Many ordinary West Germans welcomed violent attacks on left-wing professors.

Evidence

One Dr Hans Meis aired both his own views and popular sentiment in a letter to Adorno after he had read about the event in Die Welt: That I’d like to have seen, the brave' professor taking to his heels! Those students’ have given you the punishment you and the left-wing professors deserve! Carry on just as you have been doing, so the dialectical reversal can succeed sooner and more thoroughly! Prof. Horkheimer is already in Lugano … You’ll be able to find somewhere there to escape to as well when the turnabout comes; it will be starting fairly soon. Even that dozy lot in the present government will wake up eventually. I don’t agree with the cheeky cynic who said he wanted a new Hitler to give the left-wing professors and students a `free ticket to the oven’. But hundreds of thousands want an end to the nonsense of this poisoning of youth that you and your colleagues are carrying on. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 669

Categorization

• CANDY: A private citizen writing to Adorno to celebrate his humiliation and casually mentioning a ‘free ticket to the oven’ is darkly quotable elevator material.
• XREF: Illustrates the Frankfurt School’s postwar thesis that latent authoritarianism survived intact in West German civil society. — connects to: West German reactionaries welcomed right-wing backlash against left-wing professors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2675
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: West German reactionaries welcomed right-wing backlash against left-wing professors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2675