'The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again...'
Download the text here: http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/auschwitz/AdornoEducation.pdf
Under the title “Education to Maturity (Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Adorno 1971a), a collection of radio interviews with Hellmut Becker from the years 1959-1969, was published after Theodor Adorno’s death in 1971. In these interviews, Adorno presented his ideas on education in a very accessible form. The aim was to illustrate his ideas about education towards personal and political maturity (Mündigkeit)(Adorno 1971a, 133). The key article of this book, named “Education after Auschwitz” (Adorno 1971b), formulates the essence in the first sentence: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again”. Theodor Adorno describes the characteristics of the perpetrators and followers of the Holocaust as blind submission, the glorification of functions, no interest in self-determination and the treatment of others as anonymous members of a mass (Adorno 1971b, 97). http://infed.org/mobi/theodor-w-adorno-on-education/
Theodor Adorno
The premier
demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen
again. Its
priority before
any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify
it. I cannot understand why it has been given so little concern until now. To justify
it would be monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place. Yet the fact
that one is so barely conscious of this demand and the questions it raises
shows that the monstrosity has not penetrated people’s minds deeply, itself a
symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence as far as peoples’
conscious and unconscious is concerned. Every debate about the ideals of
education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never
again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all
education strives against. One speaks of the threat of a relapse into
barbarism. But it is not a threat—Auschwitz was this relapse,
and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that
relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror.
The societal
pressure still bears down, although the danger remains invisible nowadays. It
drives people toward the unspeakable, which culminated on a world-historical
scale in Auschwitz. Among the insights of Freud
that truly extend even into culture and sociology, one of the most profound
seems to me to be that civilization itself produces anti-civilization and
increasingly reinforces it. His writings Civilization and its Discontents and Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego deserve the widest possible diffusion, especially
in connection with Auschwitz.
If barbarism
itself is inscribed within the principle of civilization, then there is
something desperate in the attempt to rise up against it. Any reflection on the
means to prevent the recurrence of Auschwitz is darkened by
the thought that this desperation must be made conscious to people, lest they
give way to idealistic platitudes. Nevertheless the attempt must be made, even
in the face of the fact that the fundamental structure of society, and thereby
its members who have made it so, are the same today as twenty-five years ago.
Millions of innocent people—to quote or haggle over the numbers is already
inhumane—were systematically murdered. That cannot be dismissed by any living
person as a superficial phenomenon, as an aberration of the course of history
to be disregarded when compared to the great dynamic of progress, of
enlightenment, of the supposed growth of humanitarianism. The fact that it
happened is itself the expression of an extremely powerful societal tendency.
Here I would like to refer to a fact that, very characteristically, seems to be
hardly known in Germany, although it
furnished the material for a best-seller like The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by
Werfel.
Already in the
First World War the Turks—the so-called “Young Turk Movement” under the
leadership of Enver Pascha and Talaat Pascha—murdered well over a
million Armenians. The highest German military and government authorities apparently
were aware of this but kept it strictly secret. Genocide has its roots in this
resurrection of aggressive nationalism that has developed in many countries
since the end of the nineteenth century.
Furthermore,
one cannot dismiss the thought that the invention of the atomic bomb, which can
obliterate hundreds of thousands of people literally in one blow, belongs in the
same historical context as genocide. The rapid population growth of today is
called a population explosion; it seems as though historical destiny responded by
readying counter-explosions, the killing of whole populations. This only to
intimate how much the forces against which one must act are those of the course
of world history.
Since the
possibility of changing the objective—namely societal and political— conditions is
extremely limited today, attempts to work against the repetition of Auschwitz are
necessarily restricted to the subjective dimension. By this I also mean
essentially the psychology of people who do such things. I do not believe it
would help much to appeal to eternal values, at which the very people who are
prone to commit such atrocities would merely shrug their shoulders. I also do
not believe that enlightenment about the positive qualities possessed by
persecuted minorities would be of much use. The roots must be sought in the
persecutors, not in the victims who are murdered under the paltriest of
pretenses. What is necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to
the subject. One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of
such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a
general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so
again.
It is not the victims
who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still
today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate
and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection,
must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves.
The only
education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection.
But since according to the findings of depth psychology, all personalities, even
those who commit atrocities in later life, are formed in early childhood, education
seeking to prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood. I mentioned
Freud’s thesis on discontent in culture. Yet the phenomenon extends even further
than he understood it, above all, because the pressure of civilization he had observed
has in the meantime multiplied to an unbearable degree. At the same time the
explosive tendencies he first drew attention to have assumed a violence he
could hardly have foreseen. The discontent in culture, however, also has its
social dimension, which Freud did not overlook though he did not explore it
concretely. One can speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered
world, of a feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely
woven, netlike environment.
The denser the
weave, the more one wants to escape it, whereas it is precisely its close weave
that prevents any escape. This intensifies the fury against civilization. The
revolt against it is violent and irrational.
A pattern that
has been confirmed throughout the entire history of persecutions is
that the fury
against the weak chooses for its target especially those who are perceived as
societally weak and at the same time—either rightly or wrongly—as happy.
Sociologically, I would even venture to add that our society, while it
integrates itself ever more, at the same time incubates tendencies toward
disintegration. Lying just beneath the surface of an ordered, civilized life,
these tendencies have progressed to an extreme degree. The pressure exerted by
the prevailing universal upon everything particular, upon the individual people
and the individual institutions, has a tendency to destroy the particular and
the individual together with their power of resistance. With the loss of their identity and power of resistance,
people also forfeit those qualities by virtue of which they are able to pit
themselves against what at some moment might lure them again to commit
atrocity. Perhaps they are hardly able to offer resistance when the established
authorities once again give them the order, so long as it is in the name of some
ideal in which they half or not at all believe.
When I speak of
education after Auschwitz, then, I mean
two areas: first children’s education, especially in early childhood; then
general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social
climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible, a climate,
therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively
conscious. Naturally, I cannot presume to sketch out the plan of such an education
even in rough outline. Yet I would like at least to indicate some of its nerve centers.
Often, for instance, in America, the
characteristic German trust in authority has been made responsible for National
Socialism and even for Auschwitz. I consider this
explanation too superficial, although here, as in many other European countries
authoritarian behavior and blind authority persist much more tenaciously than
one would gladly admit under the conditions of a formal democracy. Rather, one
must accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected with the fact
that the old established authorities of
the Kaiserreich decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically
were not yet ready for self-determination.
They proved to be unequal to the
freedom that fell into their laps. For this reason the authoritarian structures
then adopted that destructive and, if I may put it so, insane dimension they
did not have earlier, or at any rate had not revealed. If one considers how
visits of potentates who no longer have any real political function induce
outbreaks of ecstasy in entire populations, then one has good reason to suspect
that the authoritarian potential even now is much stronger than one thinks. I
wish, however, to emphasize especially that the recurrence or non-recurrence of
fascism in its decisive aspect is not a question of psychology, but of society.
I speak so much of the psychological only because the other, more essential
aspects lie so far out of reach of the influence of education, if not of the
intervention of individuals altogether.
Very often
well-meaning people, who don’t want it to happen again, invoke the
concept of
bonds. According to them, the fact that people no longer had any bonds is
responsible for what took place. In fact, the loss of authority, one of the
conditions of the sadistic-authoritarian horror, is connected with this state
of affairs. To normal common sense it is plausible to appeal to bonds that
check the sadistic, destructive, and ruinous impulse with an emphatic “You must
not.” Nevertheless I consider it an illusion to think that the appeal to
bonds—let alone the demand that everyone should again embrace social ties so
that things will look up for the world and for people— would help in any
serious way. One senses very quickly the untruth of bonds that are required
only so that they produce a result—even if it be good—without the bonds being
experienced by people as something substantial in themselves.
It is surprising how
swiftly even the most foolish and naive people react when it comes to detecting
the weaknesses of their betters. The so-called bonds easily become either a
ready badge of shared convictions—one enters into them to prove oneself a good
citizen—or they produce spiteful resentment, psychologically the opposite of
the purpose for which they were drummed up. They amount to heteronomy, a
dependence on rules, on norms that cannot be justified by the individual’s own
reason. What psychology calls the superego, the conscience, is replaced in the
name of bonds by external, unbinding, and interchangeable authorities, as one
could observe quite clearly in Germany after the
collapse of the Third Reich. Yet the very willingness to connive with power and
to submit outwardly to what is stronger, under the guise of a norm, is the
attitude of the tormentors that should not arise again. It is for this reason
that the advocacy of bonds is so fatal. People who adopt them more or less
voluntarily are placed under a kind of permanent compulsion to obey orders. The
single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy,
if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of
self-determination, of not cooperating.
I once had a
very shocking experience: while on a cruise on Lake Constance I was reading a Baden newspaper,
which carried a story about Sartre’s play Morts sans s´epulchre, a play that
depicts the most terrifying things.3 Apparently the play made the critic
uneasy. But he did not explain this discontent as being caused by the horror of
the subject matter, which is the horror of our world. Instead he twisted it so
that, in comparison with a position like that of Sartre, who engages himself
with the horror, we could maintain—almost maintain, I should say—an
appreciation of the higher things: so that we could not acknowledge the
senselessness of the horror. To the point: by means of noble existential cant
the critic wanted to avoid confronting the horror. Herein lies, not least of
all, the danger that the horror might recur, that people refuse to let it draw
near and indeed even rebuke anyone who merely speaks of it, as though the speaker,
if he does not temper things, were the guilty one, and not the perpetrators...
Also see: Raising Children After Auschwitz
Theodor Adorno Archive
“All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology - since ideology always reflects economic coercion - everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same.” Enlightenment as Mass Deception 1944
