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\title{Education After Auschwitz}
\author{Theodor Adorno}

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\lfoot{\sc Theodor Adorno}
\rfoot{\em Education After Auschwitz}
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The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen
again.  Its priority before any other requirement is such that I
believe I need not and should not justify it. I cannot understand
why it has been given so little concern until now. To justify it
would be monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place.
Yet the fact that one is so barely conscious of this demand and the
questions it raises shows that the monstrosity has not penetrated
people's minds deeply, itself a symptom of the continuing potential
for its recurrence as far as peoples' conscious and unconscious is
concerned. Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial
and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again
Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against. One
speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a
threat---Auschwitz {\em was} this relapse, and barbarism continues as
long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue
largely unchanged. That is the whole horror.  The societal pressure
still bears down, although the danger remains invisible nowadays.
It drives people toward the unspeakable, which culminated on a
world-historical scale in Auschwitz. Among the insights of Freud
that truly extend even into culture and sociology, one of the most
profound seems to me to be that civilization itself produces
anti-civilization and increasingly reinforces it. His writings {\em
Civilization and its Discontents} and {\em Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego} deserve the widest possible diffusion, especially
in connection with Auschwitz.\footnote{%
Sigmund Freud, {\em Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse} (1921)
and {\em Das Unbehagen in der Kultur} (1930); English: vols.~18 and
21, respectively, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans.~James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1975).} If barbarism itself is inscribed
within the principle of civilization, then there is something
desperate in the attempt to rise up against it.

Any reflection on the means to prevent the recurrence of Auschwitz
is darkened by the thought that this desperation must be made
conscious to people, lest they give way to idealistic platitudes.
%% \footnote{
%% 2. First published version: "helpless" and "'helplessness" instead
%% of "desperate" and "desperation."}
Nevertheless the attempt must be made, even in the face of the fact
that the fundamental structure of society, and thereby its members
who have made it so, are the same today as twenty-five years ago.
Millions of innocent people---to quote or haggle over the numbers
is already inhumane---were systematically murdered. That cannot be
dismissed by any living person as a superficial phenomenon, as an
aberration of the course of history to be disregarded when compared
to the great dynamic of progress, of enlightenment, of the supposed
growth of humanitarianism. The fact that it happened is itself the
expression of an extremely powerful societal tendency. Here I would
like to refer to a fact that, very characteristically, seems to be
hardly known in Germany, although it furnished the material for a
best-seller like {\em The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Werfel}.\footnote{
{\em Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh} (1933) by Franz Werfel. Set
in Syria in 1915, the novel recounts the resistance offered by the
Armenians against more numerous and better equipped Young Turk
forces.  The Armenian forces entrench themselves on the mountain
Musa Dagh for forty days and, on the verge of being overwhelmed,
are rescued by an Anglo-French naval squadron. English: {\em The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh}, trans.~Geoffrey Dunlop (New York: Viking,
1934).} Already in the First World War the Turks---the so-called
``Young Turk Movement" under the leadership of Enver Pascha and
Talaat Pascha---murdered well over a million Armenians. The highest
German military and government authorities apparently were aware
of this but kept it strictly secret.  Genocide has its roots in
this resurrection of aggressive nationalism that has developed in
many countries since the end of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, one cannot dismiss the thought that the invention of
the atomic bomb, which can obliterate hundreds of thousands of
people literally in one blow, belongs in the same historical context
as genocide. The rapid population growth of today is called a
population explosion; it seems as though historical destiny responded
by readying counter-explosions, the killing of whole populations.
This only to intimate how much the forces against which one must
act are those of the course of world history.

Since the possibility of changing the objective---namely societal
and political---conditions is extremely limited today, attempts to
work against the repetition of Ausch\-witz are necessarily restricted
to the subjective dimension. By this I also mean essentially the
psychology of people who do such things. I do not believe it would
help much to appeal to eternal values, at which the very people who
are prone to commit such atrocities would merely shrug their
shoulders. I also do not believe that enlightenment about the
positive qualities possessed by persecuted minorities would be of
much use. The roots must be sought in the persecutors, not in the
victims who are murdered under the paltriest of pretenses. What is
necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to
the subject.
%% \footnote{
%% 4. See the essay, "'The Meaning of Working Through the Past," this volume.
%% }
One must come to know the mechanisms that render people
capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and
strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to
prevent people from becoming so again. It is not the victims who
are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which
still today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly
vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must
labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from
striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only
education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical
self-reflection. But since according to the findings of depth
psychology, all personalities, even those who commit atrocities in
later life, are formed in early childhood, education seeking to
prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood. I
mentioned Freud's thesis on discontent in culture. Yet the phenomenon
extends even further than he understood it, above all, because the
pressure of civilization he had observed has in the meantime
multiplied to an unbearable degree. At the same time the explosive
tendencies he first drew attention to have assumed a violence he
could hardly have foreseen. The discontent in culture, however,
also has its social dimension, which Freud did not overlook though
he did not explore it concretely. One can speak of the claustrophobia
of humanity in the administered world, of a feeling of being
incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike
environment. The denser the weave, the more one wants to escape it,
whereas it is precisely its close weave that prevents any escape.
This intensifies the fury against civilization. The revolt against
it is violent and irrational.

A pattern that has been confirmed throughout the entire history of
persecutions is that the fury against the weak chooses for its
target especially those who are perceived as societally weak and
at the same time---either rightly or wrongly---as happy. Sociologically,
I would even venture to add that our society, while it integrates
itself ever more, at the same time incubates tendencies toward
disintegration. Lying just beneath the surface of an ordered,
civilized life, these tendencies have progressed to an extreme
degree. The pressure exerted by the prevailing universal upon
everything particular, upon the individual people and the individual
institutions, has a tendency to destroy the particular and the
individual together with their power of resistance. With the loss
of their identity and power of resistance, people also forfeit those
qualities by virtue of which they are able to pit themselves against
what at some moment might lure them again to commit atrocity. Perhaps
they are hardly able to offer resistance when the established
authorities once again give them the order, so long as it is in the
name of some ideal in which they half or not at all believe.

When I speak of education after Auschwitz, then, I mean two areas:
first children's education, especially in early childhood; then
general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and
social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible,
a climate, therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror
would become relatively conscious. Naturally, I cannot presume to
sketch out the plan of such an education even in rough outline. Yet
I would like at least to indicate some of its nerve centers. Often,
for instance, in America, the characteristic German trust in authority
has been made responsible for National Socialism and even for
Auschwitz. I consider this explanation too superficial, although
here, as in many other European countries authoritarian behavior
and blind authority persist much more tenaciously than one would
gladly admit under the conditions of a formal democracy. Rather,
one must accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected
with the fact that the old established authorities of the {\em
Kaiserreich}
decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not
yet ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal to the
freedom that fell into their laps. For this reason the authoritarian
structures then adopted that destructive and, if I may put it so,
insane dimension they did not have earlier, or at any rate had not
revealed. If one considers how visits of potentates who no longer
have any real political function induce outbreaks of ecstasy in
entire populations, then one has good reason to suspect that the
authoritarian potential even now is much stronger than one thinks.
I wish, however, to emphasize especially that the recurrence or
non-recurrence of fascism in its decisive aspect is not a question
of psychology, but of society. I speak so much of the psychological
only because the other, more essential aspects lie so far out of
reach of the influence of education, if not of the intervention of
individuals altogether.

Very often well-meaning people, who don't want it to happen again,
invoke the concept of bonds.  According to them, the fact that
people no longer had any bonds is responsible for what took place.
In fact, the loss of authority, one of the conditions of the
sadistic-authoritarian horror, is connected with this state of
affairs. To normal common sense it is plausible to appeal to bonds
that check the sadistic, destructive, and ruinous impulse with an
emphatic ``You must not." Nevertheless I consider it an illusion
to think that the appeal to bonds---let alone the demand that
everyone should again embrace social ties so that things will look
up for the world and for people---would help in any serious way.
One senses very quickly the untruth of bonds that are required only
so that they produce a result---even if it be good---without the
bonds being experienced by people as something substantial in
themselves. It is surprising how swiftly even the most foolish and
naive people react when it comes to detecting the weaknesses of
their betters. The so-called bonds easily become either a ready
badge of shared convictions---one enters into them to prove oneself
a good citizen---or they produce spiteful resentment, psychologically
the opposite of the purpose for which they were drummed up.  
%% \footnote{
%% 5. First published version: "resistance, rebellion" instead of "'spiteful resentment."
%% }
They
amount to heteronomy, a dependence on rules, on norms that cannot
be justified by the individual's own reason. What psychology calls
the superego, the conscience, is replaced in the name of bonds by
external, unbinding, and interchangeable authorities, as one could
observe quite clearly in Germany after the collapse of the Third
Reich. Yet the very willingness to connive with power and to submit
outwardly to what is stronger, under the guise of a norm, is the
attitude of the tormentors that should not arise again. It is for
this reason that the advocacy of bonds is so fatal. People who adopt
them more or less voluntarily are placed under a kind of permanent
compulsion to obey orders. The single genuine power standing against
the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian
expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not
cooperating.

I once had a very shocking experience: while on a cruise on Lake
Constance I was reading a Baden newspaper, which carried a story
about Sartre's play {\em Morts sans s\'epulchre}, a play that depicts the
most terrifying things.\footnote{%
German translation {\em Tote ohne Begrdbnis} of Jean Paul Sartre, 
{\em Morts sans s\'epulchre} in {\em Theatre}, vol.~I
(Paris: Gallimard, 1946). 
English: {\em The Victors}, in {\em Three Plays}, trans.~Lionel 
Abel (New York: Knopf, 1949).}
Apparently the play made the critic uneasy. But he did not explain
this discontent as being caused by the horror of the subject matter,
which is the horror of our world. Instead he twisted it so that,
in comparison with a position like that of Sartre, who engages
himself with the horror, we could maintain---almost maintain, I
should say---an appreciation of the higher things: so that we could
not acknowledge the senselessness of the horror. To the point: by
means of noble existential cant the critic wanted to avoid confronting
the horror. Herein lies, not least of all, the danger that the
horror might recur, that people refuse to let it draw near and
indeed even rebuke anyone who merely speaks of it, as though the
speaker, if he does not temper things, were the guilty one, and not
the perpetrators.

With the problem of authority and barbarism I cannot help thinking
of an idea that for the most part is hardly taken into account. It
comes up in an observation in the book {\em The SS State} by Eugen Kogon,
which contains central insights into the whole complex and which
hasn't come near to being absorbed by science and educational theory
the way it deserves to be.\footnote{%
Eugen Kogon, {\em Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrations
lager} (Frankfurt: Europdische Verlagsanstalt, 1946); numerous
reprints.  English: Eugen Kogon, {\em The Theory and Practice of
Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind them},
trans.~Heinz Norden (New York: Berkley, 1950).}
Kogon says that the tormentors of the concentration camp where he
spent years were for the most part young sons of farmers. The
cultural difference between city and country, which still persists,
is one of the conditions of the horror, though certainly neither
the sole nor the most important one. Any arrogance toward the rural
populace is far from my intentions. I know that one cannot help
having grown up in a city or a village. I note only that probably
debarbarization has been less successful in the open country than
anywhere else. 
%% \footnote{%
%% 8. First published version: simply "has not yet succeeded" without the comparative.
%% }
Even television and the other mass media probably
have not much changed the state of those who have not completely
kept up with the culture. It seems to me more correct to say this
and to work against it than to praise sentimentally some special
qualities of rural life that are threatening to disappear. I will
go so far as to claim that one of the most important goals of
education is the debarbarization of the countryside. This presupposes,
however, a study of the conscious and unconscious of the population
there. Above all, one must also consider the impact of modern mass
media on a state of consciousness that has not yet come anywhere
close to the state of bourgeois liberal culture of the nineteenth
century.

In order to change this state of consciousness, the normal primary
school system, which has several problems in the rural environment,
cannot suffice. I can envision a series of possibilities.  One would
be---I am improvising here---that television programs be planned
with consideration of the nerve centers of this particular state
of consciousness. Then I could imagine that something like mobile
educational groups and convoys of volunteers could be formed, who
would drive into the countryside and in discussions, courses, and
supplementary instruction attempt to fill the most menacing gaps.
I am not ignoring the fact that such people would make themselves
liked only with great difficulty. But then a small circle of followers
would form around them, and from there the educational program could
perhaps spread further.

However, there should arise no misunderstanding that the archaic
tendency toward violence is also found in urban centers, especially
in the larger ones. Regressive tendencies, that is, people with
repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today by the
global evolution of society. Here I'd like to recall the twisted
and pathological relation to the body that Horkheimer and I described
in {\em The Dialectic of Enlightenment}.\footnote{ 
Cf.~Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.~Adorno, 
{\em Dialectic of Enlightenment}, trans.~John Cumming (New
York: Seabury Press, 1972; reprint, New York: Continuum, 1989), 
esp.~231--236.}
Everywhere where it is mutilated,
consciousness is reflected back upon the body and the sphere of the
corporeal in an unfree form that tends toward violence. One need
only observe how, with a certain type of uneducated person, his
language---above all when he feels faulted or reproached---becomes
threatening, as if the linguistic gestures bespoke a physical
violence barely kept under control. Here one must surely also study
the role of sport, which has been insufficiently investigated by a
critical social psychology. Sport is ambiguous. On the one hand,
it can have an anti-barbaric and anti-sadistic effect by means of
{\em fair play}, a spirit of chivalry, and consideration for the weak.
On the other hand, in many of its varieties and practices it can
promote aggression, brutality, and sadism, above all in people who
do not expose themselves to the exertion and discipline required
by sports but instead merely watch: that is, those who regularly
shout from the sidelines. Such an ambiguity should be analyzed
systematically. To the extent that education can exert an influence,
the results should be applied to the life of sport.

All this is more or less connected with the old authoritarian
structure, with modes of behavior, I could almost say, of the good
old authoritarian personality. But what Auschwitz produced, the
characteristic personality types of the world of Auschwitz, presumably
represents something new. On the one hand, those personality types
epitomize the blind identification with the collective. On the other
hand, they are fashioned in order to manipulate masses, collectives,
as Himmler, H\"oss, and Eichmann did. I think the most important way
to confront the danger of a recurrence is to work against the brute
predominance of all collectives, to intensify the resistance to it
by concentrating on the problem of collectivization. That is not
as abstract as it sounds in view of the passion with which especially
young and progressively minded people desire to integrate themselves
into something or other. One could start with the suffering the
collective first inflicts upon all the individuals it accepts. One
has only to think of one's own first experiences in school. One
must fight against the type of {\em folkways} [Volkssitten], initiation
rites of all shapes, that inflict physical pain---often unbearable
pain---upon a person as the price that must be paid in order to
consider oneself a member, one of the collective.\footnote{%
Cf.~William Graham Sumner, {\em Folkways: A Study of the Sociological
Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals} (Boston:
Ginn, 1906).  Cf.~also {\em Soziologische Exkurse: Nach Vortrdgen
und Diskussionen}, vol.~4 of {\em Frankfurter Beitrdge zur Soziologie}
(Frankfurt: Europdische Verlagsanstalt, 1956), 157; and T.~W.~Adorno,
{\em Einf\"uhrung in die Soziologie} (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993),
77.  Adorno planned to have Sumner's book translated into German
when he returned to Frankfurt after the war.}
The evil of customs such as the {\em Rauhn\"achte} and the 
{\em Haberfeldtreiben}
and whatever else such long-rooted practices might be called is a
direct anticipation of National Socialist acts of violence.\footnote{%
{\em Rauhn\"achte}: hazing ritual during the nights of Christmastide;
{\em Haberfeldtreiben}: old Bavarian custom of censuring those
perceived by the community as (often moral or sexual) reprobates
who have been overlooked by the law. Cf.~T.~W.~Adorno, {\em
Einf\"uhrung in die Soziologie}, 65, where Adorno speaks of
``Oberbayerische Haberfeldtreiben" in the context of the conceptual
opacity of Durkheim's {\em faits sociaux}.}
It is no coincidence that the Nazis glorified and cultivated such
monstrosities in the name of ``customs." Science here has one of
its most relevant tasks. It could vigorously redirect the tendencies
of folk-studies [{\em Volkskunde}] that were enthusiastically appropriated
by the Nazis in order to prevent the survival, at once brutal and
ghostly, of these folk-pleasures.

This entire sphere is animated by an alleged ideal that also plays
a considerable role in the traditional education: the ideal of being
hard. This ideal can also, ignominiously enough, invoke a remark
of Nietzsche, although he truly meant something else.\footnote{%
Cf.~Friedrich Nietzsche, {\em Beyond Good and Evil}, trans.~Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), numbers 82, 210, 260, 269; {\em
The Gay Science}, trans.~Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1974), number 26; ``On the Old and New Tablets," no.~29, in {\em
Thus Spake Zarathustra}, trans.~Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking,
1966), 214.}
I remember how the dreadful Boger during the Auschwitz trial had
an outburst that culminated in a panegyric to education instilling
discipline through hardness. He thought hardness necessary to produce
what he considered to be the correct type of person.\footnote{%
Wilhelm Boger was in charge of the ``escape department" at Auschwitz
and took pride in the fact that it had the fewest escapes of any
concentration camp. As one of the twenty-one former SS men brought
before the ``Frankfurt" or ``Auschwitz" trials (1963--1965), Boger
was accused of having taken part in numerous selections and executions
at Auschwitz as well as having mistreated prisoners so severely on
the ``Boger swing" (a torture device he invented) during interrogation
that they subsequently died. The court found him guilty of murder
on at least 144 separate occasions, of complicity in the murder of
at least 1,000 prisoners, and of complicity in the joint murder
of at least 10 persons. Boger was sentenced to life imprisonment
and an additional five years of hard labor.}
This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without
reflecting about it, is utterly wrong. The idea that virility
consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a
screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated,
aligns itself all too easily with sadism. Being hard, the vaunted
quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference
toward pain as such.  In this the distinction between one's own
pain and that of another is not so stringently maintained. Whoever
is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well
and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not
allowed to show and had to repress. This mechanism must be made
conscious, just as an education must be promoted that no longer
sets a premium on pain and the ability to endure pain. In other
words: education must take seriously an idea in no wise unfamiliar
to philosophy: that anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is
not repressed, when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the
anxiety that this reality warrants, then precisely by doing that,
much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced anxiety
will probably disappear.

People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make
themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves
as self-determined beings. 
%% \footnote{%
%% 14. First,published version: "objects" instead of "'material. ff
%% }
With this comes the willingness to treat
others as an amorphous mass. I called those who behave in this way
``the manipulative character" in the {\em Authoritarian Personality},
indeed at a time when the diary of H\"oss or the recordings of
Eichmann were not yet known.\footnote{%
See Adorno's interpretation of {\em The ``Manipulative" Type} in {\em The
Authoritarian Personality}, by T.~W.~Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik,
Daniel J.~Levinson, and R.~Nevitt Sanford, in collaboration with
Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow, {\em Studies in
Prejudice}, ed.~Max Horkheimer and Samuel H.~Flowerman (New York:
Harper \& Brothers, 1950). 767--771.}
My descriptions of the manipulative character
date back to the last years of the Second World War. Sometimes
social psychology and sociology are able to construct concepts that
only later are empirically verified. The manipulative character---as
anyone can confirm in the sources available about those Nazi
leaders---is distinguished by a rage for organization, by the
inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a
certain lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism. At any cost he
wants to conduct supposed, even if delusional, {\em Realpolitik}. He does
not for one second think or wish that the world were any different
than it is, he is obsessed by the desire of {\em doing things} [{\em Dinge
zu tun}], indifferent to the content of such action. He makes a cult
of action, activity, of so-called {\em efficiency} as such which reappears
in the advertising image of the active person. If my observations
do not deceive me and if several sociological investigations permit
generalization, then this type has become much more prevalent today
than one would think. What at that time was exemplified in only a
few Nazi monsters could be confirmed today in numerous people, for
instance, in juvenile criminals, gang leaders, and the like, about
whom one reads in the newspapers every day. If I had to reduce this
type of manipulative character to a formula---perhaps one should
not do it, but it could also contribute to understanding---then I
would call it the type of {\em reified consciousness}. People of such a
nature have, as it were, assimilated themselves to things. And then,
when possible, they assimilate others to things. This is conveyed
very precisely in the expression ``to finish off" [{\em
``fertigmachen"}],
just as popular in the world of juvenile rowdies as in the world
of the Nazis. This expression defines people as finished or prepared
things in a doubled sense. According to the insight of Max Horkheimer,
torture is a manipulated and somewhat accelerated adaptation of
people to collectives.\footnote{%
See part 3 of ``Egoism and the Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology
of the Bourgeois Era," (1936) in Max Horkheimer, {\em Between
Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings},
trans.~G.~Frederick Hunter, Matthew S.~Kramer, and John Torpey
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).}
There is something of this in the spirit
of the age, though it has little to do with spirit. I merely cite
the saying of Paul Val\'ery before the last war, that inhumanity has
a great future.\footnote{%
Original reflections on ``L'inhumaine" in Paul Val\'ery, ``Rhumbs"
in {\em OEuvres II}, ed.~Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard 1960),
620--621.}
It is especially difficult to fight against it
because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of
true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness
that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters,
namely schizoids.

In the attempt to prevent the repetition of Auschwitz it seems
essential to me first of all to gain some clarity about the conditions
under which the manipulative character arises, and then, by altering
those conditions, to prevent as far as possible its emergence. I
would like to make a concrete proposal: to study the guilty of
Auschwitz with all the methods available to science, in particular
with long-term psychoanalysis, in order, if possible, to discover
how such a person develops. Those people would be able yet to do
some good, in contradiction to their own personality structure, by
making a contribution so that such things do not happen again. This
could be done only if they would want to collaborate in the
investigation of their own genesis. Certainly it will be difficult
to induce them to speak; by no means should anything related to
their own methods be employed in order to learn how they became
what they are. In the meantime, however, in their collective---precisely
in the feeling that they are all old Nazis together---they feel so
secure that hardly any of them has shown the least sentiment of
guilt. Yet presumably there exist even in them, or at least in many,
psychologically sensitive points conducive to changing this attitude,
for instance, their narcissism, baldly put: their vanity. They might
have a sense of importance if they could speak of themselves freely,
like Eichmann, who apparently recorded whole libraries of tape.
Finally, one can assume that even in these persons, if one digs
deep enough, one will find vestiges of the old authority of conscience,
which today frequently is in a state of dissolution. Once we learn
the external and internal conditions that make them what they
are---if I may assume hypothetically that these conditions can in
fact be brought forth---then it will be possible to draw practical
consequences so that the horror will not happen again. Whether the
attempt helps somewhat or not cannot be known before it is undertaken;
I don't want to overestimate it. One must remember that individuals
cannot be explained automatically by such conditions. Under similar
conditions some people develop in one way and other people completely
differently. Nevertheless it would be worth the effort. Simply
posing such questions already contains a potential for enlightenment.
For this disastrous state of conscious and unconscious thought
includes the erroneous idea that one's own particular way of
being---that one is just so and not otherwise---is nature, an
unalterable given, and not a historical evolution. I mentioned the
concept of reified consciousness. Above all this is a consciousness
blinded to all historical past, all insight into one's own
conditionedness, and posits as absolute what exists contingently.
If this coercive mechanism were once ruptured, then, I think,
something would indeed be gained.

Furthermore, in connection with reified consciousness one should
also observe closely the relationship to technology, and certainly
not only within small groups. The relationship here is just as
ambiguous as in sports, to which it is related, incidentally. On
the one hand, each epoch produces those personalities---types varying
according to their distribution of psychic energy---it needs
societally. A world where technology occupies such a key position
as it does nowadays produces technological people, who are attuned
to technology. This has its good reason: in their own narrow field
they will be less likely to be fooled and that can also affect the
overall situation. On the other hand, there is something exaggerated,
irrational, pathogenic in the present-day relationship to technology.
This is connected with the ``veil of technology." People are inclined
to take technology to be the thing itself, as an end in itself, a
force of its own, and they forget that it is an extension of human
dexterity.  The means---and technology is the epitome of the means
of self-preservation of the human species---are fetishized, because
the ends---a life of human dignity---are concealed and removed from
the consciousness of people.\footnote{%
The ``technological veil," as Adorno and Horkheimer first conceived
it, is the ``excess power which technology as a whole, along with
the capital that stands behind it, exercises over every individual
thing" so that the world of the commodity, manufactured by mass
production and manipulated by mass advertising, comes to be equated
with reality {\em per se}: ``Reality becomes its own ideology through the
spell cast by its faithful duplication. This is how the technological
veil and the myth of the positive is woven. If the real becomes an
image insofar as in its particularity it becomes as equivalent to
the whole as one Ford car to all the others of the same range, then
the image on the other hand turns into immediate reality" (``The
Schema of Mass Culture," (1942), trans.~Nicholas Walker, now in
Adorno, {\em The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture},
ed.~J.~M.~Bernstein [London: Routledge, 1991], here p.~55). Original
in GS 3:301. Adorno used the concept throughout his works, e.g.,
the 1942 text ``Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie," GS 8:390, and the
1968 text ``Sp\"atkapitalismus oder Industrie gesellschaft,"
where he defines it as follows: ``The false identity between the
organization of the world and its inhabitants caused by the total
expansion of technology amounts to upholding the relations of
production, whose beneficiaries in the meantime one searches for
almost as much in vain as the proletariat has become invisible" (GS
8:369).
}
As long as one formulates this as
generally as I just did, it should provide insight. But such a
hypothesis is still much too abstract. It is by no means clear
precisely how the fetishization of technology establishes itself
within the individual psychology of particular people, or where the
threshold lies between a rational relationship to technology and
the over-valuation that finally leads to the point where one who
cleverly devises a train system that brings the victims to Auschwitz
as quickly and smoothly as possible forgets about what happens to
them there. With this type, who tends to fetishize technology, we
are concerned---baldly put, with people who cannot love. This is not
meant to be sentimental or moralistic but rather describes a deficient
libidinal relationship to other persons. Those people are thoroughly
cold; deep within themselves they must deny the possibility of love,
must withdraw their love from other people initially, before it can
even unfold. And whatever of the ability to love somehow survives
in them they must expend on devices.
%% \footnote{
%% 19. Radio version is stronger here: "If I may voice a suspicion here, 
%% concerning how this fetishization
%% of technology comes about, then I would like to say that people who cannot 
%% love, that is those who
%% constitutively, essentially, are cold, must themselves negate even the 
%% possibility of love, that is,
%% withdraw their love of other people from the very outset, because they 
%% cannot love them at all, and at
%% the same time apply to means whatever has managed to survive of their 
%% ability to love. "
%% }
Those prejudiced, authoritarian
characters whom we examined at Berkeley in the {\em Authoritarian
Personality}, provided us with much proof of this. A test subject---the
expression itself already comes from reified consciousness---said
of himself: {\em ``I like nice equipment"} [{\em Ich habe h\"ubsche 
Ausstattungen,
h\"ubsche Apparaturen gern}],\footnote{
Cf.~Adorno's qualitative evaluation of the clinical interview with
``Mack," the exemplary subject prone to fascism as presented in
{\em Authoritarian Personality}, 789; cf.~also pp.~55, 802.}
completely indifferent about what
equipment it was. His love was absorbed by things, machines as such.
The alarming thing about this---alarming, because it can seem so
hopeless to combat it---is that this trend goes hand in hand with
that of the entire civilization. To struggle against it means as
much as to stand against the world spirit; but with this I am only
repeating what I mentioned at the outset as the darkest aspect of
an education opposed to Auschwitz.

As I said, those people are cold in a specific way. Surely a few
words about coldness in general are permitted. If coldness were not
a fundamental trait of anthropology, that is, the constitution of
people as they in fact exist in our society, if people were not
profoundly indifferent toward whatever happens to everyone else
except for a few to whom they are closely bound and, if possible,
by tangible interests, then Auschwitz would not have been possible,
people would not have accepted it. Society in its present form---and
no doubt as it has been for centuries already---is based not, as was
ideologically assumed since Aristotle, on appeal, on attraction,
but rather on the pursuit of one's own interests against the interests
of everyone else.\footnote{
According to Aristotle, ``man is by nature a political animal. And
therefore men, even when they do not require one another's help,
desire to live together," where ``common advantage " and ``friendship
as political justice" hold states together. Cf.~{\em Politics},
1278bl6--25 and {\em Nicomachean Ethics}, 1155a2l--28 and 1160a9--14.}
This has settled into the character of people
to their innermost center. What contradicts my observation, the
herd drive of the so-called {\em lonely crowd} [{\em die einsame
Menge}],\footnote{%
David Riesman, {\em The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American 
Character} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).}
is
a reaction to this process, a banding together of people completely
cold who cannot endure their own coldness and yet cannot change it.
Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved,
because every person cannot love enough. The inability to identify
with others was unquestionably the most important psychological
condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have
occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
What is called fellow traveling was primarily business interest:
one pursues one's own advantage before all else and, simply not to
endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of
the status quo. The silence under the terror was only its 
consequence.\footnote{%
Radio version and first published version continue as follows:
``Similar behavior can be observed in innumerable automobile drivers,
who are ready to run someone over if they have the green light on
their side."}
The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was
the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the
fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers know this,
and they put it to the test ever anew.


Understand me correctly. I do not want to preach love. I consider
it futile to preach it; no one has the right to preach it since the
lack of love, as I have already said, is a lack belonging to {\em all}
people without exception as they exist today. To preach love already
presupposes in those to whom one appeals a character structure
different from the one that needs to be changed. For the people
whom one should love are themselves such that they cannot love, and
therefore in turn are not at all that lovable. One of the greatest
impulses of Christianity, not immediately identical with its dogma,
was to eradicate the coldness that permeates everything. But this
attempt failed; surely because it did not reach into the societal
order that produces and reproduces that coldness. Probably that
warmth among people, which everyone longs for, has never been present
at all, except during short periods and in very small groups, perhaps
even among peaceful savages. The much maligned utopians saw this.
Thus Charles Fourier defined attraction as something that first
must be produced through a humane societal order; he also recognized
that this condition would be possible only when the drives of people
are no longer repressed, but fulfilled and released.
%% \footnote{
%% 24. Charles Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et soci&aire; ou, 
%% Invention du procM6 d"industrie
%% attrayante et naturelle distribu6e en series passionnees (1829). English: 
%% Charles Fourier, The
%% Passions of the Human Soul, and their Influence on Society and 
%% Civilization, trans. Hugh Doherty
%% (London: Hippolythe Bailli6re, 1855).
%% }
If anything
can help against coldness as the condition for disaster, then it
is the insight into the conditions that determine it and the attempt
to combat those conditions, initially in the domain of the individual.
One might think that the less is denied to children, the better
they are treated, the greater would be the chance of success. But
here too illusions threaten. Children who have no idea of the cruelty
and hardness of life are then truly exposed to barbarism when they
must leave their protected environment. Above all, however, it is
impossible to awaken warmth in the parents, who are themselves
products of this society and who bear its marks. The exhortation
to give more warmth to children amounts to pumping out warmth
artificially, thereby negating it. Moreover, love cannot be summoned
in professionally mediated relations like that of teacher and
student, doctor and patient, lawyer and client. Love is something
immediate and in essence contradicts mediated relationships. The
exhortation to love---even in its imperative form, that one {\em
should}
do it---is itself part of the ideology coldness perpetuates. It
bears the compulsive, oppressive quality that counteracts the ability
to love. The first thing therefore is to bring coldness to the
consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it arose.

In conclusion, permit me to say a few words about some possibilities
for making conscious the general subjective mechanisms without which
Auschwitz would hardly have been possible. Knowledge of these
mechanisms is necessary, as is knowledge of the stereotypical defense
mechanisms that block such a consciousness.
%% \footnote{
%% 25. Radio version: "'First of all, it is necessary to learn about the 
%% objective and subjective mechanisms
%% that led to this, as well as to learn about the stereotypical defense 
%% mechanisms that prevent working
%% against such consciousness. "
%% }
Whoever still says
today that it did not happen or was not all that bad already defends
what took place and unquestionably would be prepared to look on or
join in if it happens again. Even if rational enlightenment, as
psychology well knows, does not straightaway eliminate the unconscious
mechanisms, then it reinforces, at least in the preconscious, certain
counter-impulses and helps prepare a climate that does not favor
the uttermost extreme. If the entire cultural consciousness really
became permeated with the idea of the pathogenic character of the
tendencies that came into their own at Auschwitz, then perhaps
people would better control those tendencies.
%% \footnote{%
%% 26. First published version: "then people perhaps will not give vent to 
%% these traits so unrestrainedly."'
%% Radio version: "'When one no longer has the feeling that countless people 
%% are all similarly waiting for
%% outrages to be committed, rather when one knows that they are deformations 
%% and the entire cultural
%% consciousness is permeated with the intimation of the pathogenic character 
%% of these traits, then people
%% will perhaps not give vent to it so unrestrainedly."'
%% }

Furthermore, one should work to raise awareness about the possible
displacement of what broke out in Auschwitz. Tomorrow a group other
than the Jews may come along, say the elderly, who indeed were still
spared in the Third Reich, or the intellectuals, or simply deviant
groups. As I indicated, the climate that most promotes such a
resurrection is the revival of nationalism. It is so evil because,
in the age of international communication and supranational blocs,
nationalism cannot really believe in itself anymore and must
exaggerate itself to the extreme in order to persuade itself and
others that it is still substantial.

Concrete possibilities of resistance nonetheless must be shown. For
instance, one should investigate the history of euthanasia murders,
which in Germany, thanks to the resistance the program met, was not
perpetrated to the full extent planned by the National Socialists.
The resistance was limited to the group concerned: precisely this
is a particularly conspicuous, very common symptom of the universal
coldness. The coldness, however, on top of everything else is
narrow-minded in view of the insatiability that lies within the
principle of the persecutions. Virtually anyone who does not belong
directly to the persecuting group can be overtaken; there is thus
a drastic egoistic interest that can be appealed to.---Finally,
inquiry must be made into the specific, historically objective
conditions of the persecutions. So-called national revival movements
in an age in which nationalism is obsolete are obviously especially
susceptible to sadistic practices.

All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea
that Auschwitz should never happen again. This would be possible
only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any
authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this education
must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about
the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of
political forms. One must submit to critical treatment---to provide
just one model---such a respectable concept as that of ``reason of
state"; in placing the right of the state over that of its members,
the horror is potentially already posited.

Walter Benjamin asked me once in Paris during his emigration, when
I was still returning to Germany sporadically, whether there were
really enough torturers back there to carry out the orders of the
Nazis. There were enough. Nevertheless the question has its profound
legitimacy. Benjamin sensed that the people who {\em do} it, as opposed
to the bureaucratic desktop murderers and ideologues, operate
contrary to their own immediate interests, are murderers of themselves
while they murder others. I fear that the measures of even such an
elaborate education will hardly hinder the renewed growth of desktop
murderers. But that there are people who do it down below, indeed
as servants, through which they perpetuate their own servitude and
degrade themselves, that there are more Bogers and Kaduks: against
this, however, education and enlightenment can still manage a little
something.

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\makeendnotes



\end{document}