Horkheimer saw postwar Germany as the world’s decisive battleground for intellectual survival.

Evidence

If one works with absolute devotion, and does not allow oneself to be driven crazy by severe disappointments, it will probably be possible to show a few people in today’s Germany what should be preserved through the night of history. The dangers are greater here than in other places on earth. But there is hardly anywhere else which is more important at the moment than Germany. If the last remnants of intellectual life were completely extinguished there, something would be lost to the world that ought to be preserved. And so far as practical matters are concerned, I see Germany as an area in which the most important decisions will be taken. If it is not possible, with the help of those elements with awareness or which are at least undecided, to break the frightful reaction which has already consolidated itself there, then the anti-Russian policy of the Western powers in Europe will be carried through with a massive chauvinistic and anti-Semitic energy. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1715

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s decision to return to Germany in 1949-50 and to Horkheimer’s pessimistic reading of the Cold War, echoed in Adorno’s writings on the same period.
• SHARE: A precise statement of the intellectual stakes Horkheimer attached to postwar Germany — worth sending to anyone studying the School’s repatriation decision.