How can we think about education and intellectual critique in times of violence and moral rupture? What demands does the present – amid an authoritarian turn in Europe and the tightening of Staatsräson in Germany – place on intellectual and educational work? Taking up these questions, this event revisits Theodor W. Adorno’s seminal essay “Education after Auschwitz” (1966) and asks how its critical and ethical imperatives might be rethought as an “education after Gaza” today.

In a recent essay for Berlin Review, historian and political scientist A. Dirk Moses relates Adorno’s project to the current condition of German academia and the legacy of the Frankfurt School – raising uncomfortable questions about critique, complicity, and responsibility. Together with sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck, we will discuss Moses’s proposition: what “education” could still mean in an emphatic sense, what role Critical Theory and its legacy might play under present conditions, and whether a free and critical academia remains possible – or even desired – in Germany today.

The event is organised in cooperation with Berlin Review.

Detail of the Adorno-Denkmal designed by Vadim Zakharov, Frankfurt/Main, Germany