Defensiveness about Nazi crimes signals shock and warrants hope, yet Adorno undermined that hope.

Evidence

The idea of repressed guilt should not be taken in too narrowly psychological a sense: defence mechanisms only operate to the extent that injustices one has committed are consciously seen as injustices. Hardly any of those who took part in the experiment and found themselves on the defensive were prepared to say, It was right that they should be killed.' Instead, it was usually a matter of making one's own excessive identification with the collective to which one belongs consistent with knowledge of the crimes. One denies or minimizes such knowledge in order not to lose the possibility of identifying with the collective that psychologically enables countless people to overcome an unbearable sense of their own powerlessness. One can conclude from this that those who found themselves on the defensive, even where they only supported rudiments of the Nazi ideology, did not agree with any repetition of what had happened. Defensiveness itself is a sign of the shock they experienced, and therefore offers hopeful prospects. … In the rest of the study, however, these hopeful prospects had the ground cut from under them by Adorno's hypothesis that the anthropological conditions’ for manipulative mass psychology continued to exist, as did a susceptibility to totalitarian systems, caused by the technological and economic tendencies that were developing in society as a whole. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2028

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Adorno’s ideal analyst pushes reality to extremes so hope emerges only in darkness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1107