With his Back to the Wall 451‘Vietnam: Analysis of an Example’. Jürgen Habermas also took part
as the leader of a discussion group in the mass meeting against the
emergency laws that took place at the end of October 1966. The event
organized in May 1968, ‘Democracy in a State of Emergency’, took
place in the large auditorium of Hessen Radio. Adorno, who had helped
to organize it, was present and made a short speech. It is not necessary,
he said, ‘to be filled with political hysteria in order to be afraid of what
is appearing on the horizon’. He recalled the arrest of the editor in chief
of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel on an unwarranted charge of high
treason, as well as the cynical attitude of leading politicians towards the
Basic Law. Given the background of a still unstable democratic order in
Germany, it was necessary to protest as vigorously as possible against
the emergency laws on the grounds that they were a legal device to
undermine democracy.^10
Adorno left no one in any doubt about his solidarity with the opposi-
tion as far as the emergency laws were concerned. But it was a different
story when it came to the anti-Americanism that had begun to spread in
Germany among the growing number of opponents of the war inVietnam
from the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the suppression
of the race riots and the subsequent murder of Martin Luther King.
Adorno felt in sympathy with Horkheimer, who had demonstratively
proclaimed his pro-American views during the German-American Week
in Frankfurt in May 1967.^11 In speeches and discussions, Horkheimer
stressed that he had close ties to American democracy. It was a land in
which those persecuted by the National Socialist regime had once found
refuge. He could accept the critical attitude of intellectuals towards US
policy in Vietnam, but he believed that the American war was also a
defence of the democratic constitution. To that extent, the Americans
deserved our gratitude, not least because they had liberated Germany
and Europe from the most terrible totalitarian terrorism.^12 In contrast,
in his lectures on Metaphysics in summer 1965, Adorno had described
the war in Vietnam as proof of the continued existence of the ‘world of
torture’ that had begun in Auschwitz.^13
A final test of the state of West German democracy was provided by
the extraordinary security measures taken by the German authorities.
These included closing the motorways and the Rhine and the sur-
veillance of the Iranians living in the Federal Republic before the state
visit of the shah of Persia in summer 1967. The shah’s regime had total-
itarian features such as the use of the secret service to spy on Iranian
students and his use of torture against members of the opposition.
It was politically committed students who took the lead in the protests.
In a number of large towns, thousands of students and schoolchildren
followed their call to take part in the demonstrations. In Berlin the
demonstration took place on 2 June in front of the Schoeneberger Town
Hall and the Deutsche Oper. In the following scuffles with the police,
who violently pursued the fleeing demonstrators, a student, Benno