582 Notes to pp. 382–387
66 Adorno, ‘Schuld und Abwehr’, GS, vol. 9.2, p. 150.
67 Ibid., pp. 155 and 158.
68 Ibid., p. 184.
69 Ibid., p. 294f.
70 Ibid., p. 312.
71 Adorno to Böhm, 14 January 1957, Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik,
NaS, vol. 7, p. 367.
72 Hofstätter, ‘Zum “Gruppenexperiment” von Pollock’, p. 103.
73 See König, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 448.
74 Adorno, ‘Hofstätter-Replik’, GS, vol. 9.2, p. 392f.
75 This was a talk Adorno gave at the First European Conference on Educa-
tion, which took place at Wiesbaden, 30 October–30 November 1962.
76 Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, Critical Models, p. 90.
77 Unknown vandals had defaced the monument for the victims of National
Socialism and also the synagogue in Cologne with swastikas and anti-
Semitic slogans. (See Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und
Studentenbewegung, vol. 1, p. 157.) Right-wing radicals carried out similar
anti-Semitic daubings and there was a wave of graveyard desecrations.
Against this background, Horkheimer wrote to Wolf Jost Siedler, the
editor of the culture section of Der Tagesspiegel, who had invited him
to list the most significant cultural events since 1945: ‘I am astonished
that life can go on so merrily after all the horrors that have taken place.
Wherever something of the insanity of this situation makes itself felt in
the despairing works of avant-garde art, I have felt some sort of affinity’
(Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 456).
78 The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich regarded this lack of moral
sensitivity as part of a general ‘inability to mourn’. The principal thesis
of his psycho-social analysis in the book he wrote with this title was ‘that
there is a cause-and-effect relation between the political and social
immobilism and provincialism that prevails in the Federal Republic and
the obstinate resistance to memories, and in particular the refusal to share
feelings towards events of the past that are currently being denied’
(Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, p. 9).
79 See Thorsten Bonacker, ‘Theodor W. Adorno – Die Zukunft des Erinnerns’,
p. 173ff.; Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus,
p. 231ff.; Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte, p. 81ff.
80 Adorno, Critical Models, p. 93.
81 Ibid., p. 98. See also Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, Critical Models,
p. 191ff.
82 The idea that parliamentary democracy threatened to turn into pseudo-
democracy because the political form assumed by the sovereignty of the
people was in contradiction with the social and economic system was
a fear that inspired many of the books on politics in the mid-1960s. See
Schäfer and Nedelmann (eds), Der CDU-Staat; Agnoli and Brückner, Die
Transformation der Demokratie.
83 Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, Critical Models, p. 98f.
84 Ibid., p. 102.
85 Ibid., p. 103.
86 See Adorno, ‘Critique’, Critical Models, p. 281f. On the question, not
discussed here, of the normative content of democratic societies and the