The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch
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campaign against supposed communists: in 1947, just before the book went to press, the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun its first hearing – against the brothers Hanns and Gerhart Eisler. ‘Under these circumstances’, Adorno explained, ‘I felt it was right not to declare my authorship, trusting that people who took an interest in my work would notice it in any case. After so many years, you are one of the first.’ In concluding, he asked Gente to treat his message as confidential, since ‘in the climate currently prevailing in our country, some people would naturally try to exploit the matter’.81
The heads of the Frankfurt School were anxious to keep their Marxist past under wraps, not least in order to avoid risking the disfavour of their American sponsors. For that reason, they long resisted the idea of a new edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and purged their old texts of passages that contained echoes of class struggle.82 And that was the reason why Adorno was reluctant, in 1965, to be associated with Hanns Eisler, the recently deceased composer of East Germany’s national anthem, whose brother Gerhart, just on the other side of the Berlin Wall, was a high official in the Socialist Unity Party. Although he showed fewer reservations in this regard than Max Horkheimer, Adorno too tried to avoid the stigma of communist sympathies under the West German state. Not until May of 1969, shortly before his death, did Composing for the Films appear under his name, published by the direct-distribution press Zweitausendeins. Adorno exposed the book’s true authorship in an appendix. The letter to Gente in which he had done so four years earlier found its way into an editor’s afterword in the later Suhrkamp edition of Adorno’s complete works.83 Gente, by then the publisher of Merve and still an Adorno reader, was, of course, proud of that.
And yet, for all his overt veneration of the author, Gente’s intentions in formulating his letter had been quite critical. For in 1965, at the apex of his fame, Adorno’s moral authority was beginning to show signs of strain. The question whether the book on film music was really the product of Adorno’s pen concealed the unspoken suspicion that Adorno had foisted off his elitist, ultimately bourgeois aesthetics on the Marxist Eisler. Both Adorno and Eisler had lent their support to twelve-tone music since the 1920s; whoever had written the book in question went so far as to hold Schönberg’s progressive dissonances to be the only music appropriate to the medium of film. But there was an essential political difference, as the well-read Gente knew by that time, between Adorno’s and Eisler’s positions. Was the function of twelve-tone composition to liberate music – without regard for audiences’ tastes – from the myth of natural tonality? Or was its purpose grounded in the education of the revolutionary class? Adorno’s ‘Leninist listening’, as the novelist Rainald Goetz once called it, was reserved to the avant-garde.84 To Hanns Eisler, on the other hand, whose studies with Schönberg had not prevented him from composing a harmonious anthem for the Germany of his choice, musical progress must be subservient to the socialist society. Aesthetic elitism or music for the revolutionary masses: those were the choices. The book on film scoring took Adorno’s side – under Eisler’s name. Since the mid-sixties, however, that side had become politically suspect.85 Sooner or later, Gente’s subtle criticism would inevitably draw after it the crucial question that Adorno heard more and more often during the last years of his life. Just a few weeks after Gente’s letter, one of Adorno’s students in Frankfurt asked it straight out: ‘Dear Professor Adorno,’ says the letter of November 1965:
Our generation, or at least a part of it, is confronted with the harrowing experience of our parents having lived under National Socialism and failing to explain why they put up with it, except by saying there was nothing they could have done. Hence our reflections on what meaning philosophy has, what meaning it can have, for our practice. Is theory practicable or not? Are your endeavours aimed at changing the world?86
Notes
1 1 1. Rififi2. To Catch a Thief3. We’re No Angels4. Gigi5. Lola Montès6. Paisà7. Mädchen in Uniform8. Daddy Long Legs9. Millionenstadt Neapel10. The Cure, The Pilgrim11. La Belle et la bête12. The Desperate Hours13. Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück14. The Man with the Golden Arm15. Threepenny Opera16. To the Ends of the Earth17. Othello18. The Lower Depths19. The Red Shoes20. The Benny Goodman Story21. Hôtel du Nord22. Confidential Report23. Hi-jack Highway24. The Diary of Major Thompson25. Shadows of the Past26. Le ragazze di San Frediano27. Ich denke oft an Piroschka28. Les Belles de nuit29. Invitation to the Dance30. Die weisse Schlangenfrau31. Mädchen m. [illegible]32. Loser Takes All33. The Unknown Soldier
2 2 The speech Khrushchev had given four months before at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was broadcast on 21 June 1956. See Wolfgang Leonhard, ‘Die bedeutsamste Rede des Kommunismus’, in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 17/18 (2006), 3–5.
3 3 Gente saw himself as a late bloomer: ‘Somehow it took me a long time to come to myself, to my own interests’, he told the sociologist Heinz Bude, who interviewed him for his portrait of the ’68 generation. Quoted in Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen’, 228.
4 4 On the importance of cinema in the cultural and political landscape of East and West Berlin, see Uta Berg-Ganschow and Wolfgang Jacobsen (eds.), Film, Stadt, Kino, Berlin, exhibition catalogue, Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin: Argon, 1987.
5 5 Quoted in Lowien, Weibliche Produktivkraft, 152.
6 6 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970, 135.
7 7 On Khrushchev’s speech and the attendant radio propaganda, see the articles in Thomas Grossbölting and Hermann Wentker (eds.), Kommunismus in der Krise: Die Entstalinisierung 1956 und die Folgen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008.
8 8 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Word Berlin’, trans. James Cascaito, in The German Issue, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 2nd edn, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009, 60–4.
9 9 Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen’, 211. On the cultural significance of latent sexuality, see the interview with Friedrich Kittler, ‘Wir haben nur uns selber, um daraus zu schöpfen’, in Die Welt, 30 January 2011.
10 10 Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
11 11 Quoted in Lowien, Weibliche Produktivkraft, 152.
12 12 Author’s interview with Peter Gente, 10 May 2012. See also Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen’, 218.
13 13 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1978, 192.
14 14 Helmut Lethen, a few years younger than Gente, had a similar experience a little later with Walter Benjamin, whom he encountered for the first time on the radio: ‘What I heard was addictive. But I can no longer reconstruct what the drug was that made me high’ – Lethen, Suche nach dem Handorakel, 51.
15 15 On Adorno’s verdict of a ‘rigidification of circumstances’, see Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, rev. edn, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 363. On his relationship to Arnold Gehlen, see Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History, Princeton University Press, 2006, 147.
16 16 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 20, 135, 23, 116, 42f., 39, 40, 113.
17 17 Ibid., 25. See also Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 56.
18 18 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka’, in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981, 260. See also Martin Mittelmeier, Adorno in Neapel: Wie sich eine Sehnsuchtslandschaft in Philosophie verwandelt, Munich: Siedler, 2013. My portrayal of Adorno is influenced by that book and by conversations with Martin Mittelmeier.
19 19 Bude, ‘Die Suche nach dem Unmöglichen’, 214; the author’s conversations with Peter Gente on 26 September 2010 and 10 May 2012, and with Hannes