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THEODORADORNO

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6THEODOR

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6THEODOR W. ADORNO

Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist,philosopher and musicologist known for his

critical theory of society. He was a leadingmember of the Frankfurt School of critical theory,whose work has come to be associated withthinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin,Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, forwhom the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marxand G.W.F. Hegel were essential to a critiqueof modern society. He is widely regarded asone of the 20th centurys foremost thinkerson aesthetics and philosophy, as well as oneof its preeminent essayists. As a critic of bothfascism and what he called the culture industry,his writingssuch as Dialectic of Enlightenment,Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics

strongly inuenced the European New Left.

Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism andpositivism in early 20th century Europe, Adornoadvanced a dialectical conception of naturalhistory that critiqued the twin temptations ofontology and empiricism through studies ofKierkegaard and Husserl. As a classicallytrained pianist whose sympathies with thetwelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenbergresulted in his studying with Alban Berg of theSecond Viennese School, Adornos commitmentto avant-garde music formed the backdropof his subsequent writings and led to his

collaboration with Thomas Mann on the lattersnovel Doctor Faustus, while the two men livedin California as exiles during the Second WorldWar. Working for the newly relocated Institutefor Social Research, Adorno collaborated oninuential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would laterserve as models for sociological studies theInstitute carried out in post-war Germany. Uponhis return to Frankfurt, Adorno was inuentialto the reconstitution of German intellectuallife through debates with Karl Popper on thelimitations of positivist science, critiques ofHeideggers jargon of authenticity, writings onGerman responsibility for the Holocaust, andcontinued interventions into matters of publicpolicy. As a writer of polemics in the traditionof Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno deliveredscathing critiques of contemporary Westernculture. Adornos posthumously publishedAesthetic Theory, which he planned ondedicating to Samuel Beckett, is the culminationof a life-long commitment to modern art whichattempts to revoke the fatal separation offeeling and understanding long demandedby the history of philosophy and explode theprivilege aesthetics accords to content over

form and contemplation over immersion.

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9FRANKFURT

Theodor Ludwig Adorno-Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt am Main on September11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (18701946) andMaria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (18651952). His mother, a devout Catholicfrom Corscia, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jewwho had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proudof her origins, Maria wanted her sons paternal surname to be supplemented bythe addition of her own name: Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the

name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship,his name was modied to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by themusical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boastof having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe,who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist.He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigywho could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve.

At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school before transferringto the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to hisgraduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionarymood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacss The Theory of theNovel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Blochs The Spirit of Utopia,of which he would later write: Blochs was a philosophy that could hold its head

high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to theabominable resignation of methodology I took this motif so much as my own that I donot believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit.

Yet Adornos intellectual nonconformism was no less shaped by the repugnance he felttowards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Alongwith future collaborators like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Adornowas profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germanys intellectual and spiritualleadersamong them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Ernst Simmel, as well as his friendSiegfried Kracauercame out in support of the war. The younger generations distrustfor traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself.

Over time, Oscar Wiesebgrunds rm established close professional and personal tieswith the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplusfamily, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she wasacquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adornowould become familiar with during the mid-20s; after fourteen years, Gretel andTheodor were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benetedfrom the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt - in which one could hear performances ofworks by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartk, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith - butalso began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking privatelessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At aroundthe same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitungs literaryeditor, of whom he would later write: For years Kracauer read [Kants] Critique ofPure Reason with me regularly on Saturday af ternoons. I am not exaggerating in theslightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere

epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientically valid judgments, butas a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, withthe vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.

Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann WolfgangGoethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turningnow to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and piecesof music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift fr Musik, the Neue Bltterfr Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikbltter des Anbruch. In these articles,Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failingsof musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinskys The Soldiers Tale, which he calledin 1923 a dismal Bohemian prank. In these early writings, he was unequivocal inhis condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve atranscendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as

impossible: No cathedral, he wrote, can be built if no community desires one. In thesummer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl underthe direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation,Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, MaxHorkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Through Corneliuss seminars, Adorno met his futurecollaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock.

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10VIENNA, FRANKFURT, AND BERLIN

During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Bergs Three Fragments fromWozzeck, op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Bergand both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna.Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culturewhich had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions withBerg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended theviolinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended public lectures of the satirist Karl Kraus withBerg and met Lukcs, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the HungarianSoviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as my master and teacher, wasamong the most prescient of his young pupils early friends: [I am] convinced that, in thesphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievementsand will undoubtedly fulll this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.

After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer,

Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lastingfriendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adornos Two Pieces forString Quartet, op.2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruptionfrom his preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique, as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voiceand Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The Concept of theUnconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche, to Cornelius in November 1927.Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscriptwas too close to his own way thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underlinethe epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged out of Freuds early writings.Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno arguedthat Freuds notion of the unconscious serves as a sharp weapon ... against every attemptto create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature. Undaunted byhis academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition

to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adornos FourSongs for Medium Voice and Piano, op.3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929.

Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committeeof the Musikbltter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adornosought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he calledthe stabilized music of Ptzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism ofStravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays Night Music,On Twelve-Tone Technique and Reaction and Progress. Yet his reservations abouttwelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno,twelve-tone techniques use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritativecanon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer.

At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with

whom he discussed problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a letter of 1934Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: Twelve-tone technique alone is nothingbut the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, butelevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed intoan a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.

At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities camesecond to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middleof 1929 he accepted Paul Tillichs offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard,which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. Atthe time, Kierkegaards philosophy exerted a strong inuence, chiey through its claimto pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegels philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno

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11turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like anxiety, inwardness andleapinstructive for existentialist philosophywere detached from their theologicalorigins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceededandKierkegaards overcoming of Hegels idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorizationAdorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking overhis shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorablereports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer,the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the veryday his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.

Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered aninaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization whichhad recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literaryscholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher HerbertMarcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the socialsciences. His lecture, The Actuality of Philosophy, created a scandal. In it, Adorno

not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier,but challenged philosophys very capacity for comprehending reality as such: For themind, Adorno announced, is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totalityof the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature themass of merely existing reality. In line with Benjamins The Origin of German TragicDrama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophicalinterpretation to experiments which should be conducted until they arrive at gurationsin which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish. Having lostits position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform itsapproach to objects so that it might construct keys before which reality springs open.

Following Horkheimers taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschriftfr Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members bothbefore and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not himself

an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, includingThe Social Situation of Music (1932), On Jazz (1936), On the Fetish-Character inMusic and the Regression of Listening (1938) and Fragments on Wagner (1938). Inhis new role as social theorist, Adornos philosophical analysis of cultural phenomenaheavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reication,false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in hiswork. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominentsociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posedby treating objects - like musical material - as ciphers of social contradictions, Adornowas compelled to abandon any notion of value-free sociology in favor of a form ofideology critique which held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twains The Adventures of TomSawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete;by the time he ed Hitlers Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera

or concert reviews and an additional fty critiques of music composition. As the Naziparty became the largest party in the Reichstag Horkheimers 1932 observation provedchillingly prophetic: Only one thing is certain, he wrote, the irrationality of societyhas reached a point where only the gloomiest predications have any plausibility.

In September Adornos right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up theag pole of town hall, the Institutes ofces were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police.Adornos house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application formembership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membershipwas limited to persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of characterand blood. As a non-Aryan, he was informed, you are unable to feel and appreciatesuch an obligation. Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fteen years of exile.

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14OXFORD, LONDON, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES

After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to theUniversity of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno consideredrelocating to Britain upon his fathers suggestion. With the helpof the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as anadvanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934.During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeatedtrips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was stillworking in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adornoworked on a dialectical critique of Husserls epistemology. Bythis time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to NewYork City and began making overtures to Adorno. After monthsof strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablishedtheir essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris.Adorno continued writing on music, publishing The Form ofthe Phonograph Record and Crisis of Music Criticism withthe Viennese musical journal 23, On Jazz in the InstitutesZeitschrift, Farewell to Jazz in Europischen Revue. YetAdornos attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, atthis time, twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he hadbeen working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserlwere accepted by the Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimersbook of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began workingon his own book of aphorisms, what would later become MinimaMoralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses:

his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg diedin December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adornonever abandoned the hope of completing Bergs unnished Lulu.

At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with WalterBenjamin on the subject of the latters Arcades Project. Afterreceiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in NewYork, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937 and stayedthere for two weeks. While in New York, Max Horkheimersessays The Latest Attack on Metaphysics and Traditionaland Critical Theory, which would soon become instructive forthe Institutes self-understanding, were the subject of intensediscussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved toBritain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8,

1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed fromNew York with news of a position Adorno could take up with thePrinceton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austriansociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adornos work continued withstudies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in 1939 asFragments on Wagner), drafts of which he read to Benjaminduring their nal meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera.According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for theprecision of their materialist deciphering, as well as the wayin which musical facts had been made socially transparentin a way that was completely new to me. In his Wagner study,the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of Enlightenmentmansdomination of naturerst emerges. Adorno sailed for New Yorkon February 16, 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on

Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discussthe Projects plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music.

Although he was expected to embed the Projects research withina wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that theProject was primarily concerned with data collection to be used

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15by administrators for establishing whether groups of listenerscould be targeted by broadcasts specically aimed at them.Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could pressa button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particularpiece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment:I reected that culture was simply the condition that precludeda mentality that tried to measure it. Thus Adorno suggestedusing individual interviews to determine listener reactions and,only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Projects topic, Music in Radio.Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical materialwas affected by its distribution through the medium of radio andthought it imperative to understand how music was affected byits becoming part of daily life. The meaning of a Beethovensymphony, he wrote, heard while the listener is walkingaround or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effectin a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church.

In essays published by the Institutes Zeitschrift, Adornodealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had becomeinstrumental in accelerating tendencies - towards conformism,trivialization and standardization - already present in the largerculture. Unsurprisingly, Adornos studies found little resonanceamong members of the project. At the end of 1939, whenLazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, themusical section of the study was duly left out. Yet during the

two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno wasnevertheless prolic, publishing The Radio Sympthony, ASocial Critique of Radio Music and On Popular Music, textswhich, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublishedwritings, which are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentors recenttranslation, Current of Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimersoon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift Adorno wasexpected to be the Institutes liaison with Benjamin, who soonpassed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire hehoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project.

In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in theirconceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks

which had become manifest through Benjamins The Workof Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility. At aroundthe same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for ajoint work on dialectical logic, which would later becomeDialectic of Enlightenment. Alarmed by reports from Europe,where Adornos parents suffered increasing discrimination andBenjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study couldentertain few delusions about its practical effects. In view of whatis now threatening to engulf Europe, Horkheimer wrote, ourpresent work is essentially destined to pass things down throughthe night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle

As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks onmusic and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaards doctrine of love,

Benjamin ed Paris and attempted to make an illegal bordercrossing. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid andfearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took on overdoseof morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set aboutformulating a theory of anti-Semitism and fascism. On one sidewere those who supported Franz Neumanns thesis according to

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16which National Socialism was a form of monopoly capital; on the other werethose who supported Fritz Pollocks state capitalist theory. Horkheimerscontributions to this debate, in the form of the essays The Authoritarian State,The End of Reason and The Jews and Europe served as a foundationfor what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic.

In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Manncalled German California, setting up house in a Pacic Palisadesneighborhood of German emigres which included Bertolt Brecht and ArnoldSchoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music,a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, whilewriting, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent theprevious decades elaborating. Horkheimers reaction to the manuscript waswholly positive: If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm aboutanything, then I did on this occasion, he wrote after reading the manuscript.

The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed itself froma book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality andthe Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the text would wait another three yearsbefore achieving book form when it was published with its denitive title,Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag.This reection on the destructive aspect of progress proceeded throughchapter which treated rationality as both the liberation from and furtherdomination of nature, interpretations of both Homers Odyssey and theMarquis de Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry and anti-semitism.Their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on anti-semitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford-ledPublic Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee. In line

with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radiopreacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adornowrote, simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of todaysstandardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent oftheir autonomy and spontaneity[22] The result of these labors, the 1950study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination ofquantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data aswell as its development of the F-scale. After the USA entered the war in1941, the situation of the migrs, now classed enemy aliens becameincreasingly precarious as government measures turned from anti-Nazism toanti-communism. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6amand prohibited from going more than ve miles from their houses, migrs likeAdorno, who would not be naturalized until November 1943, were severelyrestricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms which conclude

Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorismsin honor of Horkheimers fteith birthday that would later be published asMinima Moralia: Reections from Damaged Life. These fragmentary writings,inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration,totalitarianism and individuality, as well as everyday matters such as givingpresents, dwelling and the impossibility of love. In California, Adorno madethe acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Langand Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of lm music in 1944.In this study, the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde musicin lm, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany,the visual aspect of lms. Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann onhis novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help. Would you bewilling, Mann wrote, to think through with me how the work - I meanLeverkuhns work - might look; how you would do it if you were in league withthe Devil?[23] At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europejust as The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return,Adorno had not only reached an agreement with a Tbingen publisher toprint an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music, but completed twocompositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op.7, andThree Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Daubler, op. 8.

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Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany.Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed tothe intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at FrankfurtUniversity, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan ofcritical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International SummerCourses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soonafter his arrival, with seminars on Kants Transcendental Dialectic, aesthetics,Hegel, Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge and The Conceptof Knowledge. Adornos surprise at his students passionate interest in intellectualmatters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: Theliterary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany duringHitlers rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Naziapparatus and people were generally loathe to own up to their own collaborationor the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as ifnothing had happened, holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the gooddespite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble orkilled off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adornos students showedfor intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of MaxFrisch, culture had become an alibi for the absence of political consciousness.Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as The Frankfurt Schoolwere soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and theInstitute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought.

Nevertheless, in September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week

visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundationin Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and sawhis mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-HenryKahnweiler, Michel Leiris and Rene Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitledThe Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany at a conferenceon opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection andstatistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only anauxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would raise theharsh facts to the level of consciousness. With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty,then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institutes work fell upon Adorno.

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At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the KranichsteinerMusikgeselschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Kreneks opera Leben desOrest, and a seminar on Criteria of New Music at the Fifth International Summer Coursefor New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with the publishinghouse of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamins Berlin Childhood Around1900, Kracauers writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamins Writings. Adornos ownrecently published Minima Moralia was not only well-received in the press, but met withgreat admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952: I havespent days attached to your book as if by a magnet. Every day brings new fascination concentrated nourishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, ismade of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne here. This is why ithas such an extremely powerful gravitational eld; in this respect it is similar to your book.

Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of HeinrichManns novel Professor Unrat with its lm title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy with thosewho protested the scandal of big-game hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes. BecauseAdornos American citizenship would be forfeited by the middle of 1952 if he remained outsidethe country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the HackerFoundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collectedin The Stars Down to Earth), the essays Television as Ideology and Prologue to Television;even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-directorof the Institute. Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954,completed the essays Notes on Kafka, Valry Proust Museum and an essay on Schoenbergfollowing the composers death, all of which were included in the 1955 essay collection Prisms.In response to the publication of Thomas Manns The Black Swan, Adorno penned a long letterto the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second

collection of essays, Notes to Literature, appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckettwhile delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on Trying toUnderstand Endgame, which, along with studies of Proust, Valry and Balzac, formed thecentral texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to Literature. Adornosentrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference ofthe Hlderlin Society. At the Philosophers Conference of October 1962 in Mnster, at whichHabermas wrote that Adorno was A writer among bureaucrats, Adorno presented Progress.

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20Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, includinga collection of essays entitled Sociologica (1955), the Gruppenexperiment (1955), a study of work satisfaction among workersin Mannesmann called Betriebsklima and the Soziologische Exkurse, a textbook-like anthology intended as an introduction.

Throughout the fties and sixties, Adorno became a public gure, not simply through his books and essays, but also throughhis appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio,South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as The Administered World (September 1950),What is the Meaning of Working Through the Past? (February 1960) to The Teaching Profession and its Taboos (August1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurter Rundschau and the weekly Die Zeit. At theinvitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from1951 to 1958. Yet conicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like Pierre Boulez, KarlheinzStockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression inAdornos 1954 lecture, The Aging of the New Music, where he argued that atonalitys freedom was being restricted toserialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adornofeared that music was being sacriced to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a signicantseries of notes on Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published Mahler: AMusical Physiognomy in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a musique informelle,which would possess the ability really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else.Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end.

At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets like Paul Celan and IngeborgBachmann. Adornos 1949 dictumTo write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaricposed the question of what Germanculture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictumin Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrotethat Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; while in 1962s Commitment,he wrote that the dictum expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literaturewas part of post-war

Germanys struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensbergeras well as the lm-maker Alexander Kluge. In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German SociologicalSociety, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on Max Weber and Sociology and in 1968 on LateCapitalism or Industrial Society. A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the PositivistDispute in German Sociology, arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin. Adornoscritique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up aroundHeideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollow, and which had since seeped into publicdiscourse. His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words likeangst, decision and leap. After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which,during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-8, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discussthe book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth.One objection which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of theoppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself.

At the time of Negative Dialectics publication, the fragility of West German democracy led to the increasingradicalization of students. Monopolistic trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah ofPersias 1967 state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined to create ahighly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the warin Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz

The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shahs visit. This death, as wellas the subsequent acquittal of the responsible ofcer, were both commented upon in Adornos lectures. As politicization increased,rifts developed within both the Institutes relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himselfwould become an object of the students ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlinto give a lecture on Goethes Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that readBerlins left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist, a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refusedto abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated ina friendly and productive meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed Student Unrest

with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students disruptions touniversity life. His isolation was only compounded by ar ticles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead ofHannah Arendts articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin andcompiled Benjamins Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamins longtime friend Gershom Scholem,wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful remarks by Arendt.

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23Relations between students and the West German statecontinued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominentSDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down inthe streets; in response, massive demonstrations tookplace, directed in particular against the Springer Press,which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An openappeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, calledfor an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise tothis assassination attempt as well as an investigationinto the Springer Press manipulation of public opinion.

At the same time, however, Adorno protested againstdisruptions of his own lectures and refused to expresshis solidarity with their political goals, maintaininginstead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejectedthe so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated bythe students and argued that the students actions werepremised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation.The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, isridiculous against those who administer the bomb.

In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for thepublication of Alban Berg: Master of the SmallestLink. Upon his return to Frankfurt, events preventedhis concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he

wished to write: Valid student claims and dubiousactions, he wrote to Marcuse, are all so mixedup together that all productive work and evensensible thought are scarcely possibly any more.

After striking students threatened to strip the Institutessociology seminar rooms of their furnishings andequipment, the police were brought in to close thebuilding. Adorno began writing an introduction to acollection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which wasconnected with a talk entitled Charmed Language,delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics inParis where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October1966, Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory. InJune 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical Models.During the winter semester of 1968-9 Adorno wason sabbatical leave from the university and thus ableto dedicate himself to the completion of his book ofaesthetics. For the summer semester Adorno planneda lecture course entitled An Introduction to DialecticalThinking, as well as a seminar on the dialectics ofsubject and object. But at the rst lecture Adornosattempt to open up the lecture and invite questionswhenever they arose degenerated into a disruptionfrom which he quickly ed: after a student wrote onthe blackboard If Adorno is left in peace, capitalismwill never cease, three women students approached

the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered owerpetals over his head. Yet Adorno continued to resistblanket condemnations of the protest movement whichwould have only strengthened the reactionary thesisaccording to which political irrationalism was theresult of Adornos teaching. After further disruptionsto his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for therest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophyseminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from theseactivities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt,Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restorehis strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack.

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THEODORADORNO

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26THEODOR ADORNO

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