Chris Doss:
> Sounds like the kind of thing Adorno would have
done.
Roger Behrens of the journal Testcard maintains that when Adorno makes negative references to "Jazz", the word "Jazz" should be understood as a placeholder for all popular music of his day, as it is most probable that Adorno had never heard Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk.
Your speculations about the name change from Wiesengrund to Adorno are correct, though I can't dig out a source at the moment. On the other hand, there are private letters to Horkheimer, Post-Shoah, where we professes to hate the Goy side of his heritage, in terms reminiscent of Malcolm X hating every drop of the white blood in his body.
I am curious in any case as to what Adorno would have made of the incorporation of his beloved Second Viennese School into the bourgeois musical canon. I'd like to think he would be an admirer of the various individuals and organizations grouped around the English composer Cornelius Cardew (AMM, John Tilbury, Scratch Orchestra) and the current improvised music scene in Berlin.
> stuff rests on a lack of understanding of how
> pervasive and banal this kind of thing was in
Germany > in the 1930s and is tied into an attempt to
get
> German society as a whole off the hook.
Absolutely. What you write is so correct I'm going to quote it again:
> stuff rests on a lack of understanding of how
> pervasive and banal this kind of thing was in
Germany > in the 1930s and is tied into an attempt to
get
> German society as a whole off the hook.
The personalization of the NS-period is nothing but a way of projecting guilt upon a few "bad apples", a means of whitewashing the eager and active participation of the masses.
This is what American critics of Goldhagen such as Finkelstein overlook: obviously Goldhagen's thesis that the Holocaust is to be understood solely as the result of eliminatory anti-semitism is overreaching, but the essential core truth of Goldhagen's work is emphasizing the mass participatory character of the time, rather than the convenient narratve of a few bad apples seduced by an evil pied piper from Austria.
What you say on other posts of this thread concerning the essential differences between National Socialism and Fascism is also correct. Anti-semitism plays essentially no role in the worldview of "traditional" Fascist movements.
I have been agreeing with Chris Doss on three essential points in the last 24 hours, a new experience for me. So as I have reached my three post limit, I will bow out of the discussion now.