The German Genius

States.
    Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, his Jewish family moved to New York in 1938. While still in college he served as a German interpreter in the Counter Intelligence Corps. After the war he forged an academic career at Harvard, specializing in foreign policy (and nuclear weapons in particular), becoming a consultant to various prestigious bodies and to Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, who sought the Republican nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968. After Richard Nixon became president in 1968 he made Kissinger national security adviser and then secretary of state, which office he continued to hold when Gerald Ford took over as president after Nixon resigned.
    Kissinger was a very controversial secretary of state, a “power cynic” to some, pursuing Realpolitik and becoming the dominant force in American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. His involvement in the Vietnam War, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, and the botched CIA intervention in Chile, when the Marxist Salvador Allende was assassinated after being legitimately elected president, brought Kissinger robust criticism, and later in his life there were repeated attempts in several countries to have him arraigned on war crimes charges. At the same time, he helped negotiate the end to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam, and, with Nixon, pursued the policy of détente, a relaxation of relations with the Soviet Union and China, which helped him win the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. 40
    D AMAGED L IVES?
     
    Theodor Adorno was possibly the most arrogant and at the same time the most angry émigré in the United States. Brecht thought Adorno was “pompous and elusive, austere and sensual” and Anthony Heilbut concluded that his disdain for American culture “bordered on the pathological.” He nevertheless remains a figure to be reckoned with.
    The Frankfurt Institute had moved from Columbia to California in the early 1940s, in an attempt to fortify the declining health of Max Horkheimer, its director (though Horkheimer didn’t die until 1973, a decade after he and the institute returned to Germany). It was an ironic destination, Los Angeles being the capital of the entertainment industry that attracted the brunt of Adorno’s disdain. 41 Yet although Adorno’s criticisms of American society and culture were clearly over the top at times, many of his points were well taken. His criticisms may be divided into those he advanced while he was in America, and those he made after his return to Germany. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which he coauthored with Horkheimer, the two men argued that Enlightenment led inexorably to totalitarianism, “everything can be illuminated in order to be administered.” 42 Cultural life in capitalist society, in particular, they said, is as much a prison as a liberation, “style”—in fashion as in art—is a phony form of individualism, brought about by the need for commerce to maximize profits, trivializing experience.
    This was followed by a more influential—but far more prosaic—work, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The book was conceived as early as 1939, as a joint project with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the American Jewish Committee, to investigate anti-Semitism. It was the first time the institute had used a quantitative approach, and the results of their “F” (for fascist) scale “seemed to warrant alarm…Anti-Semitism turned out to be the visible edge of a dysfunctional personality revealed in the many ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘conventional’ attitudes of the general American population, as well as of a disquietingly submissive attitude towards authority of all kinds.” The book concluded with a warning that fascism rather than communism was the chief threat facing America in the post-war world, that fascism was finding “a new home” on the western side of the Atlantic, and that bourgeois America and its great cities were now “the dark heart of modern civilisation.” It was an arresting thesis, especially against the backdrop of the McCarthy shenanigans. But it was immediately attacked by fellow social scientists, who disassembled its findings. By then, however, the unsubstantiated phrase “the authoritarian personality” had caught on.
    After he returned to Germany, Adorno wrote three more reflective works. In 1949, in Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem