414 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
with its programme based on freedom, security and German sover-
eignty, so much so that Konrad Adenauer was elected federal chancel-
lor four times in succession from 1949. As early as 1953, the CDU/CSU
had emerged the winner from the elections, thanks to the impact of the
violent crushing of the uprising against the GDR government in Berlin.
And in September 1957, the year of the establishment of the European
Economic Community, Adenauer, who had campaigned with the slogan
‘No experiments’, obtained an absolute majority of votes as well as
parliamentary seats. The Paris treaties of 1955 provided for the creation
of a new Federal German army, and during this same period there was
a growing political debate in Germany about whether this army should
be equipped with tactical nuclear weapons. As a warning against under-
estimating the lethal capacities of such weapons, eighteen leading scien-
tists declared their opposition to arming the Bundeswehr with a nuclear
capability. In their protest, the ‘Göttingen Eighteen’ pointed out that
each of the nuclear weapons in question would have the destructive
force of the Hiroshima bomb, and they called for a general renunciation
of nuclear weapons. A group of well-known intellectuals came out in
support of them. Like Horkheimer, Adorno tended to hold back from
making political statements in public – as far as was possible. Neither
director of the institute signed the German Manifesto of January 1955
against rearmament and in favour of reunification that was decided on
in St Paul’s Church by the assembled protesters. Adorno commentedon
this issue in a note he planned to include in a second volume of aphor-
isms with the title Graeculus.^11 In answer to the question whether one
ought ever to make one’s political opinions known publicly by signing
manifestos, he wrote: ‘It is difficult even to sign appeals with which
one sympathizes, because in their inevitable desire to have a political
impact, they always contain an element of untruth or presuppose a
knowledge of specific circumstances.. ..The absence of commitment is
not necessarily a moral defect; it can itself be moral, since it means
insisting on the autonomy of one’s own point of view.’^12
Nevertheless, on balance both Adorno and Horkheimer were op-
posed to the dynamics of the arms race that followed from the creation
of hostile blocs.^13 But they did not share the fear that was widespread in
intellectual circles of the risks posed by a new German army. Hence
they had no scruples about carrying out a study in conjunction with the
German Defence Ministry. The aim of the study was to discover how
to select volunteers for the future German army on the basis of their
democratic attitudes.^14 Younger institute members were opposed to this
project, and in much the same way they were not enthusiastic about the
‘political attitudes’ of the directors towards such matters as the war in
Algeria or the rearmament question. Jürgen Habermas recollects, for
example, that Horkheimer’s rather timorous reserve was much criti-
cized: ‘His public demeanour and his policy for the institute too seemed
to us to be almost the expression of an opportunist conformity which