Dear Colleagues,
today at 5.15pm in CGU4, Hans Kundnani will be talking to the Centre for Modern European Literature on 'Adorno and the 1968 generation' (abstract below). Hans is a journalist and writer, a former Observer correspondent in Berlin who has just published the well-receieved study 'Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 generation and the Holocaust' (see http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/11/germany-past-fischer). Anyone in the Canterbury area would be more than welcome to join us.
all best,
Ben.
Abstract:
Theodor W. Adorno had a deep but complex influence on Germany’s 1968 generation. Many of the young West Germans born between 1938 and 1948 who were politicised in the 1960s and became involved in the student movement that reached its climax in 1968 were drawn to the Frankfurt School’s analyses of the connection between capitalism and fascism, which would come to be central to their critique of the Federal Republic. In particular, the student movement’s understanding of itself as an “anti-authoritarian” movement derived from Adorno’s writing on the “authoritarian character” as well as Horkeimer’s analysis of the “authoritarian state”. Initially, Adorno was sympathetic to the student movement, although he was anxious about its use of direct action. But the student movement increasingly turned against him, culminating in the occupation of the Institute for Social Research in 1969 that was led by Adorno’s teaching assistant, Hans-Jürgen Krahl. However, from the late 1970s onwards, some members of the 1968 generation rediscovered Adorno and in particular his view of Auschwitz – which had been marginalised in the student movement’s analysis of fascism – as a metaphysical break. In particular, Joschka Fischer aimed to apply the “new categorical imperative” that, according to Adorno, the Holocaust had imposed on mankind (“to arrange one’s thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will occur”) to German foreign policy.
Dr Ben Hutchinson
Director of the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
Co-Director, Centre for Modern European Literature,
Senior Lecturer in German Literature,
University of Kent, Canterbury
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/german/staff/hutchinson.html
|