384 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
a general tendency to conform. The Group Experiment finally appeared
in book form in 1955. Adorno hoped that its findings would have positive
effects and he believed that the future of German democracy depended
on the nation’s willingness to face up to its past. All the greater was his
disappointment, indeed indignation, when a negative review appeared
in René König’s journal, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie. The review was written by the Hamburg social psy-
chologist Peter R. Hofstätter, and he accused the author of ‘Guilt and
Defensiveness’ of having interpretated the records of the group discus-
sion in a tendentious fashion. Adorno discussed his review in a letter to
Franz Böhm, the former rector of Frankfurt University, in January 1957:
‘It goes without saying that the entire Hofstätter question has to be
seen in a much larger context.... It would be necessary to write some-
thing about the regressive tendency in the social sciences in Germany.
This consists in the way that so-called factual research is increasingly
being used as a pretext not to recognize or to talk about the things that
hurt. There seems to be a tacit agreement about this among people like
Hofstätter, Schelsky, Wurzbacher and a whole host of others, and
attacks like the one by Hofstätter are the symptom of a renewed wish to
take science in hand once again under the pretext of greater scientific
precision.’^71 In his review, Hofstätter had objected that the true aim of
the analysis was not to establish the facts but to ‘unmask’ and ‘accuse’.
What the Frankfurt authors wanted was to accuse an entire nation and
force it ‘to repent’. ‘But how far can we assume that the majority of the
members of a “nation” can be capable of collective self-accusation for
years on end? I see scarcely any possibility of a single individual being
able to assume the responsibility for the horrors of Auschwitz.’^72 Adorno
was given the option of publishing a reply to Hofstätter in the same
issue of the journal. René König had invited him to do so having taken
a positive view of the Group Experiment and having told Adorno as
early as May 1954 that he was impressed by both the method and the
contents of the study.^73 In his response Adorno did not mince words. To
identify defects in society that are also to be found in people’s heads
and that need to be changed by enlightenment was not a matter of
making accusations. Hofstätter’s allegation of one-sidedness, in con-
trast, was nothing but ‘an appeal to collective narcissism’. As for his
claim that it is too much to expect one individual to come to terms with
the entire guilt of the past, Adorno countered with the argument that ‘it
was the victims who were forced to bear the burden of the horrors of
Auschwitz, not the people who did not want to know about it, to their
own cost and to the cost of their nation. “The question of guilt was a
matter of desperation” for the victims, not for the survivors. It takes
some nerve to drown this distinction in a general sea of despair and it
is not for nothing that this concept has become so popular. But in the
house of the hangman you should not speak of the rope; otherwise, you
will open yourself to the suspicion that you are a rancorous person.’^74