Re: Deutschland Schon Wieder

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Johannes Schneider wrote:

> since you are an expert on Adorno, could you please sum up Adornos position
> here or at least post a quote of the relevant passage.

Adorno's passage is as follows:

Aphorism 69: "Little people." They who deny objective historical forces
find it all too easy to argue that the course of the war could have been
different. Actually the Germans should have won: that they failed was the
fault of the Fuehrer's stupidity. But the decisive "stupidities" of
Hitler, his refusal in the middle of the conflict to wage war on England,
his attack on Russia and America, have their precise social meaning, which
developed irresistibly from each seemingly reasonable step to the next
until the catastrophe. Even if it were, strictly speaking, stupidity, this
remains historically determinable: stupidity is above all no natural
quality, but something socially produced and socially amplified. The
ruling German cliques rushed towards war, because they were excluded from
the leading imperialist positions of power. In this exclusion however lay
also the reason for that provincialism, rusticity and self-deception,
which made the politics of Hitler and Ribbentrop uncompetitive and their
war a gamble. That they were so badly informed about the balance between
the general economic interests and specifically British interests of the
Tories and the strength of the Red Army as their own masses behind the
cordon of the Third Reich, is not to be separated from the historical
constitution of National Socialism, indeed from its power. The window of
opportunity for a clever quick strike consisted solely of the fact that
they themselves knew no better, and that was precisely the reason for its
failure. Germany's industrial backwardness forced the politicians, who
wanted to catch up at a single bound and for that very reason were
qualified as have-nots, back on their own narrow experience, that of the
political fagade. They saw nothing in front of them except cheering crowds
and frightened negotiators; this clouded their insight into the objective
power of the greater mass of capital facing them. It is the immanent
revenge on Hitler, that he, the executioner of liberal capitalist society,
was according to its own index of consciousness too "liberal" to recognize
that under the shell of liberalism abroad an irresistible dominion of
industrial potential had formed. He, who saw through the untruth of
liberalism like no other bourgeois, nevertheless did not see through the
power behind him, precisely that social tendency, the drumbeat to which
even Hitler marched. His consciousness regressed back to the standpoint of
the inferior and short-sighted competitor, from which he started, in order
to render a concern profitable in the shortest time possible. The hour of
the Germans necessarily fell prey to such stupidity. For only those who
were as inexperienced in the world economy as they were narrow-minded in
world cultural and social trends could mobilize these for war, and their
stubbornness for the sake of sheer activity devoid of any reflection.
Hitler's stupidity was a ruse of reason. [Quoted from page 119-120, Minima
Moralia, Vol. 4 of the Collected Works, German edition by Suhrkamp Verlag;
this is my own quick-and-dirty translation]

-- Dennis