Notes to pp. 306–310 561156 Ibid., p. 54.
157 Ibid., p. 25.
158 Ibid., p. 39.
159 Ibid., p. 40.
160 Ibid., p. 48.
161 Ibid., p. 27.
162 Ibid., p. 34 (translation altered).
163 ‘O avalanche, will you take me with you when you fall?’ This was the last
line of Le goût du néant (The Longing for Nothingness), from Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal.
164 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 164f.
165 Ibid., p. 165.
166 Ibid., p. 166.
167 Ibid., p. 167f.
168 Ibid., p. 170.
169 Ibid., p. 172.
170 See Raoul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, p. 811ff.;
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, p. 769ff.
171 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 234.
172 Ibid.
173 Ibid., p. 103.
174 Ibid. On the role of Auschwitz in Adorno’s diagnosis of the contemporary
world, see Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus.
175 In Minima Moralia, he wrote: ‘Things have come to a pass where lying
sounds like truth, truth like lying.... Every horror necessarily becomes in
the enlightened world, a horrific fairy-tale. For the untruth of truth has a
core which finds an avid response in the unconscious’ (p. 108).
176 Letter to his parents, 1 May 1945, Briefe an die Eltern 1939–1951, p. 309ff.
177 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 17, p. 634.
178 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 106f.
179 The view that fascist tendencies would gain the upper hand in American
politics and society was by no means uncommon among intellectuals there,
particularly among some groups of refugees. Such a trend was seen as a
consequence of the brutality of the war with Japan and the collapse of the
wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, as well as the intensification of
the Cold War. These developments came to the surface after the death
of President Roosevelt in April 1945, when the wartime understanding
with the USSR was abandoned and was replaced by the anti-communist
climate which became dominant under the presidency of Harry S. Truman.
On the domestic scene a move in the direction of fascism became evident
in McCarthyism and the actions of the Committee on Un-American
Activities. Thomas Mann was aware of these aspirations to ‘the rule of
fascist violence’. In his diary he noted: ‘The confrontation with Russia
seems to lead inexorably towards fascism’ (Mann, Tagebücher 1946–1948,
pp. 162 and 165). Cf. Jost Hermand and Wigand Lange, ‘Wollt Ihr Thomas
Mann wiederhaben?’, p. 11ff.
180 When Horkheimer’s father had died in January 1945 at the age of eighty-
five, Adorno wrote to his friend: ‘Everything to do with the lives of our
parents has something indescribably sad about it, as well as something
conciliatory...I believe that no one can understand better than I what it