Adorno Public and Private

Steven Helmling
University of Delaware
English Department
helmling@UDel.Edu

A review of:

• Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• —. Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• —, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943-1955. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• Gerhardt, Christina, ed. “Adorno and Ethics.” Special issue of New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006).

When students excited by “The Culture Industry” or some other Adorno reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a good answer: History and Freedom, Adorno’s previously unpublished 1964-1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the self-consciously “difficult” writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of that “late” work. Actually History and Freedom reprises Adorno’s whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called “Progress or Regression?”); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial early essay, “The Idea of Natural History,” and no fewer than four extend the hints in “The Actuality of Philosophy” on “the transition from philosophy to interpretation.” All of Adorno’s major career investments are here except “the aesthetic”: there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the lectures on interpretation, but “the aesthetic” connects with the main theme mostly via Hegel’s “end of art.”
 

Oh, yes: Hegel. Hegel’s ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno’s conflictedness about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won expertise to discriminate Adorno’s near-idolatry of Hegel from his often angry critique of him. By contrast, History and Freedom compels Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he, of all people, should have kept fluid and “dialectical”; worse, Hegel’s lapse into this error is always in favor of the “universal” and against the “particular,” for the master and against the slave.) When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some “famous” remark from Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann’s expert notes quote generously from the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment–and, often, instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno’s other writings. (Adorno here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.)
 

Advanced students, too, will find this collection (more than any of Adorno’s other lecture collections) a thrilling read, because even improvising for undergraduates, Adorno’s thinking aloud produces a Niagara of insight and provocation that overloads the most diligent attention. Adorno’s power to “ram every rift with ore” is as striking here as anywhere in his oeuvre. I have said this book is more accessible than Adorno’s “finished” prose; it is often more stirring as well, because more spontaneous and digressive, as well as more passionate in venting Adorno’s vibrant indignation at the course of the world, reprising and updating his chronic anxieties “after Auschwitz” and after Hiroshima.
 

Here as in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno diagnoses the devolution of “spirit” from Hegel’s dialectical joining of spirit and matter “objectively” (anticipating dialectical materialism) to positivism’s dichotomizing of the two, which renders “spirit” merely “subjective,” the disvalued term of an antithesis. In the problem of universal and particular Adorno elicits the agon of history and the individual. “Philosophy of History” in the West has presupposed “universal history”–an idealist and reifying concept that Adorno of course historicizes to yield the heuristic of a “technological rationality” which may usefully be staged as a single story, that of the “progress” from slingshot to atom bomb–with “progress” pointedly in scare-quotes. Technology promises universal mastery over nature even as it reduces millions of particular suffering individuals to servitude. “Domination” (Herrschaft) as universal “master” produces the “dominated” as particular “slave.” History promises universal freedom, but delivers instead universal compulsion, unfreedom.
 

In the final third of the course, Adorno pursues “Antinomies of Freedom” not anticipated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, often eliciting psychoanalytic overtones. “Enlightenment” since Spinoza has held that happiness is living “in accordance with Reason,” but even apart from the “dialectic of Enlightenment” sketched above, some obdurately bodily “impulse” intuits freedom as archaic and primordial, and thus irreconcilably at odds with administered modernity. Reason becomes the opposite of happiness, that chancy state that ratio can never “rationalize.” (Both German Glück and English “hap”-piness connect etymologically to chance or [good] luck.) The body experiences happiness as freedom from reason, freedom of and for “impulse” itself–a word whose connotations of irrationality Adorno charges with utopian voltages. Oddly, Adorno doesn’t cite the distinction, posited by his erstwhile Oxford colleague Isaiah Berlin, of “positive freedom” (freedom to participate in political life), as against “negative freedom” (freedom from unnecessary social constraints). But here as elsewhere Adorno’s thematic of “ego weakness” converts Nietzsche’s warnings about “the last man” from a portent for the future to a present condition, and in ways that resonate richly with Lacan and Zizek on the ways we learn to love our unhappiness. Adorno himself almost yields at moments to the premise that consciousness enlarges fruitfully only under the sting of unhappiness, though obviously the lectures as a whole assimilate freedom to happiness, however “broken” this “promise.” But in the closing lectures, a critique of Kant’s coercive categorical imperative, another universal master by which the individual is condemned (in Sartre’s phrase) to freedom, the “somatic impulse” of happiness has its analogue in morality as well, thus opening at least the possibility of a happy and moral futurity, a “not yet” worthy to be called “history.”

 
In his “Foreword ” to History and Freedom, Rolf Tiedemann observes that for Adorno, “freedom” is a problem “in the philosophy of history, rather than in moral philosophy where it has traditionally been found” (xvi). I cite the point by way of an introduction of the Winter 2006 New German Critique special issue on “Adorno and Ethics.” Adorno’s acid comment that “ethics” is “the bad conscience of morality” is a slam at ethics and morality both–he goes on to speak of “the blunt incompatibility of our experience with the term ‘morality'” (Problems 10)–and in History and Freedom, he asks whether good and evil can still mean anything for us, living as we do “[in] a kind of infernal reflection of the utopia of which Nietzsche had dreamt” in Beyond Good and Evil (History and Freedom 207). Almost half the New German Critique articles don’t address ethics at all; those that do mostly project ethics as a high ideal that “we” continually fail, especially “after Auschwitz,” to live up to. (“We” professionals? “We” practitioners of critique? “We” whose professional ethic should be to gag at the very phrase “professional ethics”?) The New German Critique ethicists fret over “the very possibility of an ethics,” finding (of course) for impossibility, and duly lamenting it. The problematizations are subtle and scrupulous, but they skirt the problem Adorno rubs raw, the corruption and illegitimacy of “ethics” at large. After Auschwitz?–no; since long before Auschwitz, and as cause, not as effect: after “administration,” doing ethics has become barbaric.
 

The “ethics” essays are led off by J.M. Bernstein’s “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘After Auschwitz’.” Bernstein identifies four “lacunae” in Adorno’s attempt at a “philosophical” response to the Shoah, and finds these deficits supplied by Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, “almost as if Agamben’s book were designed to fill in the missing arguments in Adorno’s account” (33). Besides Agamben, Bernstein takes bearings from Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt (a footnote explains that the essay is part of a larger attempt to reconcile Arendt and Adorno [35n7]); another waypoint is Foucault’s “modernity as biopolitics”–the claim not merely to power over subject populations, but of “administrative” sovereignty over biological process as such. Hence the “administrative” drive, in the camps, to reduce the inmates to “living dead”: to kill individuality and moral agency in advance of killing the “mere” physical bodies. Bernstein rewrites a famous sentence in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, putting “biopower” where the original had “enlightenment”: “biopower is mythical fear radicalized” (40, adapting the Jephcott trans. 11). Hence if Agamben’s account of “domination” is more philosophically coherent than Adorno’s, this achievement proves to be self-discrediting. “Biopolitics” requires a constitutive distinction of reason from bios, and in deconstructing this binary Bernstein shows that Agamben’s critique of it actually preserves its kernel of domination (reason as master, bios as slave). Thus does Agamben’s ethical argument compromise the very possibility of an ethics. Adorno partisans will think this a satisfying result, but it raises the question, Why adduce Agamben at all?–since the terms in which Bernstein sets up his argument are drawn rather from Arendt. Presumably Agamben is a foil for Arendt, setting the terms for Bernstein’s projected Arendt/Adorno rapprochement. Bernstein defaults to the Adorno premise that a properly philosophical response to the Shoah must resist the “dialectic of enlightenment” dynamic of domination. In Adorno, that means (at minimum) a response that owns affect, and on that ground, surely, Arendt is closer to Adorno than to Agamben. I can’t guess whether Bernstein’s pursuit of his theme will traverse the question of “philosophy and literature,” but his evocation of Primo Levi (in a moving passage from The Drowned and the Saved) seems a promising, if oblique nod toward “the aesthetic.”
 

Bernstein’s article is followed by Michael Marder’s “Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering,” an eloquent inquiry, in implicit dialogue with Bernstein, into how, if at all, “we,” the living, can witness for the six million dead–questions that generate discussion of “ethics” and/as memory. Christina Gerhardt’s “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and Kafka” reviews Adorno’s treatment of cruelty to animals, the relevant contexts from Kantian “Reason” (in which animals figure simply as the not-rational) to Freud’s account of totemism (which uncovers telling cathexes of animals in the unconscious), and Schopenhauer. The essay is more a survey than a critical discussion: the account of Kafka, for instance, makes nothing of the affective distance between the stories functioning within the “animal fable” paradigm (the ape of “Report to an Academy,” the dog of the “Investigations”) and that wholly original ordeal of guilty revulsion, “The Metamorphosis.” Alexander Garcia Düttmann, in “Adorno’s Rabbits; or, Against Being in the Right,” mounts impressive indignation on Adorno’s behalf against recent culture-wars detractors in the German press, and re-enacts Adorno’s protest against “domination” in all its forms (cognitive, affective, material, economic), in the proposition that “Being right . . . is not an ethical category”: insofar as philosophy is invested in being right, so much the worse, ethically, for philosophy.

The richest of the “ethics” essays is Robert Kaufman’s “Poetry’s Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion.” Kaufman floats free of the straitening scruples of “philosophy” to demonstrate that “Poetry’s ethics”–the aesthetic at large–dramatizes the conflicting claims of is and ought “rather than, as might seem to be required in philosophy itself, abstractly deciding between them” (77). Kaufman is a professor of literature, with joint appointments in English and German; he offers close readings of key passages, almost always citing (and discussing) the German text as well as the translation, beginning with the first “after Auschwitz” quote and Adorno’s many variant restatements of it throughout the ensuing controversy. “Lyric” is a focus for Kaufman–references to his other articles suggest a book in progress–because lyric, untrammeled by the burdens of narrative and character, epitomizes one extreme of aesthetic “semblance,” a mimesis that maintains a dialectical non-identity with what it ostensibly offers a semblance of. A “semblance,” in short, that refuses “adaequatio” conceptions of representation, can “keep the difference” between (the terms of Kaufman’s title) “aesthetic illusion,” which “keeps determination and ethical possibility open for exploration,” and the “sociopolitical delusion” that “the poem itself is already an ethical or political act” (118).

 
Kaufman writes and argues with a daring that accepts the challenge of Adorno’s dictum (which he quotes [92]) that “The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction” (Minima Moralia 86). He pursues, for example, the “poetry is barbaric” meme via the “homeopathic” twists of “immanent critique,” to the point of turning Adorno’s initial scorn of a certain genteel denial of twentieth-century barbarism into a justification of an unflinching poetry of shock, of “semblance”-barbarism like Paul Celan’s. (A two-page coda features Duncan’s poem, “A Song From the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings.”) Most daringly of all, Kaufman shares a story told him by his father, an Auschwitz survivor–and then interprets it, in just the way Agamben et al. would insist that “we,” whose witness can never be “authentic,” mustn’t do. On Kaufman’s (as on Adorno’s) showing, poetry’s ethics prove more flexible, more open, more ethical indeed, than philosophy’s; but Kaufman makes explicit the “ultimate [ethical] concern” (to recall Adorno’s under-acknowledged early mentor, Paul Tillich) that Adorno refused to declare in so many words. (As in the famous Hemingway passage about the words we don’t use anymore, refusal of the word attests commitment to the thing.)

 
Kaufman’s emphasis on Adorno’s language segues conveniently to two articles that touch on Adorno’s implicit “philosophy of language.” Gerhard Richter, in “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” replies to Rüdiger Bubner’s indignant refusal of Adorno’s ethicizing (so to speak) of the aesthetic. Richter argues the case by reading the last section of Minima Moralia with close attention to the German and with many instructive dissents from the standard translation by Edmund Jephcott. As in Kaufman, Adorno’s “non-propositional” truth-claim refuses “adaequatio” in favor of a Messianically-tinted “mimesis of what does not yet exist, the negative traces of a futurity that can be neither predicted nor programmed in advance but that nevertheless inscribe themselves into the artwork and into the philosophy that enters a relation with that artwork, as a nonidentical and negatively charged otherness” (Richter 129).
 

Samir Gandesha defends Adorno in “The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language” against Habermas’s charge that Adorno remains stuck in a “philosophy of consciousness” by appealing to what he considers Adorno’s implicit philosophy of language. The argument is based on Adorno’s early “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” which Gandesha and Michael Palamarek have translated for the first time, in a forthcoming University of Toronto volume, Adorno and the Need in Philosophy. (The translation is not included here.) Adorno writes that “all philosophical critique today is possible as the critique of language,” a dictum that Gandesha calls “programmatic for his philosophy as a whole” (139) and that he connects with the early Wittgenstein’s adviso that “all philosophy is critique of language” (Tractatus 4.0031). He likewise assimilates Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis of the “entwinement of myth and enlightenment” to the later Wittgenstein’s campaign against the “bewitchment” of thought by language. Gandesha’s effort (in which the defense against Habermas recedes) is to situate Adorno vis-à-vis not only Wittgenstein early and late but also vis-à-vis Heidegger, by the light (mostly) of the contemporaneous “Idea of Natural History” (in which Heidegger is the implicit adversary) and “Actuality of Philosophy” (in which it’s the Vienna-circle Wittgenstein). As for the later Wittgenstein, Gandesha finds unacknowledged rapprochement in “The Essay as Form” and in “Words from Abroad.” But Gandesha passes over Adorno’s dissents from Wittgenstein on clarity and on remaining silent, and from Wittgenstein’s adherence, early and late, to the “adaequatio” ideal, which would rule out critical negation (Kaufman’s “semblance,” Richter’s “mimesis”). Adorno does not share Wittgenstein’s aspiration to “leave everything as it was.”
 

I come at last to the two essays that come first in the New German Critique special issue. Detlev Claussen, in “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience,” wants to overturn the received view of the “mandarin” Adorno holding his nose through his forced exile in vulgar America. This meme is in the air, as witness David Jenemann’s Adorno in America (U of Minnesota P, 2007)–but whereas the American Jenemann stays modest in his claims, to avoid any appearance of grabby over-reach, Claussen, a German, stages the “American Adorno” as an affront to his countrymen, who take their proprietary title to Adorno too complacently for granted. “Simply put: without America, Adorno would never have become the person we recognize by that name” (6). Indeed, he might not have adopted that name; Claussen’s freshest suggestion is that Adorno dropped “Wiesengrund” (in 1942 in California) not to minimize his Jewishness (the usual conjecture) but to downplay his Germanness. (But see below.) Claussen overstates his case regarding Adorno’s absorption of American social-science research methods: Adorno’s indictments of positivism and empiricism, early and late, attest that his work on Paul Lazarsfeld’s Radio Project and The Authoritarian Personality only intensified his disdain of quantitative “research.” Perhaps Claussen argues the point more persuasively in his recent (as yet untranslated) 2003 biography, but as a short essay, the case seems more a provocative “exaggeration” than a worked-out attempt to convince.

 
Martin Jay’s “Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness” is less concerned to rehearse (again) Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, Jaspers, et al., than to pursue subtle contrasts between Adorno and Walter Benjamin on, e.g., “aura.” The famous peroration of Benjamin’s “Mechanical Reproduction” essay–where fascism aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art–is usually taken proscriptively; hence Adorno’s differences with Benjamin on “aura” (etc.) have been extensively discussed, but almost always on political grounds. Jay is alert to the politics, most interestingly with the suggestion that “authenticity” as a subtext of fascist racism prompted Adorno and Benjamin to valorize “the stigma of inauthenticity” (Jay adapts his title from Minima Moralia 154) on behalf of those condemned in Nazi-speak as “rootless cosmopolitans.” But by coming at these issues via “authenticity,” Jay illuminates the aestheticization sustaining that fetish. Especially illuminating is Jay’s articulation of “authenticity” with “mimesis.” As a conformity-imperative on behalf of authenticity, mimesis simply is ideology; but Jay also discerns along lines similar to Richter’s and Kaufman’s (above) a critical and negative mimesis that foregrounds its dissonance from “what is,” thus (in Jay’s words) “resisting identity thinking and the preponderance of the subject over the object,” and promoting a “passive receptivity that avoided domination of otherness” (21). To that extent mimesis has the potential to function not as the repetition but as the critique of “what is,” and not despite its “inauthenticity” but because of it. Hence the stakes in “taking on the stigma of inauthenticity.” (Jay also confronts a contradiction most commentators ignore: for all his sneers at “authenticity,” Adorno can evoke it honorifically in praise of artworks that realize these critical potentials. Jay deftly explains the terminological aspects of the question–i.e., the range of terms that English translates as “authenticity”: Authentizität, Eigentlichkeit, Echtheit–without reducing it to them.)

 
I picked up the Adorno-Mann correspondence expecting light on the Doctor Faustus collaboration, and I salivated over the early letter in which Mann woos Adorno, explaining what kind of novel he has in mind, and what kind of help he wants, but the actual work took place in real time when Mann and Adorno lived within easy reach of each other in Los Angeles, and by page 18 Doctor Faustus is already in print. (There are appendices reprinting Adorno’s two memos on how to characterize particular works by “Adrian Leverkuhn,” Mann’s composer-protagonist; these are apparently the principal documentary remains of the collaboration.) The reviews and controversies following Faustus‘s publication prompt some interesting exchanges, but the interest of these letters lies elsewhere. (I place Schoenberg’s pique at Mann’s novel, whose protagonist is credited with the dodecaphonic system Schoenberg himself invented, among the “elsewhere.”) Mann and Adorno exchange worries about the emerging Cold War; about Germany’s “recovery” from the war, especially its numbed and, both agreed, morally deficient posture toward (or away from) the genocide; about the German future and the question of their own return (or not) to Germany. Mann swore never to return; when he finally left California, it was to end his days in Switzerland. Adorno’s 1949 Frankfurt University stint as visiting lecturer was intended as a reconnaissance, but receptive students, a sense of duty as a public intellectual, and his unforeseen home-coming emotions (not to mention the rise of HUAC and McCarthy in America) started him thinking of returning for good. His first letter from Frankfurt to Mann makes a rich complement to the one he wrote his mother (see below).

 
Throughout, Mann and Adorno are exchanging current work: on Adorno’s side, Philosophy of New Music (Mann had read the Schoenberg sections in draft while writing Faustus, but the Stravinsky sections were new to him), Against Epistemology, In Search of Wagner, and numerous essays, reviews, radio talks, etc. Mann sent along The Holy Sinner, The Black Swan, and drafts of Felix Krull, as well as various essays and lectures. The back-and-forth, as each comments on the other’s latest work, is intellectual exchange of a very high caliber. (The extensive discussion of Wagner [92-7] is particularly rich.) There is, however, almost no disagreement between these two, and such differences as there are, they express in the mildest possible terms. Mann was ever the canny literary diplomat, but an Adorno who pulls his punches is something new.
 

Here is the largest interest (or guiltiest pleasure?) of these letters, the keyhole they open onto the personal relations of these two. For Mann, Adorno is (initially) an intellectual whose musical expertise he needs and whose continuing allegiance he wants; his praises of Adorno’s works can feel more than a little overdone. It helps, of course, that Adorno is an admirer from the beginning. Adorno, for his part, finds himself dealing for once with more than an equal: with a great and politically committed literary artist and cultural icon. (Mann’s Nobel came in 1929, when Adorno was 26.) Mann clearly had, and kept, the upper hand. Adorno saw that association with Mann could greatly boost his own prestige. Doesn’t Adorno compromise principle (not to say, make his own Faustian bargain) in agreeing to serve Mann’s basic premise–Schoenberg as the proto-Nazi Faust?–for Adorno thought Schoenberg the preeminent modernist good guy; wouldn’t he have preferred a Wagner-like protagonist for Mann’s Faustus? or a Stravinskian “reactionary” (see Philosophy of New Music)? Mann’s view of Wagner was aesthetic (à la early Nietzsche) rather than political; insofar as Mann and Adorno both took bearings from Freud, Mann sees Wagner as aesthetically potent in ways Freud helps confirm, Adorno as ideologically symptomatic in ways Freud helps diagnose. In any case, when Mann announces that he is writing a memoir about the composition of Faustus, Adorno is thrilled that his backstage role will get a curtain call, a prospect Mann played up while the book (Story of a Novel) was in progress. In the event, Adorno would be disappointed: Mann’s praise was fulsome, but (Adorno thought) understated his contribution. And of course Adorno had to swallow his spleen; he could never confess to Mann how slighted he felt.¹
 

Mann, as accredited culture-hero, can address Adorno with magisterial aplomb; Adorno, by contrast, is as usual (indeed, more than usual) anxious to dazzle. Story of a Novel isn’t the only case in which Mann seems almost to toy with the feelings of his admirer; consider also the issue of Mann’s “modernism.” Mann was a touchstone of modernism for Adorno; of anti-modernism for Adorno’s adversary in debate, Lukács–so of course Adorno sought to win the protean, shape-shifting Mann to the “modernist” side, away from the Lukácsean “demand for realism” (103). This push-pull is the subtext of a late exchange that begins when Mann confides his despair over Felix Krull, a comical picaresque of horny youth he had left unfinished decades earlier; resuming it now, at age 77, alas! he can’t find the right style, is uncertain of his genre, can’t reconcile the conflicts…. The letter is clearly fishing for encouragement, and Adorno is positively gallant in response: Mann’s past accomplishment has brilliantly reinvented genres, evaded the old-fashioned “will to style,” drawn power from dramatizing, not reconciling, tensions–assurances, of course, encoding an undeclared manifesto for (Mann’s) modernism. You can’t help imagining Mann’s Mona Lisa smile when, in a later letter, he shakes his head over Waiting for Godot in terms Lukács would applaud (“I cannot help feeling some anxiety for the society that finds acclaimed expression in such a work,” etc. [107]).
 

The head-games are of an altogether different kind in Adorno’s Letters to His Parents. To his public, Adorno was a virtuoso of unhappy consciousness; en famille, he’s a virtuoso of cheery exuberance–allowing that “virtuoso” connotes a certain willfulness. To his parents Adorno ever remained the adored only child, the star family performer and perpetual center of attention–but in these letters, Adorno must keep everyone’s spirits up during a maximally anxious period: the flight from Nazism and adjustment to a new and exigent life in a strange land. There is almost too much to discuss here, so let me simply list some principal interests of these letters. First, the candor and Gemütlichkeit of the family atmosphere: the abundant endearments and pet-names; gossip about family and fellow exiles; health complaints; and anxieties about the fate of dear ones (and property) left in Europe. Adorno’s parents devotedly read all their son’s work, and when (just once), the assiduousness falls short, Adorno’s protest is plaintive and loud–“Though . . . I can also understand that your weary old heads want to have some peace . . . Even the simplest things in life are just so damned dialectical” (165). Adorno’s father was the intellectual parent, and intellectual interest falls off after his death (8 July 1946), to which Adorno reacts with a classic, and eloquent, spasm of survivor guilt (258-59) well worth comparison to his published meditations on the Shoah.
 

To his mother, Adorno confesses his erotic turmoils–three of them: one, the disquieting reappearance of an old flame; one a heady but harmless infatuation with a charismatic beauty; and one a full-blown (but unserious) infidelity. If you only browse this book, don’t miss letter #83, a comic masterpiece in which Adorno boasts of his smitten-ness and of the charms of the sublime object, which are such as to arouse the cloddish hoi polloi to envy and hatred–“just like our theoretical writings” (139)! (Greta’s reaction to these adventures is not recorded here.)
 

Another fascination is Adorno’s running commentary on war news–e.g., the first letter after 1 Sept. 1939 swings between foreboding and sarcasm, in anxious hope that the whole thing may prove a drôle de guerre and end quickly. There is no reaction at all to Pearl Harbor, though America’s entry into the war had been a consummation devoutly to be wished. By late 1943 Adorno has become unrealistically optimistic about victory, consistently underestimating how long it would take, even as he remains apprehensive about fascist currents in America. We glimpse the effects of “enemy alien” restrictions: curfew (monitored by unannounced drop-ins from police); miles-from-home limits; travel permits from the FBI; worries about possible “evacuation” (i.e., internment). To his father Adorno blames his name-change (the loss of the patronymic Wiesengrund) on a stupid bureaucratic error.
 

These letters also give a vivid sense of the collaborative relationship with Horkheimer, especially of the degree to which Adorno was the one who set the words on paper, not only in their co-authored work but in much that is credited to Horkheimer alone, which Adorno edited, revised, rewrote–ghost-wrote, to put it no more strongly. Adorno briefs his parents on the inception and progress of what would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. He also fumes about the research projects (especially the “Studies in Prejudice” reported in The Authoritarian Personality) whose quantitative method he disdains, but whose reputation-making power he is determined to make the most of.
 

I’d always assumed Adorno’s 1941 move from Manhattan to Los Angeles galled him; not so: he disliked New York, and raved about the Riviera-like beauties of Southern California. Most touching is his recurrent wonder, despite the provincialism and vulgarity, at the fundamentally democratic culture of America: bureaucratic encounters are friendly as they would never be in Europe, and even the police who showed up unannounced to check curfew compliance were amiable and courteous. (That was then, this is now.) In November 1949, Adorno’s triumphant return to the family’s war-ravaged home-town (Frankfurt) generates poignant accounts of the ruins, both architectural and human.
 

We’ve been in something of an Adorno boom for some time now. Books, articles, and special issues of journals (like New German Critique‘s) continue to appear; even more auspiciously, important works like History and Freedom are being translated and published. (What I want next is Adorno’s first Habilitationschrift, a neo-Kantian reading of Freud that Adorno withdrew when it lost the support of Hans Cornelius, his advisor. In later years Adorno would veto its publication.)² Some of Adorno’s “canonical” works are even being re-translated: just in the last few years, we’ve had Dialectic of Enlightenment translated anew by Edmund Jephcott, and Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Hullot-Kentor is reportedly at work on a retranslation (long overdue) of Negative Dialectics. There is also a loosening of the strictures against interest in Adorno’s personal life. High-minded disdain of “the personal” is widespread in our highbrow culture; it has been consistent, however diversely motivated, from the New Criticism to la nouvelle critique and beyond; and it’s a disdain that Adorno, virtuoso of the hairshirt, might seem to epitomize. But predictably enough, Adorno’s centenary year (2003) announced the arrival of what we might call the moment of biography. In Germany, three of them have appeared. Detlev Claussen’s Der Letzte Genie remains untranslated, but as for the two now available in English, Lorenz Jäger’s Adorno: A Political Biography is a culture-wars screed; Stephan Müller-Doohm’s Adorno: A Biography is a reverential academic monument; neither gives any sense whatever of Adorno as a personality. Nor have the hitherto available letters: Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, despite the mutual affection between them, stays on a remarkably stratospheric plane of high-minded intellectualism. I would expect the correspondence with Horkheimer to be warmer and more personal, but it remains untranslated. Only the just-published letters to Berg have hitherto given us any flavor of Adorno’s humor, lustig very much in the Viennese manner. The letters reviewed here give us a more lively sense than any we’ve had so far (in English, at least) of what the private Adorno was like as a social being and as a family man. Of course the “personal” isn’t the only interest of these letters: as we’ve seen, Adorno’s commitment to his work was of an intensity to fuse public preoccupations with the personal ones. But “the personal” as such in Adorno proves to hold surprising fascinations of its own. If the letters to Mann suggest something of the degree to which the public Adorno’s hairshirt mortifications, all the guilt of history and the agonies of “after Auschwitz” granted, also had their springs in predictable personal ambitions and vanities, the letters to his parents disclose a real, and attractively “happy” surprise that I, at least, never anticipated: how lively and mercurial a sprite capered under the hairshirt.

Notes

1. For a strongly pro-Adorno account of further details–side-by-side comparisons of Adorno’s memos with Mann’s published text, anti-Adorno invective from Mann’s family after the great man’s death, Adorno’s reaction to slighting remarks about him that Mann had written in letters to others–see Müller-Doohm 314-20.

2. Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre [The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche] (Philosophische Früschriften 79-322); for details of the episode and a brief account of the dissertation, see Müller-Doohm 103-6.

Works Cited

• Adorno, T.W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.
• —. Philosophische Frühschriften. Theodor W. Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.
• —. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Ed. Thomas Schröder. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• Müller-Doohm, Stephan. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.