Mann's villa in Los Angeles, a symbol
In 2016, shortly after Trump's election, the German government bought, with the idea of making it a cultural center, the villa in Los Angeles where Thomas Mann had lived for a certain period during his American exile. The house had been built in the XNUMXs to a design by the writer himself. It was about to be demolished because the building was valued less than the land on which it was built.
According to Alex Ross, music critic of the "New Yorker", the house can be considered a sort of public heritage because it is linked to a tragic moment in American history, McCarthyism.
The writer of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain settled in Los Angeles in 1938, fleeing Nazism. He took American citizenship and put a lot of effort into spreading American ideals.
McCarthyism, a déjà vu
In 1952, however, he became convinced that McCarthyism was an anticipation of fascism and decided to emigrate again. He returned to Federal Germany. Mann gave a drastic and definitive judgment on the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Comment:
“That's how it started in Germany: cultural intolerance, political inquisition, decline of the rule of law, all in the name of a supposed state of emergency.”
Mann was not the only Central European refugee to have felt an intolerable sense of déjà vu in the darkest post-World War II years dominated by McCarthyism. Intellectuals of Jewish descent from the intellectual milieu of the school of thought known as the Frankfurt School, who had found an adoptive home in America, had sounded a similar alarm to Mann's.
The watershed of critical theory
In 1923, a group of young radical thinkers and intellectuals of Jewish origin gathered at 17 Victoria Alle in Frankfurt to found the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) affiliated to the Goethe-Universität of the city on the Main. Initially of an orthodox Marxist tendency, the institute took on an entirely new multidisciplinary sociological orientation when, in 1930, Max Horkheimer took over its direction.
Among the exponents of the Frankfurt School there are some of the best minds of the twentieth century. Philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Jürgen Habermas; psychoanalysts such as Erich Fromm; historians such as Leo Löwenthal and Karl Wittfogel; economists such as Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Wolfgang Streeck. Just to mention a few.
In 1934 the institute moved to New York, a transfer which put the exponents of the school in contact with the American reality and which also determined a decisive shift in the focus of critical theory, their system of thought, from the critique of capitalism to the critique of Western society as a whole of foundations and values.
Critical theory, with books such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), would change the way we look at and interpret the world. He would also have redefined the inquiry paradigms of all social disciplines. The lives of these intellectuals of Jewish origin, as well as their ideas, have profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and interpreted the shocking events that have occurred in the short century.
Studies on the “potentially fascist”
In 1950, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno made major contributions to a study, which later became a massive volume, entitled The Authoritarian Personality. This work aimed at building a psychological and sociological profile of the "potentially fascist" individual. The survey was based on interviews conducted with American citizens who answered a questionnaire.
The constant emergence of racist, anti-democratic, paranoid and irrational feelings that the investigation brought to light, began to make the world reflect on the possible repetition of phenomena such as Nazism. A possibility that a 1949 book by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of deceit, A study of the techniques of the American agitator, also contemplated. Lowenthal and Guterman investigated the psychology of Father Charles Coughlin's followers and saw something very profound and terrifying, namely:
“The possibility of a situation occurring in which a large number of people become exposed to psychological manipulation.”
Adorno, for his part, believed that the greatest danger to American democracy was represented by the mass cultural apparatus which he and Horkhemier called the "culture industry". Cinema, radio, television and, we could add today, the web.
The hypnotic role of the cultural industry
According to the two German thinkers, this apparatus operates like a similar dictatorship even in countries that are not a dictatorship: it homogenizes, pushes towards conformity, silences dissent, conditions and directs thought, standardizes the individual.
Nazi Germany then seemed to represent the extreme case of a late capitalism in which the individual gave up his intellectual freedom and freedom of opinion to surrender himself to an authoritarian-protective apparatus. Analyzing wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the "culture industry" was replicating the fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw every line between reality and fiction vanish. In his 1951 book, Minima Moralia, he wrote:
«In the exchange and confusion of truth and falsehood, which by now almost excludes the possibility of maintaining and preserving their difference, and which makes even the effort to keep the most elementary knowledge firm, a work of Sisyphus, it is affirmed, on the level of logical organization, the victory of the principle that has been undone strategically and militarily. Lies have long legs; it can be said that they are ahead of their time. The translation of all problems of truth into problems of power does not limit itself to repressing and suffocating it as in the despotic regimes of the past, but has invested in its most intimate core the logical disjunction of true and false, which, moreover, the mercenaries of the new logic help to liquidate. Thus Hitler survives, of whom no one can say with certainty whether he died or was saved. » [TW Adorno in Minima Moralia. Meditations on offended life (1951), Einaudi, Turin, new ed. 1979, p. 113]
Beyond Bruning
Mann, who had consulted Adorno for the novel Doctor Faustus, was reading Minima Moralia as he contemplated leaving America. He likened the book's aphoristic style to "a powerful gravitational force field" like that of a supercompact celestial body. Perhaps Adorno's work really influenced Mann's decision to leave the United States. A few months later, just on the eve of departure, Mann wrote to Adorno:
“The way things have turned out [in America] is already clear. We are already beyond Brüning.'
Heinrich Brüning was the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic to openly oppose Nazism.
Decline and rebirth of the Frankfurt School
The fears of Mann, Adorno and the other political refugees, fortunately, did not come true McCarthyism passed, civil rights took a great leap forward, free speech was not affected, liberal democracy spread throughout the world . At the turn of the millennium, the Frankfurt School was seen in many quarters as an unexploded remnant of war.
In recent years, however, shares in Frankfurt have risen sharply again. As Stuart Jeffries points out in his book Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (Penguin-Random House, 2016) the crisis of globalized capitalism and liberal democracy has revived interest in critical theory.
The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural vacuity is precisely the scenario Adorno and other Frankfurters feared: mass distraction masking elite dominance. Alex Ross, in an essay in The New Yorker (Naysayers) exploring the relevance of Frankfurt School thinking, wrote:
"If Adorno takes a look at the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might feel the sad satisfaction of seeing his most bleak predictions come true."
The ethics of social media
What Adorno had identified in the erasure of the "line between fiction and reality", i.e. the first pollination of the "potentially fascist", ended up becoming the endemic state of social media. The inability of major social media outlets to contain the proliferation of fake news should come as no surprise to anyone. This inability, according to Alex Ross, is built into their own economic model of revenues and stock valuation. Ross adds:
From the very beginning, the big companies in Silicon Valley have taken an ideologically ambiguous attitude towards the degeneration of the Internet. A turning point came with the turn-of-the-century wave of music piracy that permanently damaged the idea of intellectual property. Fake news is an extension of the same phenomenon, and like in the Napster era, nobody takes responsibility for it. Traffic beats ethics.”
The ethics of traditional media
Traditional media has shown the same shrewd and opportunistic mentality as social media, seeing, for example, Trump as a vehicle for greater business. At one point in 2016 it seemed that most of the media wanted, knowingly or not, the Trump election.
On a communicative, and therefore economic, level, Trump would have worked better than Hillary Clinton; he would have been less "boring", more "pop" than the democratic candidate. John Martin, CEO of the group that owns CNN (the counterweight to Fox News), probably dazzled by the excellent ratings of his network, spoke of "an appeal [that of Trump] that would have evaporated with a Clinton administration".
Already in the summer of 2016, a sort of nihilistic intoxication was already spreading among the voters. This drunkenness may have been as much a deciding factor in Trump's election as economic dissatisfaction or racial resentment. The mechanism whereby people support a political agenda "largely incompatible with their rational self-interest," in Adorno's phrase, requires the deployment of a sophisticated machine of deception.
The reversal of history
When the purchase of the Mann house was announced, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then German Foreign Minister and now President of the Federal Republic of Germany, said:
“In stormy times like ours, we increasingly need cultural binders with our most important partner outside Europe.”
Steinmeier thought of Mann's Los Angeles mansion as an outpost of cosmopolitan thought, since nationalism was and is expanding on both sides of the Atlantic and not just in the countries bordering that ocean.
The ironic role reversal between America and Germany in their past is quite evident as is Germany's aspiration to become the moral leader of the free world today. The country that has long been synonymous with nationalist madness seems to be determined to resist political and cultural regression.
It is at the forefront against the opportunism of the large Silicon Valley groups, in the defense of privacy, copyrights and in placing a robust barrier against the spread of language marked by political and racial hatred. We are truly at the reversal of history.
Perhaps Germany is the only country in the history of the world that has learned anything from its mistakes.
PS
Steve Bannon, the theorist of the Alt-right — the right alternative to the traditional right — has just discussed a degree thesis on Adorno. His thesis is that Wagner's anti-Semitism prevented Adorno from nurturing and resolving his love for the German composer's music.
Source of information: Alex Ross, The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming, “The New Yorker”
