“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 and increasingly reinforces anti-civilization.”
Late last year, I wrote an article for this review about the Frankfurt School legacy, Auschwitz, and Gaza. Its wager was a thought experiment: if the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno were still alive, what would he make of Israel’s destruction of Gaza after 7 October, and the German government’s support of it?
I was led to this question by re-reading his classic essay from 1966, “Education after Auschwitz,” after spending the summer months of 2025 in Frankfurt, where he lived and taught after his return from exile. In the essay, Adorno excoriated Staatsräson, bourgeois coldness (about which Henrike Kohpeiß has written, martial masculinity, and the mania for order, organization and obedience—in other words, the authoritarian personality—as elements of the West German society that he thought would once again incline its citizens to fascism. Hence my question about “Education after Gaza.”
The essay elicited responses from the historians Philipp Lenhard (also published by Berlin Review) and Volker Weiss.1Their reaction to my wager about Adorno and his arguments, I think, demonstrates a point I made almost five years earlier: that members of the German political, media, and academic classes have developed a “catechism”—a state ideology—about Holocaust memory and the “protection of Jewish life” in Germany and in Israel that they attempt to impose on a skeptical or indifferent population. I respond to them and other managers of the catechism, like the journalists Jürgen Kaube and Katja Iken, in the following.
Adorno and Historical Catastrophe
The problem for these managers in posing the question of “Education after Gaza” is daring to associate the Israeli destruction of the Strip with Auschwitz. Lenhard identifies the stakes: “If Gaza is similar to Auschwitz, then the IDF are similar to the SS.”1 At issue is what Adorno meant when he wrote his famous maxim about “never again”: