West German reactionaries welcomed right-wing backlash against left-wing professors

Evidence

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, 2675

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral panics and hate-mail dynamic documented in later scholarship on postwar German conservatism’s response to the 1968 movement; also echoes criticisms of critical theory as ‘poisoning of youth’ similar to earlier anti-Enlightenment rhetoric. — connects to: Prominent right-wing thinkers remained dissatisfied with restored West German society — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2516