Adorno

Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 383

noble intentions, but the transcripts also contained clear evidence of
racist, nationalist and anti-Semitic attitudes. As far as anti-Semitism was
concerned, however, Adorno’s interpretation revealed the powerful feel-
ings of ambivalence that came together to form a specific syndrome:

Ambivalent people do not combine anti-Semitism and anti-

democratic attitudes, but appeal to democracy in order to argue

against the Jews without asking whether their principle of exclud-

ing the Jews from the universe of citizens does not constitute

a fundamental breach of the democratic principle to which they

appeal. Their reaction is: we have nothing against the Jews, we

have no wish to persecute them, but they should not do things

that conflict with an interest – wholly undefined and arbitrarily

selected – of the nation. In particular, they should not have an

over-representative share of highly paid and influential jobs. This

kind of thinking... provides a way out for people caught in a con-

flict between bad conscience and defensiveness. They can appear

to themselves as human, open-minded and unprejudiced, and

at the same time they can in practice reconcile any anti-Semitic

measure with their own convictions by treating it as an act of

compensatory justice, as long as legality is more or less preserved.^69

At the end of his content analysis, Adorno discussed a group of more
open-minded people who were in a position to deal with guilt because
they were not the prisoners of stereotyped thinking. ‘It is the people
who do not repress their consciousness of guilt and have no desperate
need to adopt defensive attitudes who are free to speak the truth that
not all Germans are anti-Semites.’^70
A brief glance at the quantitative distribution with which Adorno
ended his monograph shows very clearly that, on the guilt question in
particular, the number of the open-minded was very much smaller than
those who were ambivalent or who made outright negative statements.
Roughly one half of the people who spoke up in the discussions re-
jected any question of their own guilt in the crimes committed during
the Hitler dictatorship. This corresponded to their predominantly negat-
ive view of the West and their ambivalent attitude towards the young
German democracy, which at the time was accepted wholeheartedly
only by a minority – a finding that gave few grounds for optimism about
the future of a democratic society in Germany.
Even if people were shocked to learn about the atrocities committed
in the concentration camps, it was to be hoped that the Germans would
recognize their guilt for the murder of six million Jews and realize the
dangers of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. However, Adorno’s gen-
eral diagnosis about the state of public opinion and the mentality of his
fellow citizens was more than sceptical. What he diagnosed, in addition
to the persistence of authoritarian attitudes, was a loss of autonomy and