The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch
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The following section is based on Philipp Felsch and Martin Mittelmeier, ‘“Ich war ehrlich überrascht und erschrocken, wie umfangreich Sie geantwortet haben”: Theodor W. Adorno korrespondiert mit seinen Lesern’, in Kultur und Gespenster, 13 (2012), 159–99.
54 54 Klaus Reichert, ‘Adorno und das Radio’, in Sinn und Form, 62:4 (2010), 454. See also Clemens Albrecht, ‘Die Massenmedien und die Frankfurter Schule’, in Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann and Friedrich H. Tenbruck, Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt: Campus, 1999, 203–46.
55 55 Kaiser, ‘Was blieb von Adornos Glanz?’
56 56 Quoted in Henning Ritter, ‘Wenn Adorno spricht’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 October 2008.
57 57 As Hans-D. Kempf of Brussels, who wrote to Adorno on 8 April 1968, reports: Theodor W. Adorno Archives, Frankfurt.
58 58 Quoted in Francis Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel (eds.), Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern, Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1976, 146f. The episode is also recounted in Jäger, Adorno, 273.
59 59 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 136.
60 60 Adorno to P. G., 19 September 1967: Theodor W. Adorno Archive. On the discourse about intellectuals in post-war West Germany, see Birgit Pape, ‘Intellektuelle in der Bundesrepublik 1945–1967’, in Intellektuelle im 20. Jahrhundert in Deutschland, ed. Jutta Schlich, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000, 295–324.
61 61 P. G. to Adorno, 22 July 1967: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
62 62 Baroness von Gersdorff to Adorno, 20 April 1956: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
63 63 Ely Amstein to Adorno, 18 September 1962: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
64 64 H. N. to Adorno, 14 August 1952: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
65 65 D. Gabriel to Adorno, 31 May 1959: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
66 66 Ella Schwarz to Adorno, 14 September 1961: Theodor W. Adorno Archives. On Ella Schwarz, see Felsch and Mittelmeier, ‘Theodor W. Adorno korrespondiert mit seinen Lesern’, 163.
67 67 H. B.-R. to Adorno, 5 November 1965: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
68 68 Adorno to Roland Jaeger, 9 September 1963. Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
69 69 Adorno to the Government of Lower Franconia, 30 January 1968: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
70 70 Adorno to J. A., 12 March 1968: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
71 71 Quoted in Reichert, ‘Adorno und das Radio’, 456.
72 72 Kurt Bauer to Adorno, 25 July 1959; Ernst Bachmann to Adorno, 12 April 1957: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
73 73 See Felsch and Mittelmeier, ‘Theodor W. Adorno korrespondiert mit seinen Lesern’, 196ff.
74 74 J. A. to Adorno, 9 March 1968: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
75 75 Adorno to J. A., 12 March 1968: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
76 76 J. A. to Adorno, 15 March 1968: Theodor W. Adorno Archives. On Adorno’s attitude towards homosexuality, see Felsch and Mittelmeier, ‘Theodor W. Adorno korrespondiert mit seinen Lesern’, 190.
77 77 H. B. to Adorno, 26 June 1966: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
78 78 Adorno to H. B., 1 July 1966. Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
79 79 H. B. to Adorno, 18 December 1966: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
80 80 Peter Gente to Adorno, 30 October 1965: Theodor W. Adorno Archives. Another reason for writing to Adorno lay in the fact that Gente had heard him speak a few days before at the Academy of Fine Arts on ‘The Problem of Functionalism Today’. See Michael Schwarz, ‘Adorno in der Akademie der Künste: Vorträge 1957–1967’, in Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie, 36/7 (2013), 213.
81 81 Adorno to Peter Gente, 2 November 1965: Theodor W. Adorno Archives.
82 82 See Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ‘Die Stellung der Dialektik der Aufklärung in der Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie: Bemerkungen zu Autorschaft, Entstehung, einigen theoretischen Implikationen und späterer Einschätzung durch die Autoren’, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V: ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’ und Schriften 1940–1950, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987, 423–52.
83 83 Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Editorische Nachbemerkung’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. XV: Komposition für den Film: Der getreue Korrepetitor [Composing for films: the faithful répétiteur], Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976, 406.
84 84 Rainald Goetz, Hirn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986, 102.
85 85 On Eisler and Adorno, see Günter Mayer, Weltbild, Notenbild: Zur Dialektik des musikalischen Materials, Leipzig: Reclam, 1978; Laura Silverberg, ‘Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic’, in Journal of Musicology, 26:1 (2009), 44–84.
86 86 Rudolph Bauer to Adorno, 21 and 24 November 1965: Theodor W. Adorno Archives. The letter referred to Adorno’s commentary on Marx in his lecture course on negative dialectics. In the next lecture, Adorno addressed Bauer’s question in detail. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/1966, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity, 2008, 45–54.
2 IN THE SUHRKAMP CULTURE
5 Louis Althusser, Für Marx, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968.
It would be some time, however, before philosophy would be swept up in the maelstrom of practice, and before Adorno would be driven from the lecture hall as an obstacle to revolution by bare-breasted student activists. In 1965, theory was ascendant. In the autumn semester, Adorno lectured on negative dialectics: the event had the aura of an important event for German society. He stepped up to the lectern, aided by a female assistant. For the first time, a tape recorder was running to record his message for posterity. Adorno went all out in saying that Marx’s famous Feuerbach thesis – that philosophy’s duty is to change the world – was obsolete. Because theory has not metamorphosed, as predicted, into practice, because it has thus failed to be eliminated, he explained, we must assume once more that theoretical thinking is still current. In a bold figure of speech, he summarily turned Marx upside down: ‘One reason why [the world] was not changed was probably the fact that it was not interpreted enough.’ Only theory that is not immediately aimed at changing the world, his dialectically intricate argument implied, is able to change it at all. And where, if not here, in ‘relatively peaceful’ West Germany, could such a philosophical project find the necessary ‘historical breathing space’?1 It is surprising how benevolently Adorno reviewed German history. Ordinarily, he had been the harshest critic of the status quo, but now he seemed to sense a historic opportunity. The present, he assured the students who packed his lecture hall to overflowing, is ‘the time for theory’.2
New Leftists
The lines of conflict of debates to come were already laid out in that statement. But in the autumn semester of 1965, Adorno’s affirmation of pure philosophy must have been met with approval in the ranks of the New Left. If the seed Adorno had sown yielded such an abundant harvest in the sixties, it was thanks to the enthusiasm for culture among Germans born in wartime, as well as to the rise of the first theory generation.3 In 1959, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had adopted the Godesberg Programme, abandoning the goal of overcoming rather than reforming capitalism, and in 1961, it declared the new political course irreconcilable with the aims of its former youth organization, the Socialist German Student League (SDS), and cut off its financial support. This push-off into precarity