Theodor Adorno. To the Question: «What is German?» (translation from German, abstract and comments by Vitalii Bryzhnik)

The outstanding German social thinker Theodor Adorno, a talented university teacher and one of the founders of the critical theory of society (Frankfurt School), wrote his work «On the question: What is German?» as a speech that he read on May 9, 1965. on the German radio (Deutschlandfunk) in the series of radio programs of the same name. In the same year, the text of the speech was published as an article in the August issue of the West German magazine Liberal. As an undoubted authority in the field of social and theoretical research, and as one of ideological leaders of the institutional development of West Germany as a democratic and legal country, Adorno dedicated this speech to the date of the twentieth anniversary of the military defeat of the Nazi regime and the historic collapse of the Nazi political rule in Europe. Here, his long-standing principled criticism of sociocultural and ideological-theoretical factors was continued, primarily the so-called «philosophy of identity», which, according to the Frankfurt philosopher, due to their neutralizing influence on the independent and critical thinking of an individual, contributed to the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, and hence are indirectly responsible for their countless military and political crimes. In this speech, Adorno, remaining under the influence of his published book «The Jargon of Authenticity; to the German Ideology» (1964), in which a radical critique of the philosophical works of the German existentialist thinkers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, as well as prominent representatives of the Vienna Circle devoted primarily to the philosophy of language, theoretically supplemented his critique of the sociocultural phenomenon of a national «authenticity» of an ordinary bourgeois. According to the Frankfurt thinker, the provincial essence of this culture directly caused the spiritual «numbness», despiritualization of the German society at that time, and thus indirectly enabled its powerful capture by Nazi ideology. Based on this criticism, the Frankfurt philosopher laid out the essence of his German identity in the text, although he was not ethnically an «authentic» German. According to Adorno, the foundation of his cultural identity was laid in his childhood, in his native home, where he was brought up as a bearer of a spiritually exalted German culture, with its classical music and philosophy, whose deeply emancipatory, anti-ideological essence is able to invariably generate a personal understanding of the individual’s causes human suffering and the practical implementation of means to overcome them.