…

… allow me to recall a memory
I have from ‘Old Berlin’, during or maybe even before the Wall. In
the eastern sector, in the subway stations, one was often confronted
with huge posters proclaiming ‘Von Ich zum Wir’: ‘From I to We’, the
response of East Germany to the burgeoning individualism of the West.
But this call to the collective was surely one of the reasons why Theodor
Adorno, at about the same time, was demonstrably allergic to the use of
‘we’ in his writing and speaking.