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Diving into the Past: Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse

I visited Lübeck in July 2015, a few months after Günter Grass had passed away. I was there to visit Thomas Mann’s museum as part of a trip that also took me to Husum, Theodor Storm’s hometown, but since Grass had his own museum and I had time, I decided to drop in. Walking around inside, unable to understand the German on the walls, I did at least manage to enjoy Grass’s drawings and countless photos of undersea wreckage. I gathered that this was something to do with his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, and bought a copy of it as a trophy and memento. Unlike my unread copy of The Tin Drum, I’ve actually dragged myself through Im Krebsgang twice, and will probably read it a third time. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s easier to write on what you know, and I’ve exams to prepare for.

I cheated with Cat and Mouse because I read it in translation. However, I now think this was a good decision. I was able, for the first time, to meet Grass without my faulty German acting as an untrustworthy intermediary. Grass is often considered the most important German-language writer since the Second World War, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Cat and Mouse is a short novel about the past, about Germany’s horrific past, and individual lives within it. It takes us into wartime Danzig and follows a single figure, Joachim Mahlke, through the eyes of a friend. From the warplanes above on the first page the atmosphere is ominous. All the more so because for most of the book we don’t know why we need to hear this story. But as readers, we suspect the narrator has something bothering him, something only half-acknowledged.

Grass's illustration for the first edition of Cat and Mouse, showing a cat wearing an Iron Cross medal — Grass, who was also a talented artist, did the covers for all of his books. The Cat here, with its wonky eyes and Iron Cross, is a little unnerving.

Childhood in a Time of War

Cat and Mouse begins in Danzig a short while into the Second World War – the novel is technically second in a loosely connected trilogy of works by Grass, after The Tin Drum and before Dog Years, but it can certainly be read separately from them. Our main characters are schoolchildren, rather than adults, which gives us a different perspective on the War from what’s typical. Yes, there are planes overhead, but the War’s impact on the children is indirect at best, at least at first. The children compare notes on various warships from rival powers, and they dive in a sunken Polish minesweeper to dig up trinkets.

Real violence seems far away. The opening scene describes a successful attempt by the narrator, who is suffering from toothache, to get a cat to pounce on Mahlke’s oversized Adam’s Apple, which the narrator calls Mahlke’s “mouse”. Beneath the planes, toothache and pranks are the order of the day. The principal of their school is “high party official”, but for the kids he is first and foremost a principal. The magic of childhood is not destroyed by the War so much as slightly distorted. Words like “up to” when describing time hint at later difficulties, while the knowledge of warfare is perhaps disturbing, but at least early on in Cat and Mouse we are given the impression that all is well in their world.

Two Worlds

But there are two worlds at play here, not one. Cat and Mouse as a title reflects a division between two antagonistic beings, one stronger than the other. In practice, this refers to German society at the time, and Mahlke himself. Mahlke is an oddball. He is a Catholic, like the narrator, but his Catholicism is distorted by a strange worship of the Virgin Mary beyond what is acceptable. He doesn’t fit in with his peers either. When the boys go out to the minesweeper, most of them sit on the deck and sunbathe, while Mahlke usually exception dives down alone in search of treasure.

This underwater world is Mahlke’s world. His “light-blue eyes… filled with curiosity only under water”, and Mahlke builds himself a base in part of the boat where water has not reached. Nobody else has ever reached his hideout, which requires lung capacity beyond their own. Like Mahlke’s mind – Cat and Mouse has very little direct or reported speech – the hideout remains hidden from us. In it he stores the trinkets he finds, such as a small Polish virgin and a gramophone. It is a strange hobby, Mahlke’s “fanaticism” for diving, but it provides him with “a goal in life” completely disconnected from matters above water, from the War. For even Mahlke’s perception of the world is strange – we learn that “Great events were shaking the world just then, but Mahlke’s time reckoning was Before learning to swim and After learning to swim”.

War and the classroom

War does eventually break into the classroom, but slowly. A teacher is arrested and students are questioned. Then there is a lieutenant who returns and gives a talk, describing his experience in the air force cheerily as “some merry-go-round” and “pretty much the same as in the old days when we played handball in our good old recreation yard”. But of course, such a speech has been doctored for the schoolchildren, and only briefly do other emotions and darker thoughts break through the humour and lightness, such as when the speaker mentions “some that couldn’t take it”. And when the speech is finished, the narrator informs us casually that “he had graduated from our school in ’33 and was shot down over the Ruhr in ‘43”. The children do not notice what we, who are older and wiser, know to look out for.

Mahkle’s Other Goal

Another time a lieutenant commander comes and Mahlke, for reasons unknown, steals his medal and stows it away in his hideout while the man is supervising their gym class. Guilt then gets the better of him and he confesses the theft to the principal. He is then summarily expelled and sent to a different school. There, Mahlke develops a plan to recover his honour – he plans to come back to his initial school to give a speech, and the only way to do that is through fighting. He joins the army and disappears. The narrator is a little way behind, picking up scraps of information about his friend but little concrete information.

When they meet again, Mahlke is already a hero, but the two of them are unable to connect. Their language fails them. The narrator keeps repeating himself. And Mahlke isn’t given permission to speak at the school either – rules are rules, the principal reminds him. Mahlke, who was no patriot, learns that it was all for nothing.

Form and Structure

Cat and Mouse is interesting at least as much because of its form and structure as because of its story. From the very first words, “…and one day”, we are thrust in media res into the story, and this leaves us with more questions than answers. We do not learn, at least at first, why the narrator is writing, except obliquely, when he says he “ha[s] to write.” And he is speaking just as much as he is writing. Cat and Mouse is an oral story, which raises questions, later answered, about who is listening. When we write, we can be writing for ourselves, but when we speak, we demand something more – judgement, or perhaps support.

Cat and Mouse follows Mahlke and not the narrator. All the same, the narrator, who consciously hides himself, is just as much of an enigma as his quarry. Each chapter seems like a fragment of some longer dialogue, wrenched out of thin air, and many begin with questions, or ellipses to indicate this fragmentation. There are also, occasionally, moments where the long paragraphs split up into short, single-sentence paragraphs, such as:

“What’s the matter with him?” / “I say he’s got a tic.” / “Maybe it’s got something to do with his father’s death”.

These moments, where other characters seem to speak together, remind me of a Greek chorus. Everyone is trying to understand Mahlke, but nobody can. Cat and Mouse’s fragmentary search through the past is partially a quest to reconstruct him from the boy whose legend as “The Great Mahlke”, the amazing diver, has displaced the underlying reality. But there’s much more going on here than that.

An old photo showing the Danzig waterfront around 1900 — Danzig, modern day Gdansk in Poland, was once quite the beauty. Grass grew up here, and the city is the setting for his “Danzig trilogy”, consisting of The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years.

Literature after Auschwitz – Cat and Mouse and Memory

Cat and Mouse is, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, an attempt to reformulate and re-evaluate the past so as to come to terms with it. The narrator is cagey because he feels he has a hand in Mahlke’s ultimate fate, a hand he’s unwilling to acknowledge. The odd comment, like when he says “I alone could be termed his friend”, speaks to a kind of guilt. As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes ever so slightly more open, describing “this gloomy conscience of mine” and mentioning his conversations are with a “Franciscan Father Alban” without getting to the point of ever saying what exactly hangs over him until the very end.

In truth, the narrator is obsessed by Mahlke, because he is unable to escape his guilt – but nor can he face it directly. At the very end of the novel, in the climax scene, Cat and Mouse briefly shifts into the third person – “Pilenz shouted: “Come up!””. The narrator – whose name is Pilenz – is even ready to use linguistic trickery to distance himself from his actions.

Theodor Adorno, one of the major German critical theorists of the 20^th century, wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric”. Paul Celan, a German-language poet, revised that by suggesting that poetry written after Auschwitz can only be worthwhile if it is about Auschwitz, directly or indirectly. Both of these thoughts reflect a central preoccupation in German-language literature after 1945 – that of guilt, and how to deal with it in writing. Günter Grass, in his autobiographies, confessed to being an enthusiastic member of the SS, but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of thinking about Cat and Mouse. Rather we should read Cat and Mouse in light of Celan’s comment. It is a book that is deliberately reflective, looking back into the past from an unspecified point in the future, and not trying to find answers so much as to atone.

It is not an easy process. The fragmentary nature of the book, as I suggested above, makes it feel like it is compiled from a much greater source. And while on a literal level, this source is the narrator’s chats with the priest, on another level Cat and Mouse records just an individual instance of a general project, that of the German people’s coming to terms with their complicity in violence and horror during the Second World War and Nazi Era more broadly. Cat and Mouse is a book of obfuscations, feints and trickery, but this is not because of the narrator’s bad conscience so much as the challenge of actually truly coming to admit responsibility when every part of you begs you to go on hiding from it.

Pilenz, the Narrator of Cat and Mouse

But questions remain, and Pilenz, the narrator of Cat and Mouse, is at their centre. I’ve avoided using his name just as he avoids it. He only tells us it halfway through the novel. Just as he consciously hides his guilt so too does he consciously hide himself: “I’m not going to speak of myself, my story is about Mahlke”. But sentences like this only further draw our attention to him.

I don’t feel I have all the answers here, or at least an interpretation I can give to what I’ve read that makes sense, but I’ll do my best. Here are the basic facts: Pilenz lives with his mother. His father is away fighting, and an older brother too. The brother, who was the favourite child, dies, and at home he daily bears witness to his mother’s infidelity. It is not a happy life. Other examples, such as a sexually abusive priest from his youth, come up in passing.

I think Pilenz is consumed by guilt, both for his responsibility in Mahlke’s fate, and for his own life’s course. He mentions travelling to Nazareth and Ukraine in search of a way to live. “I should be able to believe, to believe something, no matter what, perhaps even to believe in the resurrection of the flesh” – these are his hopes, but not the reality. After the War, after the destruction, Pilenz has no spiritual centre. He is lost and cannot find himself. In telling Mahlke’s story he is not trying to tell his own so much as save it, to give himself a chance to find the meaning he longs for. We can only guess as to whether he succeeds.

Conclusion

“Who will supply me with a good ending?” Pilenz asks in the final chapter. Reading Cat and Mouse it is obvious that there cannot be a happy ending here. The very absence of a happy ending is the motor that keeps Pilenz talking and us reading. We want to understand what ending we will get, and what Pilenz’s role in it is.

This blurry but nonetheless embarrassing photo of me is the only one I have from my time in the Grass museum.

I think I probably liked Cat and Mouse. It is short and focused, and I found its structure interesting and ideas worth thinking about. I enjoyed the connection between diving into the underwater world of Mahlke’s minesweeper and the Pilenz’s “diving” into the past to try to reconstruct their friendship. Overall, I can readily recommend the book to people who think it all sounds interesting. But I can’t say I enjoyed it on a human level. The characters weren’t endearing, and the message of guilt and atonement felt rather too closely bound with its era to be engaging on a personal, rather than intellectual level. But that’s just me.

The Meaning of Working Through the Past by Theodor Adorno – Summary

Introduction: Adorno and his Aims

Theodor Adorno, a real curmudgeon of thought if ever there was one, is well-known for his sceptical attitude towards such modern inventions as “jazz” and mass culture. But then again, the professor had plenty of reasons to be. Reaching academic maturity in the years after the end of the Second World War Adorno, as a German and Jew, was determined in his critical writings to outline the ways in which the society and culture of postwar West Germany left open the door to a potential resurgence of fascism, so that such problems could be dealt with before it was too late. As he wrote in “Education after Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again”, and he does everything he can in his own work, including “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, to body forth that very idea.

Adorno’s essay „Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?“, translated as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” by Henry W. Pickford in the collection Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, has as its primary target is the ways, most of them unhealthy, that we try to deal with the past. In this it has relevance not just to German history, but also to America’s relationship to the destiny it once so gladly made manifest, and the United Kingdom’s often ambiguous attitude towards its colonial past, to give a few examples. Yet the focus remains on Germany in particular, and the way that Germans fell under Hitler’s spell, and could perhaps again. What follows is a summary of the piece, alongside the important contexts for it.

Picture of Adorno — Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, alongside Herbert Marcuse and others.

Context

“This day” being 1959, when the lecture was given. It was a time of crisis in the newish country of West Germany. The grand coalition of the CDP and CSU led by Konrad Adenauer, which had run the Germany since 1949, was sustaining a great deal of negative public attention after it emerged that Theodor Oberländer, one of the major ministers, had committed war crimes for the Nazis. It raised questions throughout the whole of West Germany about the way that the government, socially and economically conservative, had been dealing with the past. The problem was that it had not been dealing with the past at all – rather, it had done its best to treat the events of the Holocaust and the Third Reich almost as if they had not happened, in what Adorno called “collective amnesia”. And this, naturally, once it was revealed publicly, led to pressure for change.

The Social Democrats in Germany, long unpopular for stances such as being in favour of unconditional reunification with the Eastern part of the country, saw the failure of the grand coalition to answer for the past as a potential weapon to boost their own popularity. Adorno’s essay thus came at a time where it was particularly relevant to public discourse. Not only in this way did it seem timely though. Shortly after the essay was given for the first time, in December 1959 in Cologne a synagogue was daubed with a swastika and the words “Juden raus” (“out with the Jews”), proving Adorno’s fears of lingering fascist elements within German society to be completely justified.

The essay was given as a lecture, but it was also given over the radio too. Adorno’s saw his work, in spite of its academic style and nature, as important to the average German citizen because of its educational content. Through this essay and others given in the radio format he hoped to help Germans learn how they themselves can identify the signs of fascism, both within their own thoughts and actions and in those of other people. Though it is philosophy, it is manifestly practical too.

The Essay

Language as a Way of Hiding from the Past

One of the major arguments of “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, and the one that begins it, is that language is very much a potential tool that can aid the survival of fascist tendencies, even as in other hands it can be used to stop them. One need only think of the great heights reached by Joseph Goebbels as Reich Minister for Propaganda under Hitler for an example of language’s recent abuse for evil. Adorno begins his piece with a much finer distinction however: the difference between “Aufarbeitung” and “Verarbeitung” in German. By the time of the essay, public debate was already primarily using the first term. In Adorno’s mind this is a mistake, because the former term suggests “the intention to close the books on the past” rather than the idea of carrying through a consciousness of the past into the present of the latter term.

As a result, the word “Aufarbeitung” is associated with “the unconscious and not so unconscious defensiveness against guilt”. Adorno’s point here is that by moving on too rapidly we run the risk of avoiding the very guilt we should be confronting. For, although moving on seems like the rational thing to do, “because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive” we cannot yet pretend that it is simply history and not still in some form present today (in 1959). This is especially important because the people who most loudly call for the country to move on often turn out to be those people who are most guilty and in need of working on their own past.

Adorno points out that even the term “guilt complex” is dangerous. The phrase undermines itself because “complex” suggests that there is no real guilt but rather just a psychological problem. Furthermore, it also suggests that healthy people do not look towards the past, but only towards the future and present moment. With the threat of fascism still present ignoring the past instead of trying to understand it is not a healthy attitude at all in Adorno’s view.

Changing the Subject

This is not the only way that language was used dangerously in the in the years after the War’s end. Adorno singles out various other ways that language helped Germans to avoid the past. First among them is the use of euphemisms like “Kristallnacht” to refer to the pogroms against Jews throughout Germany in early November, 1938. In English the phrase “The Night of Broken Glass” is sometimes used – like the German phrase it too distracts attention from the potentially 100+ Jewish deaths by focusing on abstract objects. A better name, in Adorno’s mind, would force its user to reflect upon the nature of the event with each utterance. Thus calling it a pogrom is much better than referring to it by means of a euphemism.

Another linguistic method often used by Neo-Nazis in our own time is creating an argument out of specifics. By forcing a discussion to focus on whether, for example, it was five or six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, acknowledgement of the reality of the huge death toll – whatever its specifics – is sidelined, and sometimes even ignored together. In the same way, when people talk about “the balance sheet of guilt”, such as by claiming that the bombings of Dresden and other German cities may mitigate Auschwitz, what they actually do is avoid facing the reality of German guilt by changing the subject. No doubt the bombings were bad, but they are neither here nor there when it comes to the fact of the Holocaust.

People might also try to suggest that they had no idea that something was happening to the Jews, which Adorno finds to be a poor excuse given that Jews were literally disappearing in broad daylight. Sometimes “a lax consciousness consoles itself with the thought that such a thing surely could not have happened unless the victims had in some way or another furnished some kind of instigation”. This attitude is idiotic because even if a small number of the Holocaust’s victims were in some way guilty, that in no way justifies the mechanised slaughter that faced them. Moreover, focusing on potential guilt of the victims is once more a way of changing the subject from the certain guilt of the perpetrators.

Who is to Blame?

Well-intentioned people when talking about German postwar guilt tend to focus on those people who tolerated Hitler’s rise and later on claimed blamelessness because they were merely “following orders”. While it is undoubtedly true that these people must admit and bear their share of the guilt, Adorno is keen to point out that this approach nonetheless can sometimes lead us to forgetting about those who enthusiastically cheered the Nazis on. Even before Hitler became Chancellor, in the (free) Federal Election in November 1932 the Nazi Party was receiving 37.27% of the popular vote. With propaganda on his side the number of Germans who actively supporting the state would have grown even higher by the time of the war, and so it is foolish to pretend honest supporters of the Nazis did not exist in large numbers.

“But what about the Autobahns and the Soviets?!”

Another dangerous trend in thinking about the Nazi era is the tendency to think of the time after Hitler gained power as being one of mass oppression and suffering. Moving on is easier when we think that the past is no longer attractive, but trying to conceal the truth of the matter is even more foolish. The Nazi era was an awful time for minorities, especially Jews, within the German borders. It was a bad time for non-straight sexualities and for communists. But for the average man and woman, NSDAP member or not, it was not so bad. As Adorno writes, “terror’s sharp edge was aimed only at a few and relatively well-defined groups”. Hitler came to power at the tail end of a huge economic downturn, and thus much of his time was marked by a massive recovery, which brought huge benefits to the German people.

Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship that was used by the Nazi's for state-organised recreation — Germans under the Nazis used to be able to go on cruises on ships such as this one, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Adorno is keen to stress that though not everything about Nazi Germany was bad for everyone, that’s no excuse to want to return to fascism.

Large scale building projects like the Autobahn system suggested a new and modern Germany. After the social alienation and mass political disillusionment of the Weimar era Nazi Germany brought the “warmth of togetherness”. Public gatherings and group trips with the famed Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) state leisure organisation all meant that for most of the people left in Germany to discuss Nazism as it had appeared before the war began the period had not been in any way a bad one. More importantly still, the contemporary Cold War between the West and the East seemed to vindicate Hitler’s concerns about the Soviet threat.

To ignore both of these aspects is, to Adorno, fatal. If we pretend that the Nazi era was bad instead of acknowledging its ability to bring benefits to much of the German population, then it provides an easy opportunity for someone arguing against us to begin undermining the rest of our argument too. If we are wrong about one thing, then we may be wrong about other things. And if Hitler was right about the Soviets, our opponent might argue, perhaps he was right about other things too. Adorno thus wanted to focus on conveying as much of the reality of the past as possible, instead of concealing that which doesn’t fit into easy arguments. For it soon turns out that much of what was seen to be so good about Hitler and his time actually wasn’t. For instance, economic “recovery” was really down to rearmament and unsustainable without war.

What Remains of the Conditions that Caused Fascism in Germany?

The reason that Adorno is so concerned about fascism is “the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist”, but what were these conditions? One of them is that both in the home environment and in school obedience was promoted and praised above and beyond autonomy. This produced good worker drones, but it also produced people who would easily be led astray by a charismatic leader like Hitler. Because it encouraged obedience, it was thus inherently conservative and supportive of the status-quo. This meant that once society was changed towards totalitarianism these people would see little reason to complain about the new status quo that would have emerged. Such a system fosters what Adorno terms “the authoritarian personality”, that is people who “identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents”. It is these people who are vital in the running of a totalitarian system.

The causes were not merely educational – they were also economic and political. Here Adorno’s membership of the Frankfurt School of thinkers comes into play. Though he was no supporter of the USSR, he found a number of faults within laissez-faire and other forms of unbridled capitalism that meant they were vulnerable to fascism. Economically, Germans were still dependent on conditions beyond their control and thus they were politically immature, seeing democracy as “one system among others” rather than as the ultimate system of organisation. Adorno was thus not worried about neo-Nazi organisations so much as the trends within democracy that could lead to fascism becoming dominant again. He mentions as an example the way that many Germans hoped that Black Friday 1929 and its economic trauma would not happen again. Adorno notes that the hope contains within itself the belief that a strong state would protect Germans economically once more.

It is the individual’s impotence on the one side and the massed power of the state on the other, that leads towards totalitarian forms of domination in Adorno’s view of the matter.

Nationalism Nowadays

A key part of Nazism was the idea of returning to an ideal specifically German past. Though Hitler’s defeat ought to have broken Germany’s belief that it could conquer vast swathes of Europe, instead it had the opposite results. The “collective narcissism”, as Adorno calls it, that manifested itself as national vanity and exceptionalism, carries on in the form of “chimerical hopes.” German nationalists thus fall into “an illusory inner realm” where they can construct “reality itself as though the damage never occurred” to begin with. Instead of being focused on one idea, nationalists now seek anything that seems to conform to the idea of German greatness. Nazism’s hopes of creating a great German nation remain, even if their form has changed. Thus, with the right leader, these hopes could be focused again and millions mobilized to try to achieve “goals they cannot immediately identify as their own.”

Nonetheless, nationalism has lost a lot of its power and charm. Though it “does not completely believe in itself anymore”, still it remains a political tool to make people insist on conditions that otherwise they would not tolerate. Thus it is “both obsolete and up-to-date”. It is obsolete because clearly, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact the truth was that countries were now organised into military blocks under the most powerful; yet it was and is up-to-date because it continues to have psychological power and the force of tradition behind it. Still, Adorno writes that the countries that now are most vulnerable to fascism are actually the less developed ones – those victims of Western imperialism who want some of the West’s previous power for themselves.

Solutions: Education for Self-Reflection

Still, the focus of the essay is on Germany its own dangers, and Adorno here proposes a few solutions. Chief among them is a change in education, of the sort he writes about in more detail in “Education after Auschwitz”. I mentioned the problems of education towards obedience above, so Adorno instead wants to educate people towards something different. In the same tradition as thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Adorno sees education’s goal as “Mündigkeit” – maturity. What this means is that students must be taught how to think for themselves instead of falling into whichever collective appeals to them the most. In the first appendix printed in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords there is a discussion of the lecture between Adorno and some of his students. It is here that he explains that people must “be led to self-reflection and thereby be prevented from becoming blind victims of… instinctual impulse”.

Part of this means an increased emphasis on psychoanalysis in schools. Children must be able to analyse themselves so that they can be aware of the cognitive biases that they are vulnerable to, and thus prevent themselves from acting from pure or manipulated emotion rather than reason and logic. This education would also include a focus on propaganda, and how to identify and avoid it so that Germans would be better able to come to their own conclusions regarding how to live. What this means ultimately is not a focus on facts, but rather on understanding oneself and one’s motivations. Adorno writes that “a working through of the past understood as enlightenment is essentially such a turn towards the subject, the reinforcement of a person’s self-consciousness and hence also of his self.”

Difficulties: Anti-Semitism the Appeal to Self-Interest

Perhaps all this is too optimistic, and indeed Adorno admits as much. The difficulty of dealing with anti-Semites and other people who reject rationality is precisely the way that they reject logic. For example, Adorno write that “panegyrics to the Jews that isolate them as a group already give anti-Semitism a running start”. By encouraging us to see the Jews as different, we allow anti-Semites to start thinking of them as different in a bad way. Another method that Adorno is sceptical of is using individual examples to educate anti-Semites. Anne Frank, probably the most famous of those murdered in the concentration camps, can thus be seen as a tragic exception, rather than one guiltless individual among many others, none of whom deserved to die. “I have a black friend” does automatically mean you are not a racist; it may just mean you have taken your friend as an exception.

Picture of Anne Frank, one of the many murdered in the Holocaust — Anne Frank, pictured here, may help us to understand the human face of the Holocaust’s victims. But at the same time, focusing on her can lead to us inadvertently singling out victims like her as exceptions, rather than the rule.

Indeed, even trying to introduce anti-Semites to Jews in the hopes of demonstrating to the first group that the latter are humans just like the rest of us is not necessarily the best argument against the fascism that can result from anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites, Adorno writes, have “an incapacity for any experience whatsoever”. Instead, ultimately what he suggests we ought to do when arguing with people who have rejected self-reflection and are acting against reason and logic is actually simple: “the most effective antidote is still a persuasive, because true, demonstration of their own interests and, moreover, their most immediate ones”. Appealing to eternal values like equality and freedom, or even to the huge suffering views like anti-Semitism can cause, is far less effective than simply explaining to the anti-Semite in question that fascism means war, it means you might lose your house or money or family. Everybody listens to that.

Conclusions

“The Meaning of Working Through the Past” is ultimately a demonstration of way we ourselves might do the same self-reflection that Adorno advocates. It shows the ways, linguistic and otherwise, that we might avoid facing the truth of the horrible consequences of Nazism. It also shows us how to argue with those who might be unwilling to admit or acknowledge that Nazism was an awful mistake. In this way, it does everything it can to educate its readers in how they might avoid fascism’s recurrence, just as Adorno wanted.

But it is not only relevant in the context of Germany in 1959. The piece is relevant to any country which has a past that it needs to come to terms with. The deliberate starvation of certain parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early years of the USSR; and European, American and Japanese colonialism, are all unpleasant pasts that countries deal with in different ways, some more healthily than others. And in a world where nationalism and the far-right are on the rise again, Adorno’s exhortation towards self-reflection and his warnings about propaganda have never seemed less timely.

For more German thought, check out my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”. For a more practical look at the consequences of living under a totalitarian regime, my review of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, detailing his time in the Soviet Gulags, is here.

Picture of Adorno by Jeremy J. Shapiro used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff comes from the Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H27992 / Sönnke, Hans / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]; and Picture of Anne Frank is in the public domain.