Description
Book SynopsisA psychoanalytically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. It provides important perspectives on postwar German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and on Adorno's intellectual legacies.
Trade ReviewI am thrilled that Theodor Adorno's
Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany has eventually been translated and published in a fine American edition. This book documents Adorno's qualitative interpretations of group discussions that were conducted by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt and entailed different strata of German society short after WWII and the Holocaust. Here you can read and learn about what average Germans thought in the late 1940s, and how Adorno reconstructed their ideas. This is the best insight into immediate post-War Germany you will ever get. Anyone interested in post-War German politics and culture needs to take a close look at this. Maybe nothing for the beach, either. But for any intellectual interested in 20th century Germany: Indispensable. -- Lars Rensmann * Princeton University Press blog *
