Denying knowledge of atrocities preserves identification with the collective that makes individual powerlessness bearable

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. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 499

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno’s link between suppressed guilt, collective narcissism, and the psychological function of national identity explains postwar silence as a structural need rather than mere hypocrisy.
• DEFINE: Fixes Adorno’s precise usage of ‘repressed guilt’ as conscious complicity denied, not unconscious psychic material.