"When the spirit of rebellion seized Germany’s youth in the late 1960s, it therefore took an extreme form. Many young people discerned a strong continuity—material, ideological, even spiritual— between the apparatus of the Third Reich and the present-day Federal Republic. Nourishing this perception were the theories promoted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the aging representatives of the Institute for Social Research who had returned to Frankfurt from their American exile. For the Frankfurt School theorists, fascism was not merely a socio-political affliction particular to a certain time and place; it was a general pathology of modernity and Western industrial capitalism. Student radicals took this analysis to heart and were primed to see Nazism everywhere. 'Anti-fascism' seemed to demand a wholesale rejection of contemporary society."
Peter E. Gordon in The New Republic reviews Hans Kundnani's Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.
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