Guilt and Defense

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.