Theodor W. Adorno

Robert B. Stepto

Professor of Sociology and History Jeffrey K Olick

Jeffrey K. Adorno

It remains a pressing question to this day: How did the German people come to terms with the legacies of Nazism? Shortly after World War II, Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues addressed this question in a massive empirical study employing focus groups. The substantive results, originally published as Gruppenexperiment, appear here in its first book-length translation, along with Adorno’s accompanying essay on “Guilt and Defense,” a psychologically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. The volume includes a 1957 critique by the psychologist Peter R. Hoffstater as well as Adorno’s rejoinder. The editors’ introduction shows how one of Adorno’s best-known works, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” becomes comprehensible only as a conclusion to Adorno’s long-standing research and the debate it stirred. Understood thus, this hitherto ­little-known debate provides important new perspectives on postwar German political culture, the dynamics of collective memory, and the intellectual legacy of one of the twentieth century’s great thinkers.

Jeffrey K. Adorno

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