Education Against Staatsräson
“Never again is now” is the phrase deployed to mobilize German support for Israel’s reprisal against the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israeli communities on 7 October 2023. It communicates to Germans that, in view of their history, they are especially responsible for preventing another Holocaust against Jews. The official version, enunciated by former chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008, holds that Israel’s security is part of German Staatsräson, conflating the Jewish state with Jewish citizens of Germany. This state ideology thereby asks the population to be constantly on the lookout for threatening manifestations of Nazism today. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April, the Jungle World author Kathrin Witter contributed to this imperative by claiming that Hamas continued “what occurred in the extermination camps between 1942 and 1945.“
Her article, “The Romanticization of Reaction,” is an answer to my argument published in the Berlin Review last October that the lessons of Theodor W. Adorno’s famous essay from 1966, “Education after Auschwitz,” could be applied to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. I had argued that today we need an “Education after Gaza,” which meant, among other things, an anti-authoritarian pedagogy. A correct reading of Adorno, Witter counters, did not support this claim because Adorno was solely concerned with the unique phenomenon of antisemitism and Palestinians were “reactionary” — like far-right antisemites. Adorno was a philosopher of Staatsräson, she implies, and infers that he would support the destruction of Gaza.
Rather than imagine what Adorno would say were he alive today, it makes more sense to first examine what Germans are saying about Staatsräson and Gaza. For “Never again is now” has ended up implicating them in the latter’s destruction, which many international lawyers and human rights NGOs are calling genocidal. While the International Court of Justice case on this matter awaits determination, the question of “never again” has become controversial because opinion polls indicate that the great majority of Germans oppose the Staatsräson and its licensing of terrible crimes. A survey from late 2025 recorded that only 10% regard former chancellor Angela Merkel’s articulation of it as “fully correct,” 69% wanted German foreign policy to be guided by human rights and international law, and 66% supported the cessation of weapons to Israel. Based on this survey, I concluded in an article in The Diasporist in December 2025 that Staatsräson’s arrogation of Germany’s vaunted Holocaust culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) to support Israel’s destructive campaign was killing its public efficacy. As a result, “Holocaust memory is over,” I suggested.
The “never again is now” campaign seemed to be conscripting Adorno’s legacy for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. But is this use of his ideas accurate and true to his spirit?
This gulf between the German public and the media and political classes on the question of Israel’s actions in Gaza alongside Germany’s sinking reputation as an upholder of international law thus represents a crisis for the assumed consensus about the meaning of the Nazi past for German public morality. An urgent task, therefore, is investigating the sources of the common refrain: “never again.”
As it happens, an important source is Adorno’s “Education after Auschwitz,” in which he famously declared the imperative of a new pedagogy is “that Auschwitz never happens again.” The “never again is now” campaign seemed to be conscripting Adorno’s legacy for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. But is this use of his ideas accurate and true to his spirit? Can he really be turned into a state philosopher?
Unsurprisingly, Adorno’s ideas are more complex than the slogans derived from them. For Adorno, Auschwitz was a reversion to “barbarism,” an old-fashioned term he used throughout his writings. The barbarism of the dialectic of Enlightenment manifested itself in various ways, he suggested, ranging from genocide — the Armenian case is mentioned in “Education after Auschwitz” — to Hiroshima: “one cannot dismiss the thought that the invention of the atomic bomb, which can obliterate hundreds of thousands of people literally in one blow, belongs in the same historical context as genocide.” In his lectures from the time, Adorno also placed the Vietnam War in the “same historical context.” Together, Auschwitz, the atomic bombs which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Vietnam formed what he called a “hellish unity.”
It seems clear, then, that when Adorno declared “that Auschwitz never happen again,” he meant preventing the reversion to barbarism that can appear in various ways, each distinct but all the product of a catastrophic historical process. The polling data indicates that the majority of Germans have decided that Israel’s destruction of Gaza is barbaric. They think the same about the Hamas attack.
This does not mean equating Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and now southern Lebanon, with the Holocaust: the dreaded “equation” accusation that is used to shut down debate and thinking. It means that many Germans, like Adorno, can engage in more complex thinking than many politicians and journalists: relating but not equating the barbaric manifestations of modernity.
These will be the Germans who have drawn universalistic lessons from the Nazi past: never again genocide and human rights violation for everyone. To be sure, others, including an increasing number of AfD voters, were likely never committed to any lessons of the Nazi past. The German public is also divided about the state’s response to the anti-war protest movements. The left increasingly opposes the crackdown, including the police violence and countless cancellations of artists, writers, and academics, understanding that Staatsräson means “a subordination of the individual to state logic and coercion,” as Kathrin Witter rightly defines it. The great majority of Germans seem apathetic, by contrast, while AfD voters vent their anti-migrant resentments in supporting the authoritarian actions of the police and the state. Witter and much of the German press seem to share their position in this regard. They do not see a crisis of liberty that troubles so many observers of German political culture; they see a crisis of “romantic anti-capitalism” that supposedly threatens the republic and must be crushed with the full force of the state.
Adorno and his colleagues were far from the praxis-distant thinkers that they are often made out to be by antideutsch critics like Witter.
Adorno had firm views on this matter. Any education after Auschwitz means encouraging what he called “critical reflection,” which entailed critiquing the (then West) German Staatsräson. Why? Because, he wrote, “in placing the right of the state over that of its members, the horror is potentially already posited.” “Horror” was his choice word for describing barbarism. It recurs throughout his essays and lectures. Education after Auschwitz, we know, meant education against barbarism, and this meant resisting “the sadistic-authoritarian horror,” as he called the fascist potential that he saw lurking in West German society. Today that potential includes the program of the AfD which is gaining increasing popularity, especially in eastern Germany. Meanwhile, Kathrin Witter and her center-right comrades in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung join in the rhetoric of the AfD in singling out migrants.
Always ignored by such Staatsräson enthusiasts is Adorno’s opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as Herbert Marcuse’s, another famous critical theorist who is conveniently overlooked in these debates. Their condemnation of the mass killing of Vietnamese peasants has an obvious corollary to the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. While Adorno was certainly not “anti-Israel,” and would have condemned Hamas, it is hard to imagine him, still less Marcuse, cheering or accepting the destruction of Gaza as necessary or acceptable, let alone as a legitimate manifestation of “never again.” The opposite is more likely.
Adorno and his colleagues were far from the praxis-distant thinkers that they are often made out to be by antideutsch critics like Witter. The Frankfurt School took an active interest in the democratic prospects of the federal republic. Its members marched in the streets against the emergency laws in the 1960s, and they pioneered studies on the authoritarian personality and antisemitism. So long as the objective conditions of capitalist modernity persisted, antisemitism as a form of projective hate would remain an ever-present potential. It was the role of intellectuals to analyze this potential and to protest its manifestations.
This potential could of course manifest itself in other prejudices. No social phenomenon, even antisemitism, was absolutely “unique,” frozen in time, as Witter insists. In reality, “race” reflects social relations, and the position of the subaltern and the racialized is not a fixed ahistorical location but contingent on alignments of power, ruling ideologies, and threat perception. “The Jew” of 1930s and 1940s is not “the Jew” of the 2020s.
Who today occupies the social and cultural space that “the Jew” once did — and still does in far-right and antideutsch circles? What are the inclusion and exclusion processes in the German nation-state that lead to deportation and persecution discourses? Who are the ones now targeted and demonized by state and para-state actors as the enemy within, their bodies unassimilable and indeed threatening to the body politic? In Germany’s new demography, the mechanism of projective hate operates against migrants, and especially Palestinians.
Adorno identified the personality structure of the Germans who applauded the Nazis in the 1930s; an ensemble of authoritarian, state-oriented attributes that he also recognized in West Germans in the 1960s. I see worrying signs of their return today. They characterize the Germans who “threaten democracy” via an “authoritarian anti-antisemitism,” as the researcher Peter Ullrich puts it; and who lazily equate Palestinians and Nazis as the new way of expressing hate. With the AfD, these Germans demonize migrants as both inferior and threatening in a racist tradition stretching back to the colonial era, linking past and present in a manner that makes one wonder whether they have learned anything from their history.
