Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar German by Theodor W. Adorno, and: Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany by Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno and Colleagues (review)

In a 1968 sociology lecture, Theodor Adorno addressed allegations that he was unduly preoccupied with sociopsychological questions concerning the annihilation of the Jews. “[A]fter Auschwitz,” he insisted, the “interest in ensuring” that nothing similar recur should “determine” the “choice of. . . methods and. . .subjects to be studied.” Its “horror. . .gives it an importance which justifies the pragmatic demand that. . .knowledge should be prioritized. . . with the aim of preventing such events” (Adorno 2000:18). Adorno’s work had been guided by this imperative at least since the 1940s. The group experiment, an inquiry into German public opinion he carried out in the early 1950s together with fellow affiliates of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, formed part of this research agenda (see also editors’ introduction to Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany [henceforth GD]:11–16). The study appeared in 1955 as Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht (Pollock 1955). Two years later, Adorno suggested that Peter Hofstätter, a critic of the book, conduct the following “thought experiment”: “imagine that group discussions and interpretations of the kind we have published had been available in 1932. . ..” (GD:209)

Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin’s translations and thoughtful editorial work have made much of Gruppenexperiment accessible to Anglophone audiences. It appears as two English books: Guilt and Defense and Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany (henceforth GX). GD contains the German volume’s fifth chapter, which is ascribed to Adorno. GX contains the original’s first, third, fourth, and sixth chapters, the introduction, the afterword, two appendices—all credited to several authors—and Franz Böhm’s foreword. Gruppenexperiment’s second chapter, parts of the third and fourth chapters and a few further passages were not translated. With the possible exception of the missing parts of Chapter 2 of GX, the omitted sections, which mainly provide “information…about mundane elements of the research design” (translators’ preface to GX:xii), might not have greatly enhanced readers’ experiences of the study. The English volumes also contain four texts written after the original’s publication: GX includes Adorno’s 1964 essay “Opinion Research and Publicness”; GD contains his 1960 lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (both published previously), and, for the first time in English, Hofstätter’s 1957 review of Gruppenexperiment and Adorno’s reply. These materials and the two translators’ introductions illuminate various aspects of the study: its place in the oeuvres of Adorno and the Frankfurt School; its intellectual, historical and political context; methodological, empirical and theoretical puzzles; and its links with contemporary sociology.

Among the experiment’s decisive contributions are its conception of public opinion and its mode of examining it (discussed elaborately by the editors in GX:xxiv–xxxvii; GD:19–24). Briefly, the authors’ description of the study’s objective as inquiring into German “public opinion” on “essential social and political questions” (GX:9) reflects three problems confronting them. First, they dispute that “public opinion” equals “the sum of all individual opinions”: it constitutes a “whole that is more than the sum of its parts” (GX:24–5), comprises “objectively given, socially preset contents of consciousness” (GX:52), “predates individual opinions” and “confronts every individual as something. . . preformed, solidified, . . . often overwhelmingly powerful” (GX:25). Public opinion is “trans-subjective” and “take[s] hold in the individual.”(GX:32–3) Second, the authors investigate German opinion on totalitarianism, National...