Grand Hotel Abyss- last passages

By Stuart Jeffries

Adorno chose capitalist West Germany over Marxist East Germany when he returned from exile. So did Horkheimer when he finally arrived in Frankfurt. “We are unable to see anything in the practice of military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression and, in what people over there are accustomed to call “ideology”, we see only what was originally intended by that word: the lie that justifies an untrue condition of society', wrote Adorno.‘ The bigger question was why Adorno as well as Horkheimer and Pollock returned to Europe at all. Didn’t they realise that Europe was no longer the centre of western civilisation? ‘America is no longer the raw and unformed land of promise from which men of superior gifts like James, Santayana and Eliot departed, seeking in Europe what they found lacking in America’, wrote the art critic Harold Rosenberg in the Partisan Review in 1940, claiming that America’s century-long cultural dependence on Europe was over. "The wheel has come full circle and now America has become the protector of Western civilisation, at least in a military and economic sense" Since the war, that nascent swagger had developed and something new asserted itself, America’s proud insistence on its cultural virility over European decadence.

When, for instance, the young Saul Bellow visited Paris in 1948, the year before Adorno’s visit, the young American novelist felt like Dostoevsky a century earlier. ‘I, too, was a foreigner and a barbarian from a vast and backward land’, Bellow wrote. Or at least he was treated as such. He went home to write his 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, which begins: ‘I am an American, Chicago born’ as if in self-assertive rebuke to culturally dead old Europe. Europeans had no business in taking American civilisation to be an oxymoron when theirs had revealed its dark side during the Third Reich.

Adorno was travelling into the centre of that barbarism, into the heart of European darkness, only to find that, five years after the war had ended, his countrymen were carrying on as though the Third Reich had never happened. He didn’t deny feeling homesick, but he stressed another factor -the German language, which, he suggested in an essay called ‘On the Question “What is German?”’, had a ‘special affinity with philosophy: and was able ‘to express something in the phenomena that is not exhausted in their mere thus-ness, their positivity and givenness’." A bracing idea as though, for example English speakers were doomed to the philosophies he and the Frankfurt School excoriated by dint of the structure of their language; as if in the rubble of Germany, there was a priceless jewel that could be rescued,

Adorno was hardly eulogising German culture at this, to put it mildly, unpropitious moment in history. In fact, such was his ambivalent sense of belonging to a German tradition, that in the same paper he was able to reflect that the idea of national identity was a product of the reified thinking that critical theory opposed. ‘The fabrication of national collectivities, however the common practice in the abominable jargon of war which speaks of the Russian, the American and certainly also of the German is the mark of a reified consciousness hardly capable of experience. Such fabrication remains precisely within those stereotypes which it is the task of thinking to dissolve'. But here’s the paradox: if there was thinking to be done in order to dissolve reified consciousness, that thinking was best done perhaps could only be done in Adorno’s view in German. But such thinking in German, and the critical philosophical heritage in which Adorno, for all his exile wanderings, felt at home was now viewed with suspicion. Jurgen Habermas, the former Hitler Youth who in a few years would become Adorno’s first research assistant, would later say that he could only identify his own intellectual traditions at a distance which enabled him to ‘continue them in a self-critical spirit with the scepticism and the clear-sightedness of the man who has already once been fooled’.“

Adorno was returning to a city from which nearly everything had been erased. German troops had destroyed all but one of the bridges across the river Main in the last days of the war. Allied bombings had destroyed 177,000 houses, leaving only 45,000 still standing in 1945. One ghostly memory of his family remained: on the parquet floor of the only habitable room left in his father‘s bombed-out house on Seeheim Street, he could discern the imprints left by his mother’s piano. It was from this city that he had been forced to flee into exile, leaving behind his ageing parents who had been roughed up and jailed by the Nazis and compelled to sell their properties at well below market rate, before scrambling into exile so as not to be murdered in the death camps.

and

At a symposium of psychoanalysts and sociologists in San Francisco in 1944, before he returned to Europe, Adorno had accounted for the success of fascist propaganda by saying that ‘it simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today’s standardised mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity’.” There were similarities, he argued, between Nazi propaganda and the radio broadcasts by Californian preachers whom he called ‘would-be Hitlers’. Both tried to gain authority over their audiences by a two-stage rhetorical process first, professing their own weakness and thus identifying with the weak recipients of that message; second, stressing their status as one of the chosen few whom their listeners could join if they would only submit to their authority. To be a successful Fuhrer or an effective charismatic radio preacher, Adorno argued, one must be what he called the ‘great little man’, enough like the follower to appeal to those elements of narcissism which remain attached to the follower’s own ego, and yet also embody their collective hopes and even virtues. Hitler’s genius, Adorno suggested, was that he ‘posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber’.This symposium led to Adorno’s work in the development of what became known as the Californian F-scale, a personality test he

developed in 1947 with researchers working at the University of California at Berkeley. that was published in 1950 in a book called The Authoritarian Personality in the Studies in Prejudice series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. F stands for fascist, and the Idea marked from the hypothesis Erich Fromm had similarly sought to test in his study of German workers nearly two decades earlier, that to Investigate the character types most likely to succumb to fascism. researchers would have to penetrate the manifest dimensions of personality to get to the latent structures beneath. Like Fromm’s study. the Berkeley project involved a Freudian developmental model: the authoritarian personality was unable to confront their harsh and punitive parents, and instead identified with authority figures. More dubiously, the authoritarian personality was linked to the suppressed homosexuality taken to be common to sadomasochists. ‘The forbidden action which is converted into aggression is generally homosexual in nature’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. ‘Through fear of castration, obedience to the father is taken to the extreme of an anticipation of castration in conscious emotional approximation to the nature of a small girl, and actual hatred to the father is suppressed.’

But while Fromm’s worker study was initiated to investigate the likely strength of German workers in resisting fascism and their amenability to revolutionary socialist ideas, the Berkeley study investigated the personality types that were likely to succumb to anti-democratic ideas and those that were not. One reason for this change was that, as we have seen, while in America the Institute dared not use the M word (Marxism) in its essays or research, for fear of alienating potential sponsors. As a result, ironically, the values and behaviours that had been associated with successful revolutionary Marxism in Fromm’s study were now associated with support for democracy in the Berkeley study.

But there is more to this shift in taxonomy than self-censorship the disappearance of the language of Marxism from the Institute indicated the Frankfurt School’s declining faith in the proletariat and in revolution. Lukécs had written in History and Class Consciousness: ‘The fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat i.e on its class consciousness.‘ The Frankfurt School didn’t believe in revolution any more, precisely because the proletariat was unlikely to come to ideological maturity. As Fromm put it in his 1956 book The Sane Society: ”the world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones -and the eternally disappointed ones.“ Ideological maturity was unlikely in such a world. The manipulative control of the masses always brings about a regressive formation of humanity, wrote Adorno in a 1950 letter to Thomas Mann. He was writing about Hitler’s impact, but the Frankfurt School’s growing belief was that such control and regression were features of the societies that had only recently allied against Hitler.

The F-scale was devised as part of a research project to explore what Adorno and his team called a ‘new anthropological type’, the authoritarian personality. It involved a set of questions designed to measure fascist potential, by means of testing nine personality variables as set out in The Authoritarian Personality, which Adorno described as follows:

Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealised moral authorities of the ingroup. Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. Power and ‘Toughness’: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identiflcation with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalised attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalised hostility, vilification of the human. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’.”

The questionnaires invited respondents to state the extent to which they agreed with such statements as: 

Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.

_ What this country needs most, more than laws and political programs. is a few courageous, tireless, devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith.

_ What the youth needs most is strict discipline, rugged determination, and the will to work and flght for family and country.

_ There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.

_ Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped, or worse.

The true American way of life is disappearing so fast that force may be necessary to preserve it.39

Respondents were allowed to make graduated agreement or disagreement with these and other statements and the responses entered on a scale that went from +3 to -3. From the 2,099 people all white, gentile, middle-class Americans who filled in the questionnaires, those who scored high or low on the F-scale were invited to take part in longer evaluative interviews. Adorno used information from these interviews to draw up a list of six types of authoritarian personality, and five types of non-authoritarian personality.

Authoritarian personality types included the ‘tough guy’ (whose ‘repressed id tendencies gain the upper hand, but in a stunted form’ according to Adorno) and the ‘crank’ and ‘manipulative’ types (both of whom, Adorno thought, ‘seem to have resolved the Oedipus complex through a narcissistic withdrawal into their inner selves’). Adorno also devised a typology for respondents who scored low on the F-scale. Non-fascist types included the ‘protesting’ type (whose ‘undercurrent of hostility against the father, leads to the conscientious rejection of heteronomous authority instead of its acceptance. The decisive feature is opposition to whatever appears to be tyranny’) and the ‘genuine liberal’ (who ‘may be conceived in terms of that balance between superego, ego, and id which Freud deemed ideal)

Adorno didn’t specify which type he belonged to, but the safe money says he would have described himself as a genuine liberal."
When The Authoritarian Personality was published in 1950, the F-scale was criticised for many things, not least for its assumption that conservatism and authoritarianism were related. It was also attacked because clever people could second guess the significance of the questions, react in a more suitable manner and skew the results. The University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils wondered why authoritarianism was linked to fascism rather than communism in Adorno and his team’s work. Would a C-scale be very different from an F-scale? Surely in 1950 the real opposition was between liberal democracies and totalitarianism, be that fascist or communist? The Cold War had begun and so what was needed was not to understand the personality types that supported Hitler, but the personality types that supported Stalin and his successors and, quite possibly, to weed out those with communistic tendencies. Retooled, the F-scale could become the R-scale (R standing for Red); and another scale could be calibrated to investigate the desirable types who would resist the Red menace. The idea may have been to pit the unfortunate sadomasochistic hordes of the Soviet bloc against the free, virile individual personality types who thrived in the free west, but Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School refused to contrast Soviet totalitarianism with the individualist non-ideological libertarian west. They saw domination everywhere -in fascist, socialist and liberal capitalist polities.

Indeed, in The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno went so far as to suggest that the rhetoric of individualism, deployed during the Cold War against Soviet collectivism, was itself a tool of domination. ‘lndividualism, opposed to inhuman pigeonholing, may ultimately become a mere ideological veil in a society which actually is inhuman and whose intrinsic tendency towards the “subsumption” of everything shows itself by the classification of people themselves? Adorno bracingly argued that humans were little more than instances of types in class-ridden society. ‘In other words', he wrote, ‘large numbers of people are no longer, or rather never were, “individuals” in the sense of traditional nineteenth-century philosophy. . . (O) verpowering social processes . . . leave to the “individual” but little freedom for action and true individuation.