Considering Narcissism and Collective Identification via Places of Memory

Abstract

Set against the background of the persistent success at the ballots of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and recently attempted assassinations based on racist and anti-Semitic ideologies this paper addresses two aspects of Theodor W. Adornos work: the social causes of fascism as well as Germany’s accounting for its national socialist past. Taking Adorno’s theory of the constitution of the subject in capitalist societies into consideration, the text will focus on the question in what way social causes of Germany’s national socialist past are also part of contemporary negotiation processes of places of memory for its victims as part of the collective identification connected to the place-making. By establishing a perspective of social psychology this should demonstrate how capitalist relations of production are indirectly connected with places of memory, via subjective reasoning.