"project negatively an image of utopia." While grieving the irretrievable loss of a paradise of a privileged childhood, Adorno confronts his sheltered existence with the primitive and anti-Semitic "nightmare of childhood" which he saw as being an incipient form of Fascism. He rejected any attempt, under the aegis of the USA, to reconstruct a 19th-century culture because any such attempt would either be false, or would simply set in motion the very same dynamic that had produced fascism, reasoning possibly inspired by Nietzsche's thought experiment of the eternal recurrence. Redemption would be a final break with a system which he regarded as deterministic in the large, producing, certainly, a variety of alternative "virtual" histories, but virtual histories that would share common characteristics. Musically speaking and as seen in Mahler, certain themes would return, whether first as tragedy and then as tragic and murderous farce (where the farce of the Second Empire produced the unspoken yet real tragedy of the slaughter of the working class in Paris of 1871, one unmentioned and unmourned because the victims are unfashionable today). References Jaeggi, Rahel (March 2005) "“No Individual Can Resist”: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life" Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 12(1): pp. 65–82; External links Full text of Minima Moralia, translated by Dennis Redmond 1951 non-fiction books Frankfurt School German non-fiction books Works by Theodor W. Adorno