In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 5 Adorno’s Lesson Plans? The Ethics of (Re)education in ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’’’ Jaimey Fisher In Germany it is fashionable to complain about political education and certainly it could be better, but sociology already has data indicating that political education, when it is practiced earnestly and not as a burdensome duty, does more good than is generally believed. . . . One could well imagine that . . . something like cadres could develop, whose influence in the most diverse contexts would then finally reach the whole of society, and the chances for this are all the more favorable, the more conscious the cadres themselves become. adorno, ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’’’ Toward the end of the essay ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’’’—one of his most-cited works and probably his most-cited short essay—Theodor W. Adorno offers this unexpected proposal, one that would seem to contradict his later claim that he never said anything that was ‘‘immediately aimed at practical action.’’1 It is not only the suggestion of educational cadres that moves the essay in a surprising direction, but also the optimism about ‘‘political education,’’ which Adorno contrasts to the skepticism of unnamed critics. Rarely remarked upon in the scholarship on ‘‘Working through the Past’’—which has influenced sundry fields of study, including, especially, German history—this surprising suggestion for cadres and these unnamed critics points to a subtle, but definitely The epigraph is a slight modification to the translation from Adorno, ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past,’’’ in Critical Models, ed. and trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), here 100; the modification is based on the German text ‘‘Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit ,’’ in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (1986; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp , 1997), 10:569. 76 77 Jaimey Fisher discernible subtext to the essay that many readers overlook or do not mention .2 In order to illuminate this subtext, I wish to read ‘‘The Meaning’’ within the context of Adorno’s 1950s interest in political education and particularly of his response to the ‘‘reeducation’’ imposed on Germany after World War II. Although there have been efforts to link ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past’’’ to Adorno’s later essays on education from five to ten years later—especially in Peter Hohendahl’s work—there has been no sustained effort to locate these essays in the public sphere of the late 1940s and 1950s.3 This context includes educational debates of the day, many of which represented continuing fallout from the attempted radical reform of primary, secondary, and higher education after World War II. Citations and even analyses of these essays on education often look forward to his controversial reaction to the student movement of the late 1960s—the beginnings of which he witnessed before his death in 1969—but it is also important to locate these essays in the earlier context that helped produce these educational concerns and against which Adorno was writing. In approaching this public-sphere context and Adorno’s engagement with it, I would like to begin with a text that he wrote in the same year as the well-known ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past,’’’ an often overlooked work: ‘‘Concerning the Democratization of German Universities [Zur Demokratisierung der deutschen Universitäten].’’ This piece underscores how Adorno was engaged with questions of reeducation at the time, such that the terms of the reeducation debates helped to shape his thinking about more general questions he would then address in ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Working through the Past.’’’ In the early postwar period, reeducation became a catch-all term, a synecdoche for the occupation as well as for postwar Germany’s cultural and psychological struggles.4 The widespread and wide-ranging debates about how the Allies and the Germans themselves were to reeducate Germany’s complicit citizenry touched nearly all corners of culture and society.5 Discussions about reeducation served not only to come to terms with the past, but also to reconstitute German national identity after the war. In fact, coming to terms with the past via the discourse about reeducation simultaneously helped cultural and social elites to select elements of German culture around which national identity could be constituted in the future. In engaging with and responding to these important, substantive, and sometimes obfuscating debates, ‘‘Concerning the Democratization’’ parallels ‘‘Working through the Past’’ in both its specific themes...

Share