Empty collective rituals were a groping anticipation of mass deportations

Evidence

The nullity and lack of content of all collective rituals since the Youth Movement emerges retrospectively as a groping anticipation of stunning historical blows. The countless people who suddenly succumb to their own quantity and mobility, to the swarming getaway as to a drug, are recruits to the migration of nations, in whose desolated territories bourgeois history is preparing to meet its end. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 162

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The retrospective-causal claim that the hollowness of youth movement ritual prefigured, in miniature, the mass uprootings of the mid-century — a staggeringly dense historical inversion that reframes flight as recruitment.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s late-Weimar writing and to the reader’s library on totalitarianism and collective submission. — connects to: Uprooted masses occupied a stateless position analogous to the Jews — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 609

Broader Connections

• Uprooted masses occupied a stateless position analogous to the Jews #qualifies (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 609