Adorno’s Years in California 309to reorientate our thinking about history and to treat it as a history of
catastrophe. Auschwitz was ‘the infernal machine that is history’.^171 And,
confronted with the extermination camps, it is not possible, he thought,
to go on thinking as before, and everything that has been thought
must now be questioned: ‘Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy
with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase
in horror, before which one can preserve tranquillity of mind. Certainly,
the unprecedented torture and humiliation of those abducted in cattle-
trucks does shed a deathly livid light on the most distant past.’^172 In
Part II of Minima Moralia, which Adorno was engaged in writing during
the months in which he tried to grasp the scale of the collective guilt of
the Germans, he noted that their crimes ‘seemed to have been committed
rather as measures of alienated terrorization’. Their horrific nature passes
human understanding. ‘Nevertheless, a consciousness that wishes to
withstand the unspeakable finds itself again and again thrown back on
the attempt to understand, if it is not to succumb subjectively to the
madness that prevails objectively.’^173 The total dehumanization of human
beings in the extermination camps was the extreme expression of a
society that turned all living beings into things. All actual or imagined
differences were regarded as ‘stigmas’ of otherness and to be eradicated.
The integral, increasingly societalized society generates a will to destroy
from within itself. ‘The technique of the concentration camp is to make
the prisoners resemble their guards, the murdered, murderers. The racial
difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely,
if only in the sense that nothing that is different survives.’^174
How did Adorno react to the news of Hitler’s suicide and the
destruction of Germany, which he had heard about over the radio, from
the newspapers and on the newsreels? As early as 1 May, he wrote to
his parents expressing the hope that the news about the end of the
dictatorship was true, and, in words that echoed what he was writing in
his ‘Reflections from Damaged Life’, he added that ‘part of the horror
of the world is that truth sounds like lying and lying like the truth.’^175
Hitler’s death was the occasion for joy since he was the most ‘appalling
disaster’ that had ever occurred in history. The German nation’s ‘neck
had been broken so that, as a subject, it vanishes from history’. In the
same letter he also expressed his fear that the elimination of the Nazis
did not necessarily imply the disappearance of the Nazi principle from
the world. Faced with the tendency of history, his hopes for the future
confined themselves to ‘pauses for breath and bolt-holes’.^176 In a letter
to Horkheimer a few days later, in which he summarized his view of the
world situation, he remarked that the Hitler regime that had just come
to an end had been ‘the direct cause of all external developments in our
lives during the last twelve years’. The expectation that ‘things would
change has been one of the crucial factors that kept us alive, while on
the other hand the fact that both our lives have come together in one
shared life is something that cannot be separated from fascism.’ Over