Theodor W. Adorno: How do you fight anti-Semitism?

Right-wing networks are planning the deportation of entire sections of the population from Germany and the AfD is predicted to achieve enormous electoral success. Meanwhile, the liberal public looks on, shocked but perplexed. From the left, one can still console oneself with the insight that fascism and regression follow on the heels of capitalism – the system that, as we know, eats itself and makes people in at least perceived existential distress cry out for leaders and homeland out of sheer powerlessness. At the same time, however, leftists come up with the idea, as was recently seen in the video of an event on Martin Luther King Day at New York’s The People’s Forum, of wanting to “finally destroy the State of Israel” and “erase it from history” because this is the current situation “the most important blow against global capital” would be.

So whether the AfD should be banned, civil society should finally stand up against the right, or whether the state should demand a commitment to solidarity with Israel – good advice is expensive at the moment. It seems to be a good time to be able to question the “critical conscience of the young Federal Republic of Germany,” as Theodor W. Adorno announced in an Arte documentary. The Suhrkamp publishing house therefore recently published Adorno’s lecture “To combat anti-Semitism today” as a small volume.

The survival of anti-Semitism

The publisher says the motivation for this publication is that Adorno’s statements, which he presented in the fall of 1962 at a meeting of the German Coordination Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, “have lost none of their relevance.” In the summer of 2019, Suhrkamp presented a lecture by Adorno on “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism” for the first time because, according to the afterword by Volker Weiß, his analysis from 1967 “reads like a commentary on current developments.” The volume made it onto the bestseller lists and the features section was enthusiastic about Adorno’s explanatory power.

What is currently important is not only the (re)increasing anti-Semitism, but also the powerlessness of liberal society against the disruption caused by its own contradictions. The turn to Adorno’s authority is at least one symptom of this helplessness and, as Jan Philipp Reemtsma notes in his afterword to the current publication, the “desire to have something ‘explained’ is the desire for reassurance.” However, in the best sense, Adorno’s lecture has nothing reassuring: First of all, he warns against viewing anti-Semitism as an isolated phenomenon that can easily be eradicated or only affects individuals. Rather, anti-Semitism is the name for that overarching tendency to want to escape powerlessness in the face of a society that is systematically contradictory by projecting all evil onto a specific enemy that needs to be destroyed. There is no anti-Semitism at Regression and fascist inclination are abolished, but it functions as a glue between the different ideologies. It is “a plank in a platform,” as Adorno says, which “proves itself as a means of bringing the otherwise very divergent forces of every right-wing radicalism to a common formula.”

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As such, it does not exist in society as an eliminatory delusion of industrial mass destruction of people. It survived as “secondary anti-Semitism,” as an inherited prejudice structure, as an ideology of defense against guilt and perpetrator-victim reversal, as “crypto-anti-Semitism” in the form of “whispers” and the “rumor about the Jews.” It serves to project, to be able to keep the contradictions away from oneself and to still fantasize oneself as whole and whole where the world is in shambles. Anyone who “turns to the rumor appears from the outset as if they belong to a secret, true and (…) oppressed community” and can feel like a victim and a potential victor at the same time.

The attractiveness of such offers of identification only becomes understandable against the background of an “authority-bound character structure,” about which Adorno’s “Studies on Authoritarian Character” says that it “can never be isolated from the social whole.” Accordingly, anti-Semitism cannot be traced either as a psychological phenomenon or as a mere misanthropic attitude, but, strictly speaking, only with a comprehensive social theory. For the »elements of one In total-Theory of Anti-Semitism”, Adorno therefore refers to the “Dialectics of Enlightenment”.

Education for maturity

This explicitly social-theoretical version of anti-Semitism obviously has consequences for combating it. As Reemtsma points out, “Adorno tells those who listen to him that the question of combating anti-Semitism is not one to which there are pedagogical answers.” Adorno nevertheless distinguishes between some acute and long-term measures. In the long term, it must be a matter of “preventing, as far as possible, the development of something like an authority-bound character in the educational sphere (…). Adorno sees the “manipulative character” as particularly virulent here, “those pathetically cold, disconnected, mechanically administrative types” who are shaped by early childhood experiences of coldness and lack of attention. On the other hand, he recommends paying attention in kindergarten, influencing parents and intercepting that “shock moment” when starting school, where “for the first time you enter a secondary group that is strange and cold towards you.”

More interesting than the necessarily abstract pedagogical suggestions are Adorno’s comments on the attitude with which anti-Semites should be dealt with acutely. He repeatedly emphasizes that you shouldn’t encounter them on the terrain they drag you into: when anti-Semites want to discuss the exact number of murdered Jews and thus ultimately put the Holocaust into perspective, when you whisper that there must be every prejudice If there is any truth to it and thus blame Jewish people for their own destruction, or if they point out that Jews really have a lot to do with financial transactions and thus personalize their hatred of the commodity-based society – there is always a need for unyielding confrontation social enlightenment. Adorno insists “that one can only speak effectively against anti-Semitism if one tells the truth… instead of limiting oneself to cheap refutations.” Conversely, this means: “Anyone who adopts an ambiguous attitude to education cannot fight anti-Semitism.”

Adorno describes the deeper connection by saying that anti-Semitism is directed against the Enlightenment itself, against intellect and abstraction. He is “a mass medium; in the sense that it builds on unconscious instinctual impulses, conflicts, inclinations, tendencies, which it reinforces and manipulates instead of raising them to consciousness and clarifying them.” According to its structure, anti-Semitism corresponds to the “ontology of advertising”, i.e. exactly the falsehood against which it is supposedly intended to rebel. One should therefore not approach it in the form of advertising, with stereotypical arguments or even with maudlin philo-Semitic clichés.

Anti-Semites, in short, should not be convinced, but should be fought. Since it is part of the basic structure of anti-Semites to have insulated themselves from experience and to be fundamentally “unresponsive,” “the means of power that are actually available must be used without sentimentality.” After all, authority is the only thing that impresses them. With regard to current discussions about bans on demonstrations or even party bans, this is at least a consistent stance.

Antidote enlightenment

Above all, however, Adorno shows the biggest problem with the fight today: In the post-truth age, with theorizing that sees the indeterminacy of the social as the ultimate wisdom, truth has become a contested or even impossible concept. To be honest, this is an indication of how criticism of the Enlightenment and anti-Semitic projections go together in left-wing worldviews. Instead of a real analysis, people today prefer to argue about definitions of anti-Semitism, “to concentrate on some facts and data that are not supposed to be absolutely certain” and to relativize anti-Semitism to the point of reversing guilt.

The fight against anti-Semitism and fascist tendencies has no chance if the society we are dealing with is not penetrated, analyzed and therefore enlightened to its material foundations. That would be the condition for changing those circumstances so that people can “be different without fear,” as Adorno says elsewhere. His spoken word may be so impressive because everything in it is based on a life’s work of social theoretical analysis. Invoking this as an authority is a poor substitute for doing such an analysis for the present – ​​and is therefore part of the problem. Adorno himself prefaces his lecture with skepticism: “He himself sees the fact that there is a tendency everywhere to record free speech (…) on tape and then distribute it as a symptom of the behavior of the administered world.”

Theodor W. Adorno: Combating anti-Semitism today. Suhrkamp, ​​87 pages, €10.

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