock at what she described as a particular kind of German escapism. Willingly or unintentionally, she indicated, in so far as it might harm their idealistic collective self-image, the Germans she met avoided any serious confrontation with political and historical reality, constantly displaying a continuous totalitarian relativism towards historical facts, in other words the habit of treating facts as though they were mere opinions. For example, the question of who started the last war, by no means a hotly debated issue, is answered by a surprising variety of opinions. An otherwise quite normally intelligent woman in Southern Germany told me that the Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig; this is only the crudest of many examples.46 Arendt described time and again encountering people who still debated historical facts about the war, the concentration camps, and other historical realities in a pseudo-democratic re-enactment of public arguing. The average German, she stated, honestly believes this free-for-all, this nihilistic relativity about facts, to be the essence of democracy. In fact, of course, it is a legacy of the Nazi regime.47 In general, Arendt realised that the truth about the death camps was publicly and privately ignored, and any collective or individual responsibility was fiercely denied. Arendt noted that a ubiquitous absence of response to what happened is evident everywhere, adding that:
It is difficult to say whether this signifies a half-conscious refusal to yield to grief or a genuine inability to feel. And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they react, or, rather, fail to react to the fate of refugees in their midst. This general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.48

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As a response to any references to recent history or ones own Jewish origins, Arendt observed, people proceed to draw up a balance between German suffering and the suffering of others, the implication being that one side cancels the other and we may as well proceed to a more promising topic of conversation.49 Hence the most common publicly expressed emotion Arendt was able to observe was self-pity, with Allied policies consistently seen as aimed at revenge, not democratisation. In
45Theodor

W. Adorno, Schuld und Abwehr: Eine qualitative Analyse zum Gruppenexperiment, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9.2, Frankfurt am Main 1975, pp. 121324; Theodor W. Adorno, The Meaning of Working Through the Past, in idem, Critical Models, pp. 89104. 46Hannah Arendt, The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany, in idem, Essays in Understanding, pp. 248269, here p. 251. 47ibid., p. 252. 48ibid., p. 249. 49ibid.

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conclusion Arendt argued that German industriousness served as an effective tool in the countrys sheltering of itself against the Nazi legacy and the political and moral challenges of the time. Indeed, this present industriousness was in reality a drive to restore an idealised past, a drive crystallised in the word Wiederaufbau; it fuelled Arendts impression at first glance that Germany is still potentially the most dangerous European nation.50 Arendt encapsulated her report in an observation fusing objective history with subjective experience: And one wants to cry out: This is not realreal are the ruins; real are the past horrors, real are the dead whom you have forgotten. But they [your addressees] are living ghosts, whom speech and argument, the glance of human eyes and the mourning of human hearts, no longer touch.51 However, while emphasising the specificity of the German situation, Arendts negative experience also reached, to some extent, beyond Germanys borders. In general, she was shocked by the moral chaos in Europe in toto, only England appearing to her as a country that survived the war morally intact.52 Among Arendts trips to Germany and elsewhere in Europe that followed her long-term sojourn, the following are particularly noteworthy: a visit to Germany from April to September 1952, this time with private funding, and with the task of helping with the reconstruction of German philosophical studies;53 a visit to Karl Jaspers in the autumn of 1956 and a trip to Frankfurt in October 1958 to present the laudatio for Jaspers, who was receiving the prestigious Peace Prize of German Booksellers; a trip to Hamburg in 1959 to receive the citys prominent Lessing Prize for the humanistic and enlightened nature of her work; another trip to Darmstadt in September 1967 to receive the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, awarded to Arendt not for her (very limited) admiration of Freuds work but because of her extraordinary contributions to the German language, praise she clearly appreciated;54 and finally, a trip to Copenhagen in April 1975 to accept the Danish governments and the University of Copenhagens prestigious Sonning Prize, awarded for major contributions to European culture. (Arendt received the award on 18 April 1975 for her work as a historian of totalitarian systems and as a political theorist; she was the first American citizen and the first woman to receive the prize.)55 She also built new friendships with European and German colleagues, re-established some old onesmost prominently she always kept close contact with Karl Jaspersand even participated in Germanys public and academic life through her many publications, commentaries, and speeches. Right from the start, the visits to Karl and Gertrude Jaspers in Basel had made her even feel at home in Europe, both philosophically and personally,

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50ibid., 51ibid. 52See

p. 254.

Young-Bruehl, p. 345. p. 380 and p. 394. 54In a letter to Dr. Johan, the president of the academy, Arendt wrote: I was forced to leave Germany 34 years ago; my mother tongue was everything that I could take with me from my old home, and I always made great efforts to keep this irreplaceable treasure intact and alive. The Academys award is like a recognition that I succeeded in doing it. Arendt to Johan, 6 July 1967; quoted in Young-Bruehl, p. 535. 55ibid, p. 626 and p. 630; see also Ingeborg Nordmann, Hannah Arendt, Frankfurt 1994, p. 137.
53ibid,

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especially personally.56 At the same time, until her death in 1975 she kept a considerable distance from Germanys official policies and prevailing social mood: she strongly criticised the German governments reluctance to accept decisions by the United States and the other Allied powers (for example, the decision to build a European Defence Community in May 1952), a reluctance she began to conceptualise as stemming from an evil nationalism of the German people;57 and she criticised the continuous German initiatives to legislate statutes of limitation for Nazi crimes, as well as the general lack of willingness by the German government and German courts to prosecute Nazi criminals.58 In a letter published by the German weekly Der Spiegel, in 1965 she wrote that Germans might well react to the thought of living with murderers of cab drivers by restoring the death penalty;59 but when it came to crimes of previously unheard of proportions, no one seemed to show any emotional reaction, let alone anger or outrage. Adornos experiences and analysis of the postwar mentality in Germany was strikingly similar to Arendts. In Adornos case, the analysis was backed up with systematic social researchthe Group Experiment, his qualitative study of German guilt feelings and defensive mechanisms in respect to Nazi crimeswhich served as the basis for a set of theoretical interpretations of postwar German reactions to the Holocaust.60 The study involved group discussions held among Germans from various social backgrounds with a range of occupations and ages. The participants were given a letter ostensibly written by an American soldier; in the letter he both criticised German authoritarianism and the way Germans had been dealing with the recent past and praised the Germans for their cultural achievements and capabilities. The general response to the letter revealed strong affective reactionsin particular what Adorno defined as a collective defensiveness regarding German national guilt and political responsibility, as well as the guilt of specific German perpetrators. The response appeared to be as strong among participants who were evidently personally innocent as among former members of the Nazi party, and efforts to deny collective, national responsibility appeared even more affectively loaded than those to deny personal guilt. In his analysis of the findings, Adorno discerned seven major themes and differentiated between two major reaction-patterns among the participants. On the one hand, the vast majority had a strong sense of German national identity and reacted defensively and aggressively when confronted with German crimes. All farmers participating in the study, as well as virtually all academics, denied any guilt on the part of Germany or the Germans. Almost ninety per cent of the latter group
56Hannah

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Arendt to Fritz Frnkel, 20 December 1950, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Arendt

folder.
57Hannah 58See,

Arendt to Heinrich Blcher, 30 May 1952, ibid. for example, Arendts preface to Karl Jaspers, The Future of Germany, Chicago 1967. 59Hanna Arendt to editors of Der Spiegel 12 February 1965, Hannah Arendt Archive Oldenburg, Catalogue: Publishers, Der Spiegel 19651970, 32.5. 60For a brief overview of the studys empirical results see Lars Rensmann, Collective Guilt, National Identity, and Political Processes in Contemporary Germany, in Nyla Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International Perspectives, Cambridge 2004 [forthcoming]; for a more extensive analysis see Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie ber den Antisemitismus, Hamburg 1998, pp. 231288.

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was either somewhat or radically antisemiticalthough academics were often reluctant to speak up about the topic.61 On the other hand, a small minority of those interviewed identified less with the national collective. While itself revealing defensive reactions to a lesser degree, this minority (sixteen per cent) was relatively open to acknowledging German guilt and more frequently supported the idea of compensation for the victims. But despite these scattered exceptions the study underscored a widespread pattern of defensive strategies such as equating the Holocaust with crimes committed by the others. These strategies were accompanied by continued strong identification with Germany as a self-evidently superior nation, as well as frequent projection of personal guilt onto both the Allied forces and, above all, the Jewish victims and survivors: a process expressed in what Adorno defined as a secondary antisemitism motivated by identifying the Jews as representatives of an unwanted and unmastered memory. Adorno argued that Germans holding such attitudes in fact simultaneously clung to authoritarianism and deep-seated prejudices and clichs regarding virtually every minority, while every statement about the Germans is defensively rejected as an illegitimate false generalisation.62 A cognitive incapacity to judge and evaluate historical processes or even get the basic historical facts straight, strong national identifications and high levels of prejudice, a general lack of empathy towards the victims, a high degree of national and individual self-pity to the point of viewing the Germans as the real victims of Nazism and the Second World War such traits, Adorno concluded, amounted to nothing less than a general social tendency towards an irrational, aggressive defensiveness, a transsubjective factor characterising early postwar, post-totalitarian West German society and culture.63 Adorno thus discovered what he termed a social objective spirit, amounting to a new German ideology.64 It is striking that interspersed throughout Adornos two hundred-page empirical material, we find expressions of personal anger, and even shock, at the responses of various participants in his study. Like Arendt, Adorno, who as indicated had celebrated the capabilities of his new German students a short time before, was unmistakably surprised and affected by the level of aggression, prejudice and denial he encountered on an unexpectedly broad scale. It was as if, as Arendt later put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, German society and its prevailing moral system were not shared by the outside world65 and were still a world apart from the rest of contemporary civilisation. For Adorno, it appears that things did not get better in the 1950s; he experienced this static situation both personally and, more so, in his professional life in which he had invested so much hope. Against his expectations, he was not welcomed home by Germanys academic community: like many other German-Jewish academic exiles, he initially received no adequate professional appointment (though he was invited to teach classes at the Philosophy faculty of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of
61Wiggershaus, 62Adorno,

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p. 490. Schuld und Abwehr, pp. 121324, here pp. 218f. 63ibid., p. 138 and p. 146. 64Draft manuscript by Adorno cited in Wiggershaus, p. 489. 65Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 103.

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Frankfurt between 1949 and 1952),66 and was finally offered a supernumerary chair in August 1953 by Frankfurt University as a result of pressure exerted by Max Horkheimer after Adorno had spent another year in the US. Addressing Adornos Jewish background and migr status, the dean of the philosophical faculty declared that such a chair would be established for Adorno solely for reasons of restitution.67 A number of his university colleagues, many appointed by Nazi university presidents, viewed Adornos position as a privilege granted because he was Jewish; his restitution chair thus became a Judenprofessura Jews professorship.68 In any event, until July 1957 his hopes of becoming a regular full professor remained unfulfilled. In February 1956, Adorno was forced to remind the dean of philosophy of his right to become a full professor according to the third revision of the Law for the Restitution of National Socialist Injustice. Many colleagues in the Philosophy faculty (which, following the German tradition, included the humanities in their entirety) objected. One of the most distinguished colleagues, Hellmut Ritter, a professor of oriental history, claimed in a meeting of the commission founded to deal with the Adorno case that in Frankfurt you only need to be promoted by Mr. Horkheimer and to be a Jew in order to have a career.69 Ritters voice was representative of many, and of a generally hostile climate facing Jews in the Philosophy faculty and in various departments throughout the university.70 This climate largely shattered Adornos hopes for a fresh start for German society and culture that could revive its best traditions; the steady frustration caused by experiences of ostracisation and inflicted resentment soon led to a fading of the high ambitions tied to the re-establishment of the Frankfurt institute. In May 1956, Adornos friend and mentor Horkheimer officially applied for retirement because of the hatred against Jews expressed by his colleagues.71 To be sure, both Adorno and Horkheimer seemed to be encountering more hostility within the academy than outside it, where Adorno quickly re-established old friendships and formed new ones.72 Still, even when he finally received his Ordinarius title on 1 July 1957, he did not enjoy an ordinary professorship at Frankfurt; and at that point, he was not fully satisfied with the appointment, as its terms could not be improved on through the presence of similar offers from other German universities (he would receive no such offers during the remaining years of his career).73 In 1959, Adorno laid out the conclusions drawn from his previous research, and even more so, from his accumulated experience inside the academy and in German society as a whole during the 1950s in his essay Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (The Meaning of Working through the Past), an essay that remains one of the most radical critiques of postwar West Germanys approach to coming to terms with the

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66See 68ibid.

67Wiggershaus, 69ibid., 70ibid. 71ibid.

Mller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 507. p. 520. p. 521. p. 526. p. 521.

72Mller-Doohm, 73Wiggershaus,

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past. Adorno here drew a stark portrait of a society in which National Socialism lives on, where even today we still do not know whether it is merely a ghost of what was so monstrous that lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.74 Within this framework, he criticised an omnipresent desire to break away from the past, with its concomitant full-scale public destruction of memory75a widespread indifference towards what had transpired that he identified with as much acuity and indignation as had Arendt almost a decade earlier. Adorno argued:
There is much that is neurotic in the relation to the past: defensive postures where one is not attacked, intense affects where they are hardly warranted by the situation, an absence of affect in the face of the gravest matters, not seldom simply a repression of what is known or half-known. We are also familiar with the readiness today to deny or minimize what happenedno matter how difficult it is to comprehend that people feel no shame in arguing that it was at most only five and not six million Jews who were gassed.

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Responsibility for Hitlers crimes and the Nazi disaster, he continued, is shifted onto those who tolerated his seizure of power [i.e. England and America] and not to the ones who cheered him on. The idiocy of all this is truly a sign of something that psychologically has not been mastered, a wound, although the idea of wounds would be rather more appropriate for the victims.76 What had not been mastered, he concluded, was a persistent collective narcissism: an ongoing identification with an idealised image of the nation as a huge collective self. Secretly, smouldering unconsciously and therefore all the more powerfully, Adorno suggested, the identifications and collective narcissism stamping the Hitler years were thus not destroyed at all, but continue to exist.77 Although in many respects Hannah Arendts interpretation of the Holocaust, totalitarianism, and the post-totalitarian constellation in Germany did differ from Adornos, as has been suggested in these pages, in other respects we can also find striking similarities in relation to the German problem, some of these apparently related to similar postwar observations and experiences. On the one hand, her time in postwar Germany did not induce her to revise her view of the modern condition, and of totalitarianism as to a great extent a modern phenomenon, rooted in universal modern developments such as imperialism and atomisation in mass society. She continued to interpret antisemitism as an essentially supranational political ideology that needed to be approached in terms of its general social and political origins, in other words as a powerful weapon in organising the rootless, atomised masses of modernity.78 With the publication of her Eichmann book in 1963, she even seemed to go so far as to describe the Holocaust as essentially an abstract administrative procedure carried out by thoughtless bureaucrats, rather than by
74Theodor 75ibid.,

W. Adorno, The Meaning of Working Through the Past, p. 90. pp. 89 and 91. 76ibid., p. 91. 77ibid., p. 96. 78See Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Cambridge, MA 1996, p. 70.

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fanaticised followers of a demented political and cultural ideology. Some of her observations on Germany in the wake of the Holocaust appear to reflect her thesis that a totalitarian system destroys the moral and cognitive competence of its members: the situation in postwar Germany, Arendt argued, also demonstrates that totalitarian rule is something more than merely the worst form of tyranny.79 The experience of totalitarianism, Arendt claimed, had robbed the Germans of all spontaneous speech and comprehension, so that now, having no official line to guide them, they are, as it were, speechless, incapable of articulating thoughts and adequately expressing their feelings.80 On the other hand, it is possible to discern a new epistemological position in Arendts writings of the postwar period: an insight into the importance of sociocultural, political, anti-democratic traditions, and, in particular into the unwillingness of most Germans to deal with the Nazi legacy; the isolation of a contemporary West German predisposition to coldness, indifference and insensitivity that she defined as anti-democratic.81 The deep moral confusion apparent in Germany today, then, is more than amorality and has deeper causes than mere wickedness. The so-called good Germans are often as misled in their moral judgements of themselves and others as those who simply refuse to recognize that anything wrong or out of the ordinary was done by Germany at all.82 In such passages, Arendt expressed her own surprise at the depth of the destruction of Germanys prewar public and private life83at the extent of the anti-democratic traits maintained by accomplices to unspeakable crimes,84 and especially at the widespread repression of recent history and outright hostility she encountered as a German-Jewish exile.85 In an attempt to link her general theory of totalitarianism to an analysis of specific historical traits and traditions, Arendt critically reconstructed these particular attitudes, for example as manifest in a prevailing bustling activity that she saw not as the reflection of a fixed national character but rather as one symptom of a deep-seated historically determined mentality.86 It was a well-known fact, she indicated, that Germans have for generations been overfond of working.87 However, watching the Germans busily stumble through the ruins of a thousand years of their own history, shrugging their shoulders at the destroyed landmarks or resentful when reminded of the deeds of horror that haunt the whole surrounding world, one comes to realize that busyness has become their chief defence against reality.88 For Arendt, then, such bustle and escape from responsibility89 and associated postwar defensiveness in the face of industrial mass
79Arendt, 80ibid.,

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The Aftermath of Nazi Rule, p. 269. p. 253. 81ibid, p. 268. 82ibid, p. 259. 83ibid., p. 259f. 84ibid., p. 261. 85Hannah Arendt to Fritz Frnkel, 4 February 1950, Manuscript Division, Folder Arendt, Library of Congress. 86Arendt, The Aftermath of Nazi Rule, p. 261. 87ibid. 88ibid., p. 254. 89ibid., p. 250.

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murder corresponded to the process through which the Nazi murder machine kept going.90 At one point, she ironically remarked to Fritz Frnkel that The Germans are working their brains off (die Deutschen arbeiten sich dumm und dmlich).91 In Adornos postwar writing, and in light of his postwar experiences, one likewise finds elements of an increasingly specified approach to the interlinking questions of how to define the role of German antidemocratic traditions and what caused the Holocaust. As the following remarks reveal, this development culminated in a complex and critical version of the Sonderweg thesis that was rooted in social psychology:
Because historically German unification was belated, precarious, and unstable, one tends, simply so as to feel like a nation at all, to overplay the national consciousness and irritably avenge every deviation from it. In this situation it is easy to regress to archaic conditions of a pre-individualistic disposition, a tribal consciousness, to which one can appeal with all the greater psychological effectiveness the less such consciousness actually exists.92

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In the same context, Adorno juxtaposed Germanys dominant blind dependencies, which include the unreflected supremacy of the national with another, universalistic tradition originating with Kant, whose thought centered upon the concept of autonomy, the self-responsibility of the reasoning individual.93 In the years after his return to Germany, Adornos focus would correspondingly turn to the specific relationship between anti-modern sentiments and authoritarian ideologies anchored in German political-cultural history, on the one hand, and the processes of capitalist modernisation and totalisation of the iron cage of modernity in the twentieth century, on the other. In a manner clearly reflecting insights gained since remigration, Adorno thus came to define Nazism as an anti-modern German movement based on the political mobilisation of specifically national cultural residues, these nonetheless interacting with modern conditions and preconditioned by modernitys drastic transformations. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century German social model, he explained, was the civil servant fulfilling his duties to authority, not the free entrepreneur operating according to the laws of the market.94 A society still at some distance from the modern laws of commodification and rationalisation could easily be swept into the Nazi vortex, he suggested (this, of course, stands in sharp contrast to his general theory of Nazism as the product of the totalisation of instrumental reason and capitalist modernity); while Hitler could hardly be ascribed to the German national character as its fate, it was nonetheless hardly a coincidence that he rose to power in Germany.95 Such arguments are found only in some works by the late Adorno and mark a clear, though not consistent, indeed rather exceptional, shift from his earlier dialectic
90ibid. 91Hannah

Arendt to Fritz Frnkel, 20 December 1949, Manuscript Division, Folder Arendt, Library of Congress. 92Adorno, On the Question: What is German?, p. 206. 93ibid., p. 206. 94Adorno argued in 1965 that in Germany commercialisation had not flourished as widely as in the advanced capitalist countries which caused a lack of intellectual, cultural and democratic modernisation; ibid., p. 207. 95ibid.

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social theory with both a general stance and specific orientation towards the modern condition that was highly universal in orientation. By the 1960s, he had concluded that totalitarian antisemitism was not simply a product of a modern rationalisation process gone mad. German culture was, at its innermost core, and particularly where it believed itself to be most cultivated, interspersed with anti-Semitic prejudices.96 In the essays he wrote shortly before his death, once more Adorno laid stress on the persistence of anti-democratic ideologies in Germany after the Holocaust: a prevailing collective conformity, self-idolisation, a political culture stamped by an absence of self-reflection and self-criticism. He observed an increasingly widespread completely imagined international ostracism of the German, or a no less fictive lack of that national self-esteem that so many would like to incite again. Imperceptibly, he argued in 1965, an atmosphere is slowly taking shape that disapproves of the one thing most necessary: critical self-reflection. Once again one hears the ill-fated proverb of the bird that dirties its own nest, whereas those who grouse about the bird themselves tend to be birds of a feather who flock together.97 While Adorno may well have been mainly referring here to his own situation, his remarks also defined the fate of many of his fellow Jewish survivors who had returned to the land of their former persecution. Although in its details, Adornos analysis is strikingly similar to Arendts, the theoretical postulates informing it mark a far more dramatic shift in stance. Nevertheless, for Adorno as for Arendt, one finds no abandonment of their grand theory of modernity as a central underlying concept and the primary source of explanation for the Holocaust. In spite of some considerable reconfigurations and shifts, in this important respect both thinkers remained, unmistakably, in strong debt to the intellectual heritage of the Weimar Republic. III When Adorno returned to Germany in 1949, he had finished Minima Moralia two years before. Begun during the last years of war and completed after the Holocausts dimensions had started to surface, this collection of aphorisms conveyed some hope in the midst of a critique of what Adorno viewed as modern civilisations dialectic of destruction. One of Adornos purposes was to explore the concept of an emancipated society that would not be a unitary state but the realisation of universality in the reconciliation of differences. These differences would not be subsumed under the imperative of the general or subject to a unitary tolerance excluding refractory groups; instead, the good state was to be conceived as one in which people could be different without fear.98 And the last of the aphorisms goes so far as to reformulate a messianic idea of history unmistakably inspired by Walter Benjamin: a redemption of all previous history through a process of dialectical
96Theodor

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W. Adorno, Zur Bekmpfung des Antisemitismus heute, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.1, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 382f. 97idem, On the Question: What is German? p. 206. 98idem, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London 1974, p. 103.

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turnover, grounded in the possibility that total negativity delineates the mirrorimage of its opposite.99 We can understand Adornos move to Germany as reflecting a sense that perhaps paradoxically, this place of catastrophe was the location where he could best reignite such a messianic motif in temporary suspension. He hoped to do so through his work; in seeing this as most realisable in a country that had abandoned him he was, it seems, following his messianic principle that consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. Germany was, for sure, the site of total social negativity, hence the site of utmost hopethis concept formulated at a time when most surviving German Jews were expressing the impossibility of staying in their fatherland after all that had happened.100 In a similar manner, although more in political than general social terms, Hannah Arendt first dreamt after the war of the rise of a new German republican exemplary site of freedom, political agency, and plurality in which every Jew, no matter where he was born, could become a full citizen any time if he wishes, simply by virtue of his Jewish nationality, without abandoning being Jewish.101 Such a republic, she felt in 1945, could become a model for a new Europe, where a truly civil society had come to terms legally and ethically with past problems such as statelessness and persecution of national minorities.102 But with her visits of 1949 and 1950 and occasional ones thereafter, this political vision melted into air. For both Adorno and Arendt, the sense of political disillusionment followed the shock generated by news of the Nazi genocide; this shock had led to a more general disillusionment with their fellow Germans for their collaboration and their murderous deeds. The subsequent political disillusionment involved a painful realisation that the German society and culture both thought they had known and had as a home had apparently been destroyed to the core, and to a much higher degree than they had expected; and an equally painful realisation that most of those who had been part of it would not acknowledge the crimes, rather harbouring all the old resentments, their coldnesstheir Nazi world-view. The initial postwar ideals and hopes of both Arendt and Adorno were rooted in the Weimar Republics destroyed intellectual and cultural environment. With the experience of modern American society now a crucial part of their intellectualexperiential arsenal,103 it would seem that in face of the postwar German scene, both figures became sharply aware of a set of deeply-grounded differences between their world of exile and their world of origin. Despite their own set of theoretically elaborated political-historical concepts, each movedalbeit only in some rather marginal writings hardly undermining their general theoretical focus on universaltotalitarian modernitytowards a reflection of their experience and thus towards partial theoretical reconfigurations; each moved beyond exclusively blaming the
99ibid., 100See

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p. 247. Michael Brenner, East European and German Jews in Postwar Germany, 194550, in Y. Michal Bodemann (ed.), Jews, Germany, Memory, Ann Arbor, MI 1996, pp. 4964, here p. 57. 101Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Arendt and Jaspers, Briefwechsel , p. 89. 102Arendt, Approaching the German Question, pp. 111ff. 103See Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Die amerikanische Erfahrung: Arendt, Adorno und das Exil in den USA, in Auer, Rensmann and Wessel (eds.), pp. 5773.

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final solution on the modern condition or indeed on life spent within a totalitarian order. At least in the margins, both Adorno and Arendt now acknowledged the important role of anti-democratic traditions, and the centrality in historical events of active human agents driven by specific sets of ideas and emotions. Largely autobiographical in nature, the writings in which this shift is manifest represent a fascinating dialogue between subjective experience and theoretical abstraction: a dialogue not subsuming particular history under an abstract theoretical notion.104 Nevertheless, it sometimes seems that the tension between strictly modernist interpretations of the twentieth centurys catastrophes, from Stalinism to Nazism, interpretations criticising the modern atomisation of man and the structures of the modern bureaucratic apparatus, and more contingent interpretations of the specific political and cultural conditions of European and German society, remains unresolved in the writings of both thinkers. When Adorno wrote about the totality of late capitalism in the 1960s and when Arendt published her theory of the bureaucratic perpetrator in Eichmann in Jerusalem, they were reflecting, on parallel epistemological horizons, on the crucial role of the particular in historya role that had escaped their critical model of modernity. The two theoretical narratives represented in their work, the general critique of modernity and the critique of particular traditions, appear especially irreconcilable, disparate, fragmented. Such ambivalence and ambiguity is, in fact, broadly characteristic of their postwar work. Without essentialising German national identity, Arendt and Adorno were increasingly critical of German society, while nevertheless remaining deeply attached to its intellectual heritage, as well as empathising with its potential and identifying with its fatejust as they remained harsh critics of modernity while endorsing its prospects. In any event, the postwar German experiences of each thinker did prompt some clear-cut shifts of perceptiona partial reconsideration of the Holocausts significance and a shared fading of hopes invested in both a German and European postwar order. For Arendt and even for Adorno, the critic of the American cultureindustry, if there was any remaining potential for freedom and democracy in the Western World, this potential came to lie rather in America, and certainly not in Germany. It was, in fact, the American experience that showed both thinkers a different side to the dialectics of modernity. Modern, cut-throat capitalist America now represented a concrete and symbolic site of refuge, civilised values and democratic stabilitythis in itself represented an implicit challenge to all Holocaustaetiologies that focused on universal conditions tied to modernity. One thus finds Arendt eventually identifying the emergence of isolated masses susceptible to totalitarian ideologies as an essentially European condition: these masses, she explained, were a result of the disintegration of the class system, a process unknown in America.105 As announced most eloquently in On Revolution, Arendt,
104This

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is the way Moishe Postone critically assesses the bulk of Hannah Arendts oeuvre. See idem, Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem: Die unaufgelste Antinomie von Universalitt und Besonderem, in Gary Smith (ed.), Hannah Arendt Revisited: Eichmann in Jerusalem und die Folgen, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 284. 105Arendt to George Ackerman, 21 February 1974, Hannah Arendt Archive Oldenburg, Miscellany, 19541975 and undated, 7.1.

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now a New York intellectual who had been recognised since her early Aufbau writings106 as a prominent if controversial member of the New York migr community, had developed a strong belief in the ideals and legacy of the American Revolution and the American republic. In light of the fact that Adorno never stopped loathing American popular culture, and indeed never went back to his land of exile or wrote anything in English after his return to Germany, it is perhaps more surprising that Adorno himself came around, in his reflections on his Scientific experiences of a European Scholar in America (1968), to praising the political and social climate of the oldest modern Western democracy:
Over there I became acquainted with a potential for real humanitarianism that is hardly to be found in old Europe. The political form of democracy is ultimately closer to the people. American everyday life, despite the often lamented hustle and bustle, has an inherent element of peaceableness, good-naturedness, and generosity, in sharpest contrast to the pent-up malice and envy that exploded in Germany between 1933 and 1945. I do not want to imply by this that America is somehow immune to the danger of veering toward totalitarian forms of domination. Such a danger lies in the modern condition per se. But probably the power to resist fascist currents is stronger in America than in any European country, perhaps with the exception of England.107

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Correspondingly, throughout the 1950s and 1960s both Arendt and Adorno attacked both European anti-Americanism in general and its German variant in particular as symptoms of the continued strength of anti-modernist and antidemocratic ideas on the old continent. In 1954 Arendt wrote as follows in three essays on anti-Americanism which resulted from a lecture at Princeton University:
Anti-Americanism, its negative emptiness notwithstanding, threatens to become the content of a European movement. If it is true that each nationalism (though, of course, not the birth of every nation) begins with a real or fabricated common enemy, then the current image of America in Europe may well become the beginning of a new panEuropeanism. Our hope that the emergence of a federated Europe and the dissolution of the present nation-state system will make nationalism itself a thing of the past may be unwarrantedly optimistic.

That the remnants of European fascism had joined the fight for European federation, Arendt added, reminds everybody that after Briands futile gestures at the League of Nations it was Hitler who started the war with the promise that he would liquidate Europes obsolete nation-state system and build a united Europe. The widespread and inarticulate anti-American sentiments find their political crystallisation point precisely here.108 In the 1950s, Arendt developed elements of a theory of European anti-Americanism, one of this theorys basic assumptions being
106See

Hannah Arendt, Vom Antisemitismus ist man nur auf dem Monde sicher: Beitrge fr die deutsch-jdische Emigrantenzeitung Aufbau 19411945, Munich 2000. 107Theodor W. Adorno, Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America, in idem, Critical Models, pp. 215242, here p. 240. 108Hannah Arendt, Dream and Nightmare, in idem, Essays in Understanding, pp. 409417, here pp. 416f; on Arendts critique of anti-Americanism see Lars Rensmann, European Political Identity, the Problem of Anti-Americanism, and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: An Arendtian View, New Haven 2004.

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that in the postwar European order anti-American ideas would serve as a source of identity-creation and as a means of projecting difficulties in confronting the realities of present-day modernity and past totalitarianism onto the New World:
As long as Europe remains divided, she can afford the luxury of dodging these very disturbing problems of the modern world. She can continue to pretend that the threat to our civilization comes to her from without. Both anti-Americanism and neutralism are, in a sense, clear signs that Europe is not prepared at this moment to face the consequences and problems of her own development.109

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In an analogous way, Adorno insisted again and again that in Germany, arrogance against America is inappropriate. By misusing a higher good, it only serves the mustiest of instincts,110 as he wrote in 1965. In 1968, denouncing an apparently rising anti-Americanism in Germany during this period111 and contrasting the substantiality of democratic forms in American political and cultural traditions to the problematic traditions of Europe, and of Germany in particular, Adorno noted that in America democratic modes of self-understanding have seeped into life itself, whereas at least in Germany they were, and I fear still are, nothing more than formal rules of the game.112 Similar to Arendts approach to the subject, Adornos critical theory of anti-Americanism, which he developed during the 1960s, conceptualises anti-Americanism as a particular, personifying expression of discontent with modernity as such. In this context, Russell Berman has argued that for Adorno, the issue is the difference between the American culture of freedom, on the one hand, and the German, or more broadly European, regime of regulatory statism, on the other. This is why he has long been rejected by the German Left for his anticollectivism and by the German nationalist Right for his pro-Americanism.113 Here, again, a postwar re-evaluation and reconfiguration of the role of specific (democratic) political cultures within the horizon of modernity is visible. Both Arendt and Adorno, who had found refuge in America and in the end endorsed its democratic political culture, began to see German anti-Americanism as just another expression of the problematic, unmastered, and in particular collectivist features and traditions of postwar German societya society towards which they had become steadily more sceptical. Although affectively the two intellectual figures remained strongly tied to their German cultural and intellectual heritage, they simultaneously felt alienated in Germany as it had become. Having taken markedly different biographical paths, they now shared a common sense of permanent exile because of the experience of a far-reaching alienation from their original homea sense of continued exile shared with many other returned German-Jewish intellectuals.114

109Hannah

Arendt, Europe and the Atom Bomb, in idem, Essays in Understanding, pp. 418422, here p. 422. 110Adorno, On the question: What is German, p. 210. 111Cf. Russell A. Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem, Stanford 2004, p. 141. 112Adorno, Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America, p. 239f. 113Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe, p. 143. 114See Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, New York 1986.

Returning from Forced Exile: Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt

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Embodied in different ways by the postwar lives of Arendt and Adorno, the status of such permanent exile reflects the biographical reality of both forced emigration and confrontation with a culture that was once familiar but has turned unfamiliar. Their former home could not be fully regained. But such status likewise signifies a general theoretical position. On both a personal and broader cultural level, both Arendt and Adorno increasingly came to perceive that the wound left by the Holocaust would never close. It seems that the perception was reinforced by the postwar experiences of each of these thinkers, experiences largely shattering the continued hope in a revived German tradition, while bringing home the loss of friends, community, a portion of humanity itself. Rendered even more acute through a specific form of eingeholte Erfahrung of the unexpected level of German societys moral destructionrealising that most of their fellow Germans had at least accepted the Nazis genocidal projectsuch a sense of loss could not fail to leave high universalistic hopes untouched. In part this explains the tensions, and indeed the despair, that we can find in some of Arendts and Adornos postwar writings: a despair transforming the Kantian imperatives direction from a hope for universal freedom, which is still reflected in their continued engagement with an intellectual ideal of universal enlightenment, increasingly into the defensive, if not resigned hope of a never again. It thus appears that in a certain sense, the return to Germany of both Arendt and Adorno made them both homeless in this world once and for all. On a theoretical level, their postwar insights into the role of political culture foster a more complex, multifaceted, and indeed more advanced approach to interpreting the Holocaust, one that takes account of the specific interactions between rapid social modernisation, politics, and cultural mentality. In doing so, Arendt and Adorno also further enhance our general understanding of the complex relationship between democracy, culture, and modernity.

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