Notes
Preface
1. Letter of Adorno to Kracauer, 19 July 1951, from the Adorno-Kracauer correspondence located in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar (hereafter abbreviated DLA).
2. Letter of Adorno to Kracauer, 14 November 1963 (DLA). Suhrkamp Verlag cannot confirm these figures because of incomplete records.
3. For instance, between 1928–1932 Adorno published in and edited the musical journal Anbruch while in Vienna. The dates and Adorno’s exact duties are somewhat controversial: cf. Heinz Steinert, Adorno in Wien: Über die (Un-)Möglichkeit von Kunst, Kultur, und Befreiung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993), 152–176. During the early thirties Adorno gave several radio talks and regularly published under Siegfried Kracauer’s editorship in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and as his correspondence records, he entertained the idea of becoming a journalist like Kracauer and Georg Simmel rather than an academic.
4. Gerd Kadelbach, “Persönliche Begegnungen mit Theodor W. Adorno im Frankfurter Funkhaus,” in, Politische Pädagogik: Beiträge zur Humanisierung der Gesellschaft, ed. Friedhelm Zubke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1990), 51–52.
5. Letter of Adorno to Kracauer, 17 December 1963 (DLA). Adorno’s modus operandi since the late thirties was to collect copious notes, then dictate, and repeatedly edit the typescripts. For most of the essays in the present volume there are between three and seven extant typescript versions.
6. Adorno most clearly describes his practical engagement in the mass media for the purpose of what he calls “debarbarization” in texts collected in Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker, 1959–1969 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), in which the radio lecture versions of several essays from the present volume are reprinted.
7. Adorno in his response also appends the paragraph from “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” dealing with the law on homosexuality; Weder Krankheit noch Verbrechen: Plädoyer für eine Minderheit, ed. Rolf Italiaander (Hamburg: Gala Verlag, 1969), 227–228.
8. “The demand for binding cogency without system is the demand for thought models [Denkmodelle]. These are not merely monadological in kind. The model concerns the specific and more than the specific, without evaporating into its more universal generic concept. Philosophical thinking means as much as thinking in models, and negative dialectics an ensemble of model analyses [Modellanalysen]” (T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Seabury Press, 1973], 29; translation modified). On the double gesture of critique see p. 154: “The ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are.”
9Negative Dialectics, 29 (trans. modified). Kracauer too recognized the affinity and praised the author of Jargon of Authenticity for being a genuine “moraliste.” Kracauer to Adorno, 22 November 1963, in DLA.
10. As Adorno himself wrote: “No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott [London: NLB, 1974], 85).
11. “The Essay as Form,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:13. Cf. a similar formulation in Negative Dialectics, 45.
12. “Punctuation Marks,” in Notes to Literature, 1:91–97. All citations in this paragraph are from that essay.
13. For a useful introduction to this vocabulary see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); and Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
14. Cf. “Words from Abroad,” in Notes to Literature, 1:185–199; “On the Use of Foreign Words,” in Notes to Literature, 2:286–291, and his apothegm “German words of foreign derivation are the Jews of language” in Minima Moralia, 110.
Reviewing Adorno
1. Richard Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, and Patrick Carnegy’s Faust as Musician, Music and Letters, vol. 55, no. 2 (April 1974), 219. A different range of critical reviews of Adorno’s work is covered in Martin Jay’s seminal essay “Adorno in America,” New German Critique, no. 31 (Winter 1984), 157–182. The level of polemic, hostility, and rhetoric he records is sometimes extraordinary. Whereas Jay’s essay focuses on Adorno’s complex reception, mine focuses more on how the reception served as material for Adorno’s own thought. Both essays acknowledge that German- and English-speaking reception differ in many respects. The most informative text on Adorno’s public work is Rolf Wiggerhaus’s The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). In the present essay, although there are obvious overlaps between my thoughts and those present in much secondary literature, I have referred almost to none other than the reviews of Adorno’s work and mostly reviews published in the course of his lifetime and the years immediately after his death when several of his books appeared for the first time (either in German or in English). I hardly ever quote Adorno himself, although all the time I am referring to the essays in the present volume. If I do quote, it is mostly, for reasons I explain, the last lines of his own essays. I adopted this approach to maintain a somewhat independent narrative not burdened too heavily by the usual scholarly apparatus. I have kept notes to a minimum. There are many excellent secondary texts with excellent bibliographies from which I have benefited. I am extremely grateful to Taylor Carman, Boris Gasparov, Tom Huhn, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Andreas Huyssen, Richard Leppert, Jonathan Neufeld, Ernst Osterkamp, Henry Pickford, and Hans Vaget for their corrections and comments.
2. Cf. the following reviews by Horst Krüger, of Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Kritisiche Blatter, 172–173: “ein elegantes Stück polemischer Prosa“; H. M. Estall, of Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Aesthetischen, The Philosophical Review, vol. 43 no. 3 (May 1934), 322; Paul Tillich, of Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Aesthetischen, Journal of Philosophy, vol, 31. no. 23 (November 1934), 640; Mosco Carner, entitled “Three Austrians,” Musical Times, vol. 110, no. 1513 (March 1969), 268 and 270; Gerry Stahl, of The Jargon of Authenticity, Boundary 2, vol. 3, no. 2 (Winter 1975), 49; F. E. Sparshott, of Philosophy of Modern Music, Musical Times, vol. 115, no. 1574 (April 1974), 303. A full list of reviews in the year 1968 was listed in Kurt Oppens et al., Über Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); some but not all of these reviews I was able to track down.
3. Cf. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, ed., Theodor W. Adorno zum Gedächtnis. Eine Sammling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 46 and 47. It has been remarked that those who tended to follow Adorno as a cult figure were those who tended not to read his work (cf. Robert C. Holub, review of Prisms, 1967, the first German book by Adorno to be translated into English, German Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (March 1983), 285–286). Cf. “The ‘Frankfurt School’ is probably the tendency in contemporary social thought which everyone ‘knows’ and nobody reads,” Geoffrey Pearson, review of Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, British Review of Sociology, vol. 25, no. 1 (March 1974), 111. On the other hand, Zoltan Tar remarks rather sarcastically in his review of several of the Frankfurt School publications (including Adorno’s Minima Moralia), that “one of the few positive by-products of the student revolt” was that it brought attention in America to the Frankfurt School (Contemporary Sociology, vol. 4, no. 6 [November 1975], 630).
4. Cf. Franz Alexander’s review, where he remarks that the recent studies of authoritarianism offered a “welcome reminder” of the fact that “free societies represent extremely short and rare episodes in history,” which is to say that freedom cannot be taken for granted; review of The Authoritarian Personality in Ethics, vol. 61, no. 1 (October 1950), 76–80.
5. Recorded in Alf Lüdtke’s “‘Coming to terms with the Past’: Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 65, no. 3 (September 1993), 552.
6. Cf. ibid., 554 and 558.
7. The letter is reprinted in Wolfram Schütte, ed., Adorno in Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 146.
8. These were the concentration camp guards who were convicted in the 1963–65 Frankfurt, Auschwitz trial. See this volume, note 13, p. 370.
9. Cf. Franz Alexander, review of The Authoritarian Personality: “Somewhat arbitrarily, the authors identify antidemocratic leanings almost exclusively with the Fascist orientation and disregard the trend towards leftist authoritarianism” (78).
10. Cf. J. F. Brown’s review of, among other books, Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1950), 176.
11. Cf. W. Stark, in review of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Sociologie, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962); British Journal of Sociology, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 1963), 81–83.
12. Cf. Stark, who quotes Adorno: “For social reality as it exists in the age of the concentration camps, castration is more characteristic than competition.” “This,” Stark concludes, “surely, is not the voice of sober scholarship” (ibid., 83).
13. Cf. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern, 1973), 81, 76–77, and 66, especially the point that when the Third Reich was claimed to be the “true democracy,” it caricatured equal rights by concealing the unalleviated discrimination of societal power.
14. Cf. Franz Alexander’s criticism of this theory as (doubly) “one-sided,” review of The Authoritarian Personality, 79. Another critic said of the institute’s work generally that the findings were better than their explanations; W. Baldamus, “Gruppenexperiment: Betriebsklima,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 1950), 65–66.
15. Cf. Kurt H. Wolff’s review of “Jugend der Nachkriegszeit . . .” (a book for which Adorno wrote an introduction), American Sociological Review, vol. 20, no. 2 (April 1955), 243–246.
16. Cf. Joseph H. Bunzel, review of The Authoritarian Personality, American Sociological Review (1950), 573; also see previous note.
17. Cf. Holub, review of Prisms, 285–286.
18. Cf. the opening lines of the introduction to Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. The translation of this book’s title has thus far been Philosophy of Modern Music, which in my view inadequately captures Adorno’s particular focus on the idea of the new. In what follows, where possible, I use the translation of neu as “new.”
19. The line “Thousands of people march past” is from a text by John Henry Mackay, which Schoenberg used also in an early tonal song “Am Wegrand” (op. 6). Pappenheim quoted only this line in her libretto for Erwartung.
20. Cf. Stark, “Exaggerations and crudities occur frequently throughout the volume,” review of Horkheimer and Adorno, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Sociologie, 83; Richard Middleton discusses the “extremism” that led Adorno to condemn so many of the twentieth-century composers; review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 221.
21. Stark, review of Horkheimer and Adorno, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Sociologie, 82–83.
22. William E. Webster, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 35, no. 2 (Winter 1976), 244: “Normative aesthetics is at best ‘iffy’ and it is my contention that pejorative aesthetics is either simply disguised criticism or poor theory. I see no place in the realm of philosophy or art for the kind of scathing invective that Adorno levels at Stravinsky.”
23. F. E. Sparshott, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, Musical Times, vol. 115, no. 1574 (April 1974), 303.
24. Cf. Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 223.
25. Usually this phrase is translated into English as the “master of the smallest link,” but I think the English word transition is preferable to link, both because it better captures the movement or inherent musicality of Adorno’s thought and because Adorno spoke often of transitions in politics and in music: for example, that postwar Germany is “a time of transition.”
26. Cf. Tim Souster’s review of Alban Berg, Tempo, no. 88 (Spring 1969), 65.
27. Brown, review of Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 176.
28. Cf. R. M. Schemmerhorn’s review of The Authoritarian Personality, Social Forces, vol. 29, no. 3 (1951), 335.
29. Cf. W. Phillips Davison’s review of, among other books, Sociologica: Aufsätze, Max Horkheimer zum Sechzigsten Geburtstag Gewidmet, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 1956), 481.
30. Geoffrey Pearson, review of Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, 111–113. Jay’s book was certainly one of the most important for introducing Adorno’s work to the English-speaking world after Adorno’s death.
31. Franz Alexander, review of The Authoritarian Personality, 80: “At this moment of human history, when all the major representatives of Fascist ideology have been defeated in the last war, this book, with its sociological orientation which ignores the now existing threats to our still free society, appears strikingly out of date.” Cf. also Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 222: Adorno is “fixed in time and place. One searches in vain for an awareness of divergences in social situation. . . . We are not all natives of twentieth-century Austro-Germany; perhaps we are not all governed by identical historical necessities.”
32. Stark described Adorno as a “diehard (Freudian) of the old school,” review of Horkheimer and Adorno, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Sociologie, 83.
33. Bunzel, review of The Authoritarian Personality, 571.
34. Holub, review of Prisms, 285, who comments that Adorno’s remarks on popular culture are “dated and superfluous,” “polemically flat and undialectical.”
35. Cf. Adorno, Jargon, 68.
36. Hans Jürgen Krahl, “The Political Contradictions in Adorno’s Political Theory,” Telos, no. 21 (Fall 1974), 164.
37. Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 219.
38. Wolf Franck, review, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1950), 279.
39. Helmut Lamprecht concluded his review, “. . . was der Fassade nicht gleicht,” of Noten zur Literatur with a recognition of Adorno’s particular form of provocation; Frankfurter Hefte (March 1962), 205: “Der Impuls seines Denkens ist von der gleichen Moralität wie sein Denken selber, das nicht blenden will.”
40. In his review of Noten zur Literatur, Peter Demetz remarks on Adorno having the courage like no other to pursue the topics he did; “Der Rabe Entfremdung,” Merkur (December 1965), 1196.
41. Cf. Mosco Carner’s review, “Three Austrians,” Musical Times, vol. 110, no. 1513 (March 1969), 268 and 270: where the author writes that in order to appreciate how good this book is, and he thought it absolutely the best book of the series he was reviewing, “you have first to hew your path through a thicket of metaphysical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological shrubbery, [and] accept the idiosyncratic language of the Frankfurt Professor of Sociology and come to terms with his oblique style.”
42. Arthur Jacobs, review of Hanns Eisler’s (coauthored by Adorno, but initially his name was left out of the text, given troubles in the McCarthy period) Composition for the Films, Musical Times, vol. 93, no. 1315 (September 1952), 406.
43. Sparshott, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 303.
44. Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 223.
45. Anonymous, “Intelligence and Servitude,” review of Noten zur Literatur, Times Literary Supplement, no. 3 (February 16, 1962), 129.
46. Cf. anon., review of Noten zur Literatur, TLS, 1962, 98.
47. Adorno, Jargon, xxi.
48. Ibid., 9.
49. Franck, review, 285.
50. Irving Wohlfarth, “Hibernation: On the Tenth Anniversary of Adorno’s Death,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 94, no. 5 (Comparative Literature; December 1979), 956.
51. Adorno, Jargon, 111.
52. A. P. Faulkes, review of Ludwig Rohner, “Der Deutsche Essay: Materialien zur Geschichte und Ästhetik einer Literarische Gattung” (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1996), Comparative Literature, vol. 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1968), 355.
53. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” Notes to Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, 1:3–23, and “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos, vol. 31 (Spring 1977), 132 (translation modified).
54. Webster, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 244.
55. Note for comparison’s sake how, in her review of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Gillian Rose described the failure of the translator William Ashton to preserve the unfamiliarity of Adorno’s prose, to render it familiar by translating it into what he took to be idiomatic English. She is astounded, she says, by the translator’s remark that Adorno “thinks in English”; American Political Science Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1976), 698, 599.
56. Lazarsfeld became the head of Columbia Bureau of Applies Social Research in 1937 and was the Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. Adorno worked with Lazarsfeld at the Princeton Office of Radio Research.
57. Cf. Adorno’s opening lines to his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 19.
58. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “An episode in the history of social research: A Memoir,” Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1969), 301, 322–323.
59. Hans Keller, review of Philosophie der Neuen Musik, Tempo (1950), 32.
60. Cf. Schütte, ed., Adorno in Frankfurt, 154.
61. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, Bd. 1 1927–1937, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 65. I thank Hans Vaget for reminding me of this letter.
62. See the essay in the present volume, “Notes on Philosophical Thinking,” dedicated to Marcuse on his seventieth birthday.
63Jargon, 108, specifically for the move, in reverse order, from a discussion of Heidegger to that of Wagner.
64Jargon, 25.
65. Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), 42–48.
66. Wolf Franck begins his review: “Although he has been a writer and teacher of note for more than two decades, the author of this book is still unknown to the general public.” He then goes on to describe Adorno in terms offered by Schoenberg and Mann (review, 279). Tim Souster (review of Alban Berg, 65) also quotes Mann’s passage on Adorno’s life at length, and notes that thus far Adorno is “regarded a major intellectual force” only on the continent.
67. Cf. Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 223.
68. Mann, letter to Jonas Lesser (15.10.1951), Erika Mann, ed., Briefe 19481955 und Nachlese (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), 226. I thank Hans Vaget for telling me about this letter.
69. Middleton, review of Philosophy of Modern Music, 223.
70. Cf. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12.11.49, repr. in Schütte, Adorno in Frankfurt, 152.
71. Schütte, Adorno in Frankfurt, 146–149.
72. Wohlfarth, “Hibernation,” 956.
73. Gillian Rose, review of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, 698.
74. Cf. Adorno, Jargon, 44.
Interventions
Introduction
1“Ausgebaut und vertieft” (literally “built up and deepened”): hackneyed contradictio in conjunctio used incessantly by diplomats and journalists to refer to the German-Austrian alliance in 1918 and savagely dissected by Karl Kraus in “Ausgebaut und Vertieft,” Die Fackel (September 1918), reprinted in Kraus, Weltgericht: Polemische Aufsätze und Satiren aus den Jahren 1914–1919 gegen den Krieg, ed. Heinrich Fischer (Munich/Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1965), 237–246. The phrase also suffers dramatic “tender persecution” in act 5, scene 9 of Kraus’s Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (1926). Cf. also Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 85, where he discusses the same phrase.
2. The “clump” results from the density of the German semantics: Eingriff, literally “intervention,” also can mean “abortion,” as in the expression verbotener Eingriff, literally “prohibited intervention” yet actually meaning “illegal abortion”; Verhältnis in the plural means “relations, conditions” (e.g., of society in Marxist philosophy); in the singular (as here in the original) it can mean “relationship,” “liaison” in the sexual sense. English “relations” conveys only some of this ambiguity.
3. Adorno is here playing on the dialectical relationship between essence (Wesen) and appearance (Erscheinung), as for instance in Hegel’s Science of Logic, with, however, the further qualification that the essence is a “malfeasance” (Unwesen).
Why Still Philosophy
1. Radio version has “intellectual Vatican City” instead of “enclave.”
2. Allusion to Heidegger’s neologisms and his etymological argumentation in his later interpretations of pre-Socratic philosophy. Adorno’s “resolute beings” [Entschlossene] puns on Heidegger’s decisionistic “resoluteness” [Entschlossenheit] as in sections 60 and 62 of his Sein und Zeit (1926); English: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
3. Allusion to Hegel’s famous dictum,
 
Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich;
und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.
[What is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.]
 
It appears in the preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (G. W. F. Hegel, Werke [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], 7:24) and is returned to in the introduction (§6) of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Werke, 8:47ff.). English: G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.
4. Radio lecture and first published version are more to the point here: “In the face of the unspeakable that occurred and can happen again just as easily . . . .”
5. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Die Kehre,” in Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1962). Heidegger’s ‘turn’ is generally taken to be from human existence (Dasein) to Being (Sein) itself. English: “The Turning,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 36–49.
6. Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 219–241. English translation in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 23–34.
7. Adorno several times obliquely cites the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], 6–7): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” (“The world is everything that is the case”).
8. Cf. preface in the Phänomenologie des Geistes, G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 3:56. English: “What, therefore, is important in the study of science, is that one should take on oneself the strenuous effort of the concept” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 35; translation modified).
9. Walter Bröcker, Dialektik—Positivismus—Mythologie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1958).
10. Adorno is parodically referring to Heidegger’s “hut” in the Black Forest, using the medieval term “Gehäus” as in Dürer’s 1514 etching of St. Jerome, Hieronymus im Gehäus, as well as to the “stahlhartes Gehäuse” (“iron cage” [sic]) of modernity in the conclusion of Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. English: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1993).
11. A Kantian term, das Mannigfaltige is sometimes rendered in English as “the [sensible] manifold.”
12. The “something” (“Etwas”) is a topos in Kantian epistemology resulting from the division between the intelligible world of objects in themselves (noumena) and the sensible world of appearances (phenomena). “And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based on a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something” (Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977], 57). The original is in Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783), §32 (A. A. 4:314f.). For the same topos in Kant’s moral theory, cf. the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (A. A. 8:461f.); English: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 60.
13. Günther Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 8 (1947/48). Cf. also Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1, Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, 5th (expanded) ed. (Munich: Beck, 1980), 21–96; and vol. 2, Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (Munich: Beck, 1981), 335–354.
14. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 53 (A. A. 5:51).
15. Adorno’s citation of “Dabeisein” alludes to a passage from Hegel: “The principle of experience contains the infinitely important determination that, for a content to be accepted and held to be true, man must himself be actively involved with it [dabei sein], more precisely, that he must find any such content to be at one and in unity with the certainty of his own self. He must himself be involved with it, whether only with his external senses, or with his deeper spirit, with his essential consciousness of self as well” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, with the Zusätze, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §7, p. 31). German: Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 8:49–50.
16. Radio and first published versions continue here: “Students experience this for themselves when they come to the university with the unconscious hope that their eyes will be opened, and instead they are put off with methodologies that ignore their actual concerns and consign them to the contingency of reviled aperçus and in fact isolate the students’ original inquisitiveness and degrade it into prattle about worldviews.”
17. Husserl’s famous injunction underlying his phenomenological method.
18. “This is an expression of the impracticality of idealistic construction as soon as it reached complete consistency. What is not proper to the subject appears phantasmagorically as reflection in transcendental phenomenology, though it fancies itself breaking directly out of the phantasmagoria in the mirroring of ‘what gives itself as such.’
This is true to Benjamin’s definition of Jugendstil as the dream in which the dreamer dreams that he has awakened” (T. W. Adorno, Against Epistemology [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982], 138). Adorno here footnotes Benjamin, “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts,” Konvolut K, B1.2 (now: Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V/1 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982], 496).
19. ‘Wesenschau’ is variously translated as ‘essential insight’, ‘intuition of essences’, and ‘eidetic intuition’ and refers to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as the method to intuit the forms of consciousness underlying perceptual cognition.
20. Radio and first published version of this sentence: “Marx’s thesis against Feuerbach, that philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways while it is a question of changing the world, already foresees the end of philosophy.”
21Diamat is the abbreviation of “dialektischer Materialismus” (dialectical materialism) common in the Socialist countries.
22. With “consciousness of needs” (“Bewußtsein von Nöten”) Adorno quotes a nonexistent Hegel passage several times at strategic junctures in his argumentation for the role of modern art (e.g., Philosophie der neuen Musik, GS 12:22 [where Adorno provides the reference to Hegel’s Ästhetik] and Ästhetische Theorie, GS 7:35, 309) because the edition of Hegel’s Ästhetik he used (ed. Hoth, 2d ed. [Berlin, 1842]) misinterprets Hegel’s text: Hegel speaks of “Bewußtseyn von Nöthen,” an older orthography conforming to the modern phrase “etwas vonnöten haben” (“something is needed, required”) and not, as Hoth (and hence Adorno and his readers) take it, meaning “Bewußtsein von Nöten,” “consciousness of needs.” Hegel is speaking of the fact that consciousness is necessary (more in the learning of the art of poetry than in the art of music) while Adorno takes him to be saying that art in general exists as long as it is accompanied by the “consciousness of needs.” Cf. Jürgen Trabant, “‘Bewußtseyn von Nöthen,”’ Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Sonderband aus der Reihe text + kritik (Munich: text + kritik, 1977), 130–135.
23. Radio version interjects: “spirit, the consciousness of people about themselves. . . .”
24. Radio version is slightly different: “Only thinking that does not forsake the impulse toward the unconditioned without, however, elevating itself as unconditioned is able to call the universally conditioned by its own name. It is as irreconcilable with reified consciousness as Platonic enthusiasm once was. But what exists would have as its purpose to exist for its own sake.”
25. Adorno is here drawing on the entire semantic field of German “Schuld”: “wrong,” “guilt,” “sin,” and “debt.”
26. G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Here from the “Preface” (Vorrede), p. 26. English: “To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason. As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts” (G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 21).
27. Allusion to Heidegger’s text, in explanation of his turning down the second offer of a philosophy chair in Berlin, “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum Bleiben wir in der Provinz?” (1933) originally in Der Alemanne: Kampfblatt der Nationalsozialisten Oberbadens, 67a, “Zu neuen Ufern: Die wöchentlich erscheinende Kulturbeilage der Alemannen,” 9 (Freiburg, 1934; reprinted in Nachlese zu Heidegger, ed. Guido Schneeberger [Bern, 1962], 216–218; and in Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983], 13:9–13). English: “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? (1934),” trans. Thomas J. Sheehan Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture (River Forest), 112 (3) (1977): 122–125. In an introductory lecture course in philosophy Adorno used this text to excoriate Heidegger’s latent fascism: in the work “you can see how the supposedly pure ontological in the texts of Heidegger himself moves into a laudatio of the simple peasant life, that is, into a kind of blood-and-soil ideology” (Philosophische Terminologie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973], 1:152).
28. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Von den Hinterweltern,” Also Sprach Zarathustra, vol. 4 of Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1967–1977), 35–38. English: “On the Afterworldly,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 30–33.
29. Adorno plays on the resonance between das Heile, “the safe and sound,” and das Unheil, “the calamity.”
30. Presumably an allusion to the conservative Springer Verlag.
31. Robert Drill, Aus der Philosophen-Ecke: Kritische Glossen zu den geistigen Strömungen unserer Zeit (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societäts-Verlag, 1923). Drill was a national economist who turned to neo-Kantianism (in the person of Ernst Marcus) in search of a secure “standpoint.” The book is a loose collection of digressive occasional pieces, reviews, critical comments on anthroposophy, expressionism, Spengler, the “woman question,” etc., as well as expository appreciations of philosophers and social theorists of the German idealist tradition. Kantian “criticism” and psychoanalysis (topics that may have drawn Adorno’s attention to the book initially) serve more as invocations to “healthy common sense” than as argumentative means.
32. Adorno plays here on the resonance between Weisheit, “wisdom,” and Wohlweisheit, his neologistic substantivization of the adverb wohlweislich, meaning “prudently” and implying cautious conservatism.
33Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), Joseph von Sternberg’s 1930 film version of Heinrich Mann’s novella Professor Unrat oder das Ende eines Tyrannen (1905). Cf. Adorno’s polemic against the reissuing of the novel with the title altered to Der Blaue Engel in “Ein Titel,” and “Unrat und Engel,” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11:654–660. English: “A Title,” and “Unrat and Angel,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),2:299–304.
Philosophy and Teachers
1. Secondary school (in its three varieties: humanistisches Gymnasium, das Realgymnasium, die Oberrealschule) in Germany extends to the pupil’s eighteenth year of age. Students who successfully complete the school receive the Abitur, roughly equivalent to British A-levels or the first two years of undergraduate study in the United States.
2. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Von der Nächstenliebe,” in Also Sprach Zarathustra, vol. 4 of Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1967–1977), 76–79. English: “Do I recommend love of the neighbor to you? Sooner I should even recommend flight from the neighbor and love of the farthest. Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future: higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts” (“On Love of the Neighbor,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking Press, 1966], 61).
3. Presumably an allusion to the character of Tesman in Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler. In act 2 Hedda says of her husband, the scholar, “Tesman is a specialist . . . and specialists are not at all amusing to travel with. Not in the long run, at any rate.” Quoted from vol. 10 of the William Archer edition of The Works of Henrik Ibsen (New York: Viking, 1911–12), 92f. Adorno is also probably referring to the section “Acclimatization and Specialization” in Löwenthal’s study of Ibsen; cf. Leo Löwenthal, Literature and the Image of Man: Communication in Society (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1986), 2:163ff. An earlier version was published in the Institute journal: Leo Löwenthal, “Das Individuum in der individualistischen Gesellschaft: Bemerkungen über Ibsen,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 321–363.
4. A posthumous tract: Deducirter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren Lehranstalt: Geschrieben im Jahre 1807 von Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1817). The text was reprinted in a modern collection on “the idea of the German university,” a topic under extreme scrutiny at the time Adorno was writing the present essay. Cf. Die Idee der deutschen Universität: Die fünf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegründung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus, ed. Ernst Anrich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956).
5. In the twenty-fifth “adventure” of the Nibelungenlied Hagen, the vassal of King Gunther, leads the royal retinue to visit the king’s sister Kriemhild, who, following the murder of her husband Siegfried by Hagen, has married the Hun Etzel and, notwithstanding twelve years of marriage, still plans to avenge Siegfried’s murder. While searching for a ford or ferry across the swollen Danube, Hagen meets two water nymphs who warn him that all the company will be killed by the Huns with the sole exception of the king’s chaplain. To test the prophecy Hagen hurls the chaplain into the raging waters of the Danube as they cross by ferry, and the chaplain, who cannot swim, remarkably survives and remains on the near side of the river. Thus Hagen knows that the entire retinue is fated to perish and vows to fight to the bitter end.
6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Elektra”: Tragödie in einem Aufzug frei nach Sophokles, orig. 1904, in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Herbert Steiner, vol. 3 of Dramen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1959), 29–30. The reference is to Clytemnestra’s words in her response to Electra’s intimation that a sacrifice must be made to appease the situation, meaning the murder of her mother:
 
CLYTEMNESTRA: We need only make subservient to us
the powers that are scattered somewhere. There are
rites. There must be proper rites for everything.
(Electra: A Tragedy in One Act, trans. Alfred Schwarz, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Plays and Libretti, ed. Michael Hamburger [New York: Pantheon Books, 1963], 27–28)
 
7. Adorno’s citation: “Ich will ja gar kein Mensch sein”; the full citation is “Oh, Jungens, ich will doch gar kein Mensch sein” and is spoken by Paul in scene 8 of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, originally in Versuche, Heft 2 (Berlin: Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1930); now in Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Stücke 2 (Berlin, Weimar, Frankfurt: Aufbau-Verlag, Suhrkamp, 1988), 351.
8. Adorno’s Fachmenschentum (specialized personnel) alludes to Max Weber’s coinage in the opening pages of his introduction to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920–21); English: introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), where he very ambivalently evaluates the unique conjunction of specialization and thoroughgoing administrative organization in Western rationality. Adorno’s pun rests on the idiomatic phrase “seine Orgien feiern” (celebrate one’s orgies, go wild): in this case, “orally.”
9. Hans Cornelius (1863–1947), professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, under whom Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their dissertations.
10. Cf. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie, in GS 6:413–526. English: The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
11. Adorno here contrasts the Hegelian notion of externalization (Entäußerung), in which a person develops through a dialectic of self-abandonment to an external subject and self-transformation, with merely indifferent rote learning of independent information. For the latter activity Adorno uses the cliché “sich mit etwas auseinandersetzen,” “to confront, come to terms with something,” but literally “to set oneself apart from something,” precisely the opposite of “externalization.”
12. University degree required for the teaching profession.
13. Adorno here echoes Hegel’s Hellenophilic stylistics: the German Paränese (Paränesen here, in plural) has an equally abstruse English equivalent: parænesis: exhortation, advice, counsel, a hortatory composition, from the Greek images (advice, counsel).
14. The German originals are: “in etwa,” “echtes Anliegen,” and “Begegnung.” The latter two carry existentialist overtones.
15Ebbes in the dialect of Hessen is equivalent to the standard High German etwas, “something.”
16. The German idiom is “wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist,” literally, “just as the beak has grown on one,” which does not have the connotation of spontaneity that the English idiom does.
17. First published version directly cites the neo-Marxist phrase “sedimented cultural goods of the privileged class.”
18. Radio and first published version has “are not natural [naturhaft]” instead of “are not invariants.”
19. Plato: daimon in Apology 31d as Socrates’ inner voice, divine advisor, in Symposium 202e eros is called a daimon (mediator between mortals and immortals) that impels the lover of wisdom to attain cognition of the good and the beautiful. Cf. also mania in Ion 533dff. and Phaedrus 244ff.
20Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, in Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, vol. 3, Schriften zur Identitätsphilosophie, 1801–1806 (Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927), 229–374. English: F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan, ed. Norbert Gutermann (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966).
Note on Human Science and Culture
1. This essay especially relies on the fabric of the German language and the German intellectual tradition. Geist is “spirit,” “mind,” or “intellect” as opposed to matter or nature; geistige Gebilde are the fabrications, works, creations that are infused, shaped by spirit. Wissenschaft means both “science” and “scholarship.” Though Wilhelm Dilthey did not invent the term, in 1883 he secured the meaning of Geisteswissenschaften as the “sciences of the spirit” (including the humanities, history, the arts, etc., and here rendered “human sciences”) as opposed to sciences of nature in his Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay the Foundation for the Study of Society and History (ed. and trans. Ramon J. Betanzos [Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1988]). In later development the term came to designate all hermeneutical inquiries into human society and cultural production as opposed to analytical and positivistic methodologies, a distinction Adorno elaborated in his contribution to the “positivism controversy” in German sociology. Adorno adds a further twist by using the word in its uncustomary singular in the title and at strategic junctures in the essay, in analogy to “natural science” (Naturwissenschaft): a linguistic performance of the essay’s argument that the consolidation of a false model of scientific method homogenizes and reifies the diverse and irreducibly dialectical human sciences. Adorno coins the verb entgeisten and the substantive Entgeistung, “dispirit,” “deprivation of spirit,” as the ultimate step in a worldview characterized by the human self-image as “the ghost in the machine.” The semantics of Bildung, “formation,” “development,” “culture,” “self-cultivation,” “education” and its related verb bilden, is also specific to the German intellectual tradition and is differentiated from education in the sense of practical training (Ausbildung) and specialized training (Fachbildung). The distinction is paralleled by that of autonomy and heteronomy. The theory of Bildung as the development of a learned and cultivated personality through Wissenschaft was characteristic of German Idealism and Humboldt’s university reforms.
2. On the network of meanings to the term Entäußerung see Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975), 537–568. Lukács draws the parallels between Goethe and Hegel in his Goethe and his Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London: Merlin Press, 1979), 157–255.
3. Adorno’s neologisms entgeisten, Entgeistung (rendered “dispirit,” “dispiriting”) here echo Nietzsche’s lament of the “despiritualization” [Entgeistigung, also a neologism] of German education; cf. section 3 of “Was den Deutschen abgeht” in Götzen-Dämmerung in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter: 1967–1977), 6:105. English: “For seventeen years I have not tired of shedding light on the despiritualizing influence of our contemporary science business. The burdensome serfdom to which the immense range of the sciences condemns every individual today is the main reason why natures with fuller, richer, deeper constitutions can no longer find any suitable education or educators. Nothing makes our culture suffer more than the oversupply of arrogant loafers and fragments of humanity; our universities, despite themselves, are really the greenhouses for this sort of stunting of spiritual instincts” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer, trans. Richard Polt [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 45).
4. Adorno’s verb here, gleichschalten, belonged to the Nazi vocabulary and meant forcing institutions to toe the party line after 1933.
5. First published version of this article has instead of “the same” (das Gleiche), “Being” (das Sein).
Those Twenties
1. Adolf Frisé (born 1910), German writer, editor of Robert Musil’s Collected Works, and director of the cultural program of the regional radio studio Hessischer Rundfunk 1956–1975. Lotte Lenya (1898–1981), Austrian actress and singer, wife of Kurt Weill, famous as interpreter of the Brecht/Weill plays (Mahagonny,Threepenny Opera, Seven Deadly Sins, etc.), emigrated in 1933 and came to the USA in 1935.
The radio discussion was between Frisé, Lenya, and Adorno, part of the “evening studio” program of Hessischer Rundfunk, and was broadcast on July 26, 1960. The Hessischer Rundfunk’s catalog gives the following summary of the dialogue: “An attempt to illuminate anew the reality of the twenties against the background of the experiences of a contemporary witness. To start off the discussion Adorno formulates the idea of imagelessness, the lack of traditional ‘imagines’ in America, from which result worlds of synthetic images, for instance, that of the wild West and the image of the ‘golden twenties.’ Addressing the question of the fascination of the twenties, the attempt is made to separate the real characteristics of this period from the aspects of a synthetically produced imagistic world of the ‘golden twenties.’ Arguing for a relativistic interpretation, Adorno speaks of aesthetic and thematic ‘archetypes,’ which were laid out in the twenties and only today are becoming productive for art. As an example he notes Stockhausen’s collective compositional technique as a continuation of Brecht’s collective work.”
2. IGNM = Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik (International Society of New Music). In nuce Adorno’s argument in his article is that the new music, for all its apparently radical innovations, occurs within the established order of society: “The music has stabilized, and has submitted to the requirements of the likewise freshly stabilized society; to be sure, the music has caught up to the development of society and has liberated itself from the petit bourgeois privacy of the nineteenth century as well as from the undynamic rigidity of its musical system; the stabilized music of today relates to the stable music of the nineteenth century no differently than the most progressive theory of marginal utility relates to classical economic theory. However, within the frame of such change everything has remained as it was” (Adorno, “Die stabilisierte Musik,” in GS 18, Musikalische Schriften 5:721–728, here p. 725). According to the editorial afterword, this article was written in 1928 but never published. Cf. also “Das Altern der neuen Musik” in Dissonanzen, in GS 14:143–168; English: “The Aging of the New Music,” Telos 28 (Summer 1976): 113–124.
3. Allusion to Adorno’s essay “Zeitlose Mode: Zum Jazz” in GS 10.1:123–137. English: “Perennial Fashion: Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 119–132.
4. Allan Bott, Our Fathers (1870–1900): Manners and Customs of the Ancient Victorians: A Survey in Pictures and Text of their History, Morals, Wars, Sports, Inventions, and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1931; reprint, New York: Blom, 1972).
5. “Alienation” [Verfremdung] in the sense of Brecht’s alienation effect: a familiar object, practice, etc. is “defamiliarized” by detaching it from its everyday context or by breaking the conventions through which it is unrefractedly experienced.
6Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill; Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1929) by Brecht and Weill; Ernst Krenek, Jonny spielt auf (1926), opus 45, piano and vocal score. English: Johnny Strikes up the Band: An Opera in Two Parts, book and music by Ernst Krenek, English version by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Bullman, 1928).
7. Cf. the refrain “alles dürfen darf” from the men’s chorus in act 2, scene 13 of the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in Bertolt Brecht, Werke, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Kopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller, vol. 2, Stücke 2 (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 362; English: Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (Boston: Godine, 1976), 68:
 
One means to eat all you are able;
Two, to change your loves about;
Three means the ring and gaming table;
Four, to drink until you pass out.
Moreover, better get it clear
That Don’ts are not permitted here.
Moreover, better get it clear
That Don’ts are not permitted here!
 
8Wunschbild, “ideal-image,” “image of desire,” a terminus technicus in Freud denoting the ideal image of a love-object as constructed by the libido. Cf. Die Traumdeutung (1900); English: The Interpretations of Dreams, vols. 4 and 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
9. According to Brecht, his early drama Baal (1918) was an “antithesis” or “materialistic” “counter-design” to the drama Der Einsame: Ein Menschenuntergang (1917) by Johst, an idealistic expressionist dramatization of the life of the poet Hans Christian Grabbe (1801–1836). Brecht said he wanted to “undermine the weak successful drama [ . . . ] with a ridiculous treatment of genius and the amoral,”Schriften zum Theater 15 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1963), 69.
After being attacked by Nazi ideologues for his early expressionist plays, Hanns Johst (1890–1978) began writing in praise of Hitler and the National Socialist cause. His play Schlageter (1933), glorifying the early Nazi martyr, was performed regularly in the theaters of the Third Reich. In 1933 Johst was named producer of the Prussian State Theater and made president of the Academy of German Literature; in 1934 he was appointed to the Prussian State Council, and in 1935 he became president of the Reich Theater Chamber. He called for a “reawakening of confidence” as the condition for a new völkisch theater under National Socialism and is said to have boasted that whenever someone mentioned the word culture to him, he was inclined to reach for his revolver.
10. The German Umbruch means literally the breaking up, plowing up of soil for aeration and replanting and figuratively a radical change or shake-up.
11. Adorno articulates his abhorrence at the idea of a “guiding image” (Leitbild) in the text that opens his essay collection Ohne Leitbild (1967, 1968), now in GS 10.1.
12. To designate a third entity between serial and post-serial music Adorno “coined the term musique informelle as a small token of gratitude towards the nation for whom the tradition of the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage to produce manifestos.” Although he dialectically explicates the notion of informal or aserial music through recourse to specific works, Adorno broaches an initial description:
What is meant is a type of music which has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way. At the same time, although such music should be completely free of anything irreducibly alien to itself or superimposed on it, it should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of external laws. Morever, wherever this can be achieved without running the risk of a new form of oppression, such an emancipation should also strive to do away with the system of musical co-ordinates which have crystallized out in the innermost recesses of the musical substance itself.
He adds that, as “an image of freedom,” such music, “had been a real possibility once before, around 1910. The date is not irrelevant, since it provides a demarcation line dividing the age from the vastly overrated twenties.” Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” originally in Quasi una fantasia (1963), now in GS 16: 493–540; English: Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992): 269–322 (cited: pp. 272–73).
Prologue to Television
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, 902, vol. 12 of Goethe’s Werke, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1973), 497.
2. First published version: “The more seamless the imagistic world, the more fragile it becomes at the same time.”
3. First published version interjects here: “one hit song was called ‘Especially For You’* . . . .”
4. First published version is slightly different: “The reading of a number of admittedly better than average television drama scripts . . . .”
5. Georg Legman, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1963). An extremely witty study of the negation of sex and the institutionalization of violence in American life, as reflected in murder mysteries, comic books, films, etc., and the patent absurdity of censoring sex while promoting violence. He also offers trenchant social-psychological interpretations of the figure of the “bitch-heroine” and innumerable high (Hemingway) and low (Gone with the Wind) manifestations of misogyny and gynophobia. “My dear fellow, it is not easy to take the adolescent’s mind off sex. It takes death, death, death, and more death. For adults, more still” (93). “Violence and death have saved us from sex” (94).
6. First published version is more Freudian here: “which condition the instinctual impulses of the public according to the requirements . . . .”
7. An ironic allusion to Zarathustra’s self-injunction “Werde, der du bist!” in his address to the “human sea” in Also Sprach Zarathustra (in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin/New York: de Gruyter: 1967–1977], 4:297). “Open up and cast up to me your fish and glittering crabs! With my best bait I shall today bait the queerest human fish. My happiness itself I cast out far and wide, between sunrise, noon, and sunset, to see if many human fish might not learn to wriggle and wiggle from my happiness until, biting at my sharp hidden hooks, they must come up to my height—the most colorful abysmal groundlings, to the most sarcastic of all who fish for men. For that is what I am through and through: reeling, reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are!” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking Press, 1966], 239).
8. First published version is slightly different: “and changing its destructive force for the good, . . .”
9. First published version interjects the following sentence: “In the words of Leo Löwenthal, psychoanalysis in reverse is carried out.”
10. First published version interjects a further “maxim”: “that fathers are wax in the hands of their cruelly enchanting daughters . . . .”
11. One of the maxims “From Makarie’s Archive” [Aus Makariens Archiv] in book 3 of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, no. 172, p. 485 of vol. 8 of Goethe’s Werke. The maxim is reprinted as no. 137 in Maximen und Reflexionen, vol. 12 of Goethe’s Werke. English: J. W. von Goethe, Conversations of German Refugees: Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Jane K. Brown (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 435.
12. Like English, the German “to watch television” [fernsehen] means literally to “see far, into the distance.”
Television as Ideology
1. First published version begins with the following two sentences: “‘Prologue to Television’ theoretically developed some things the new medium inflicts upon the consciousness of those exposed to it. Concrete proof of these implications must be added to those theses.”
2. First published version has “barbaric” instead of “philistine.”
3. First published version has the following: “They were carried out in a pilot study at the Hacker Foundation in Beverly Hills during the time from November 1952 to August 1953. The author must thank Bernice T. Eiduson, George Gerbner, Merril B. Friend, and Liesel Seham for their assistance.”
4. Dallas W. Smythe and Angus Campbell, Los Angeles Television (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1951). Other research studies include: New York Television, January 4–10, 1951–52 (Urbana, Ill.: National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1952); New Haven Television, May 15–21, 1952 (Urbana, Ill.: National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1952); Three Years of New York Television, 1951–53 (Urbana, Ill.: National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1953). Interpretive studies by Smythe include: “Television in Relation to Other Media and Recreation in American Life,” Hollywood Quarterly 4 (Spring 1950): 256–261; “An Analysis of Television Programs,” Scientific American 1951 (June): 15–17; “The Consumer’s Stake in Radio and Television,” Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television 6 (Winter 1951): 109–128; “What TV Programming is Like,” Quarterly Review of Film, Radio, and Television 3 (Summer 1952): 25–31; “The Content and Effects of Broadcasting,” Mass Media and Education, National Security for the Study of Education, 53d Yearbook (1954): 192–217; “Reality as Presented by TV,” Public Opinion Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1954): 143–156.
5. First published version has “older films” instead of “films.”
6. The footnote in the original manuscript report presented to the Hacker Foundation on April 13, 1953, and now located in the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt, runs as follows:
According to the December 1951 issue of Los Angeles Television by Dallas W. Smythe and Angus Campbell and published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, “drama programs took the largest piece of available television time. Approximately one fourth (26%) of the total television program time during the test week was devoted to general adult drama programs.” “During the evening hours this percentage increased to 34.5% of programming with an additional 1.7% in children’s drama.” “Within the broad class of drama, the Western drama led all subclasses of programs. . . . Together with crime drama, these two forms of drama contribute 1/5 of all television programming.” “In addition, drama took over one half of the children-hours programming.” “If the television user tuned in at random between 7:00 and 11:00 P.M. any day of the week, the probability would be one out of three that he would encounter drama.”
7. Hans Weigel (1908–1991), novelist, dramatic critic, satirist, and playwright, who lived in Vienna except for the period between 1938 and 1945 when he was in political exile in Switzerland. Adorno is presumably alluding to a scathing review of the film version of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion by Ernst Marischka (“Für und wider Marischkas Matthäus-Passion”) originally in Welt am Montag, (Dec. 7 and 14, 1949), reprinted in Hans Weigel, 1000 Premieren: Hymnen und Verrisse (Graz: Styria, 1983), 2:393–397. Weigel argues principally against the practice of making a “film version” of classical musical works and in particular here that the excellent musical and choral production (Herbert Karajan directing) is mutilated by the commercial need to tell and show a “story.”
8. “Refunction” [umfunktionieren] in Brecht refers to the practice of alienating a term, situation, etc. from its habitual context and redeploying it in a critical fashion; “Brecht has coined the phrase ‘functional transformation’ [Umfunktionierung] to describe the transformation of forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia—an intelligentsia interested in liberating the means of production and hence active in the class struggle” (Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock [London: NLB, 1973], 93).
9. The earlier English study, on which this essay is based, offers a useful comparative exposition of the interrelationship Adorno sees between aesthetic complexity (or “multilayered structure”) and the multilayered personality:
When we speak of the multilayered structure of television shows, we are thinking of various superimposed layers of different degrees of manifestness or hiddenness that are utilized by mass culture as a technological means of “handling” the audience. This was expressed felicitously by Leo Löwenthal when he coined the term “psychoanalysis in reverse.” The implication is that somehow the psychoanalytic concept of a multilayered personality has been taken up by cultural industry [sic], but that the concept is used in order to ensnare the consumer as completely as possible and in order to engage him psychodynamically in the service of premeditated effects. A clear-cut division into allowed gratifications, forbidden gratifications, and recurrence of the forbidden gratification in a somewhat modified and deflected form is carried through.
(“How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 8 [Spring 1954]: 213–235, here p. 223)
10. Georg Legman, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1963). In particular the chapter “Avatars of the Bitch”:
The “spirited” heroine—let us be frank, the bitch-heroine—appearing on the champ de Mars some twelve years ago, has carried popular literature before her; outselling, outswearing, and outswinging all competition. But she has not yet removed her mask. After a dozen years of spying out the land she still pretends to be merely a historical hussy, merely an exceptional vixen; or, if her methods are too bloodthirsty for the mild disguise of historical or individual peculiarity, she presents herself as a poor, helpless, pathological case. Let us not be fooled. She is no accident, neither of history, nor personality, nor pathology. She is a wishful dream—Venus Dominatrix—cunningly contrived out of the substance of women’s longings. She is presented to the “emancipated” but still enslaved wives-mothers-and-mistresses as a fantasy escape from their servitude to men, to fashion, traditional morality, and the paralyzing uselessness of being nothing but the show-horses of their owners’ success. (58)
Avatars include: Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Dutchess Hotspur, diverse femmes fatales in Dashiell Hammett, etc.
11. Theodor Fontane, Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), in vol. 7 of Sämtliche Werke
(Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1959). English: Theodor Fontane,Short Novels and Other Writings, ed. P. Demetz (New York: Continuum, 1982).
The eponymous protagonist of Fontane’s novel is a society woman who constantly upholds literature and sentiment while unhesitatingly seeking material advantage. Fontane ironically portrays her attempts to undermine her son’s betrothal to the richly cultured and intelligent daughter of a teacher, alas of modest means.
12. Johann Andreas Eisenbart (1661–1727) was an itinerant practitioner of the curative arts, oculist, and gem cutter, a “country doctor from Great Britain and Hannöverian-Münden” as his gravestone attests. An important surgeon in his time, he is now remembered as a type of medical charlatan, above all because of a song about him that first appeared in a fraternity songbook in 1818, the first quatrain of which is as follows:
 
Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart,
Kurier’ die Leut’ nach meiner Art,
Kann machen, daß die Blinden gehn,
Und daß die Lahmen wieder sehn.
 
[I am the Doctor Eisenbart,
heal the folks by my own art,
Make it so the dumb can walk,
And make it so the lame can talk.]
 
13. First published version explicitly cites the (unlocated) neo-Marxist passage.
14. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, “A Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in Kierkegaard, Crisis in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama, trans. Stephen Crites (London: Collins, 1967), 67–91.
15. First published version: “Precisely in Germany, where television is not yet institutionalized, where the procedure has not yet become established, and where economic interests do not directly control the programming, . . . .”
16. First published version specifies: “Instead of tracking down vulgar words and indecency like the Johnson Code, the ‘self-censor’ of the producers should be vigilant. . . .”
17. Reference to Paul Lazarsfeld’s project of wedding “administrative research” to critical theory. Cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16; and Adorno’s account of the divorce in “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” below. For a historical treatment of the failed marriage, cf. David E. Morrison, “Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld,” Social Research 45 (1978): 330–355.
Sexual Taboos and Law Today
1Denker in dürftiger Zeit, itself an allusion to Hölderlin’s “what use are poets in indigent times?” [“wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”] from his poem “Bread and Wine” [“Brot und Wein”], here alludes to Karl Löwith’s critical assessment Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (1935; 2d. ed. 1960), in Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1984), 8:124–234.
2Partialtrieb, “component or partial instinct,” a terminus technicus introduced by Freud in the first edition of Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905); English: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). The sexual drive is there analyzed into component or partial instincts, each with its own source (e.g., oral, anal, etc.) and goal (e.g., Bemächtigungstrieb, the instinct to master). The free interplay of the partial instincts explains the “polymorphous perversion” of childhood sexuality as well as the adult phenomena of fore-pleasure [Vorlust] and various perversions.
3. Karl Kraus, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität, Werke, vol. 11 (Munich/Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1963). Cf. Adorno’s review of this volume: “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität: Zum elften Band der Werke von Karl Kraus,” in Noten zur Literatur, GS11:367–387; in English: “Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:40–57.
4. Cf. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Bildung als Konsumgut: Analyse der Taschenbuch-Produktion,” in Enzensberger, Einzelheiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), 110–136. As part of his critique of the commodification of consciousness, Enzensberger takes to task Ernesto Grassi, the editor of the recently published Rowohlts deutsche Enzyklopädie. Grassi’s explanatory justification of the modern encyclopedia, Die zweite Aufklärung: Enzyklopädie heute [The Second Enlightenment: the Encyclopedia Today] defends the new encyclopedia’s (in Enzensberger’s words “haphazard”) concatenation of articles as being a “meaningful construct,” the only mode of presentation equal to modernity’s rapid production of knowledge, to which Enzensberger responds: “That he would like to be allowed to stipulate what an encyclopedia should be is of course understandable. We however would rather stay with Diderot and d’Alembert, even though these authors don’t get much attention from Grassi, just as we prefer the first Enlightenment to the second, which he threatens to continue to produce and which comes down to nothing more than reversing the idea and intention of its illustrious predecessor” (127). Later (pp. 129–130) in the article he faults another encyclopedia for leaving “the inner law of the mass media” unexplained and refers approvingly to the work of Anders and Adorno.
5. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950; reprint, New York: Hafner, 1971):
The solution of love problems tends to be phrased mainly in terms of female types and functions. Thus two current love requirements, which in part conflict with one another, find satisfaction in various film heroines. There is on the one hand the impact of what we call goodness morality, which leads to high estimation of the charms of wickedness as well as to guilt about pursuing them. The good-bad girl represents a solution to the problem which goodness morality poses to the man. On the other hand, expressing a more recent trend, there are the demands of what we call fun morality: you’ve got to have fun (whether you like it or not). If you are not having fun, you must ask yourself what is wrong with you. The strength of impulse, which seemed so assured when faced with the barriers of goodness morality, often dwindles before the imperative of fun morality. A relatively new type of heroine has appeared to help the man over this difficulty. She boldly takes the initiative in love relations and assures the man of her confidence in his masculinity even when he is not proving it. She estimates appraisingly the quantity of pleasure produced by a kiss, but does not seem to demand any all-out letting go of emotion, which might be difficult to achieve. Thus she approaches sex with a man’s point of view, helps the man who is inhibited when confronted by an excess of femininity, and makes the requisite achievement of fun seem not too much of a strain. (21–22)
The good-bad girl and the girl with the masculine approach, while they are frequently combined in a single prize package, satisfy to some extent different needs. The good-bad girl fulfills the wish of enjoying what is forbidden and at the same time meeting the demands of what we may call (with some apparent redundance) goodness morality. The good-bad girl is what the man thinks he wants when he is told by society and conscience that he must be good. The girl with the masculine approach satisfies a different need. She is related to what we may call (with some apparent contradiction) fun morality. You ought to have fun. If you are not having fun, something is the matter with you. Fun morality, widely current in America today, makes one feel guilty for not having fun. (82)
6. Fore-pleasure (Vorlust), a term introduced by Freud to designate an increment of pleasure accompanying increasing tension, particularly during sexual stimulation, prior to the “end pleasure” connected with the release of the tension. Freud interpreted this “incentive bonus” as the result of the interplay of the partial instincts after they have been integrated into genital sexuality and suspected that it “corresponds with an arrangement that holds good in many widely separated departments of mental life.” He saw “the fore-pleasure principle” operative in the way tendentious jokes use humor to suggestively evoke suppressed or repressed instinctual urges and in the way the writer’s reworked daydreams provide aesthetic pleasure that seduces the reader into a release of additional instinctual energy. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:149–156, 210–234; The Joke and its Relationship to the Unconscious (1905), Standard Edition 8:167–169; “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908), Standard Edition 9:153.
7. August Aichhorn (1878–1949), Viennese educational and social worker, became the director of an institution for children showing a tendency to become delinquent. He came to see how psychoanalysis offered insight into juvenile delinquency, and based on his experiences at the school he wrote Wayward Youth, in which he advocated psychoanalytic treatment instead of punishment in cases of juvenile delinquency.
In Wayward Youth (foreword by Freud, trans. and ed. E. Bryant, J. Deming, M. O. Hawkins, G. J. Mohr, E. J. Mohr, H. Ross, and H. Thun [New York: Viking Press, 1935]; from the original German: Verwahrloste Jugend [Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925]) Aichhorn offers psychoanalytically derived etiologies of juvenile delinquents in his care and described the means by which his school sought to modify character and behavior among its pupils through work-oriented therapy and positive transference. Cf. also Aichhorn, “Über die Erziehung in Besserungsanstalten,” Imago 9 (11) (1923): 189–221.
8. Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921); English: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, vol. 18 of the Standard Edition.
9. The association Lebensborn e.V. was founded in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler with the chief goals of furthering the “nordic” race, strengthening the campaign against abortion, and creating the next generation of German military forces, and it was the first step in the National-Socialist politics of “planned reproduction” [“gelenkte Fortpflanzung”]. The association was subordinated to the Central Office of Race and Settlement [Rasse- und Siedlungs-Hauptamt] and after 1938 was administratively answerable to the Central Office for Economics and Administration [Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungs-Hauptamt], both of the SS. The association actively promoted large families (at least four children) among SS officers and police, the support of unmarried mothers, and quite openly propagated the procreation of children out of wedlock. All full-time SS officers were obligated to join, and dues were inversely scaled to the given officer’s number of children.
The Lebensborn e.V. maintained its own maternity homes (in 1943 nine in the “greater German empire” and four in occupied territories), which took in, following a blood test administered by SS doctors, not only all wives and fiancées of SS and police members but also other women who fulfilled selection requirements and needed to keep their pregnancy a secret. In total about 8,000 children (60% of whom were born out of wedlock) were born in the maternity homes. Illegitimate children were either raised in SS children’s homes or placed with SS families. In addition, beginning in 1941, several hundred “racially valuable” children from populations in the occupied territories were taken into Lebensborn e.V. homes for compulsory “Germanization” [“Eindeutschung”]: for this several leading functionaries of the program were charged with kidnapping at the Nuremburg trials.
10. In a footnote in the first published version Adorno refers here to the first published version of “Working Through the Past.”
11. “Moral Rearmament” (MRA), also known as “Buchmanism” and the “Oxford Group,” was a vigorous modern revivalistic movement founded by the Lutheran evangelist Frank N. D. Buchman (1878–1961). The movement strove to bring about a moral transformation of society via a return to the Christian fundamental principles (the four “absoluta”) of honesty, sexual purity, selflessness, and neighborly love. The movement’s practice of public speaking and group confessing influenced the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
12. First published version has “the old wound” instead of “the old ache.”
13. The behavioristic “sociology of knowledge” movement (influenced by Talcott Parsons) proclaimed the victory of the empirical scientific method and the “end of ideology.” Opponents, including members of the postwar Frankfurt School, attacked the position for a “positivistically truncated rationalism” (Habermas) stripped of enlightenment critique and itself ideological and apologetic, since unacknowledged social prejudices inform the theory, which then seeks and implacably finds their empirical confirmation in the society that generated them. On the political level, the “end of ideology” thesis claimed that the monolithic ideologies were bankrupt (Marxism because of the Moscow show trials, liberal mercantilism because of the growing role played by state planning in western democracies) and advocated in their stead pragmatic flexibility. Cf. C. I. Waxman, ed., The End of Ideology Debate (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968).
14. First published version is more specific here: “People delight in the Threepenny Opera, the records of Brecht and Weill songs, as though they were the mementos of a golden erotic age: at the same time prostitution, which was more or less left in peace in the era when sexual repression was allegedly harsher, is being persecuted everywhere.”
15. First published version has “pregenital sexuality” instead of “sexuality alienated from its proper purpose” [zweckentfremdet].
16. ‘Anaclisis’ [Anlehnung], a terminus technicus to indicate how the sexual drives “lean on” the subject’s vital functions of self-preservation, through which the sexual drives receive an organic source, an orientation, and even the choice of love-object. Cf. S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905); English: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, vol. 7 of the Standard Edition.
17Triebregung, a terminus technicus by which Freud refers to the dynamic aspect of instincts [Triebe] to the extent that an instinct is actualized and specified within a determinate inner excitation [Reiz]. Cf. Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale” (1915); English: “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in vol. 14 of the Standard Edition
18Wunschbild, “ideal-image,” “image of desire,” a terminus technicus in Freud denoting the ideal image of a love-object as constructed by the libido. Cf. Die Traumdeutung (1900); English: The Interpretations of Dreams, vols. 4 and 5 of the Standard Edition.
19Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). Tatjana is presumably a reference to the female figure in Tchaikovsky’s opera Evgenij Onegin, based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s “novel in verse” of the same name. Baby Doll is a screenplay by Tennessee Williams about the awakening of a Mississippi woman to her sexuality. Although the film was banned in 1956 by the Catholic church, the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Cf. Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll (New York: New Directions 1956); Baby Doll and Tiger Tail: A Screenplay and Play (New York: New Directions, 1991).
20. Adorno alludes to a ballad by Theodor Fontane that was familiar to German children; “Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland,” in Theodor Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 20, Balladen und Gedichte, ed. Edgar Groß und Kurt Schreinert (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1962), 249–250. My English, which cannot capture the dialect adequately:
HERR VON RIBBECK OF RIBBECK IN HAVELLAND
 
Herr von Ribbeck of Ribbeck in Havelland,
A pear tree in his garden did stand,
And when the golden autumn arrived,
and the pears shone far and wide,
Then, noonday chiming from the tower bell
Von Ribbeck stuffed both his pockets full,
And if a boy came along with clogs o’foot,
Then he called, “Lad, d’ya wan’ so’ fruit?”
And come a girl, then he called: “Com’ ov’r here,
Little lass, come, I git a pear.”
 
And so it went for many a year, ‘till honest
old von Ribbeck of Ribbeck came to rest.
He sensed his end. Autumn had arrived,
again the pears were laughing far and wide,
von Ribbeck said: “It’s time for me to leave.
Lay a pear in my grave beside me.”
And they carried von Ribbeck out, three days after,
From his house with the doubled rafters.
Peasants and townsfolk of solemn face
sang: “Jesus, in thee lieth my faith.”
And the children cried, hearts heavy to bear:
“An’ now he’s dead. Who’s gonna giv’s a pear?”
 
Thus the children cried. That wasn’t rightly,
Ach, they knew old Ribbeck too slightly.
The new one, a scrooge, stingy and tight,
guards park and pear-tree day and night.
But the old one, with a sense of omen,
and full of mistrust for his very own son,
he knew exactly what he was doing there
when he asked that his grave get a pear,
and in the third year, from that peaceful abode
a little pear-tree sprig did sprightly unfold.
 
And the years, each comes and each goes,
Over the grave a pear tree grows,
and in the autumn’s golden light
it shines again far and wide.
And if in the churchyard a boy sets foot,
the tree whispers: “d’ya wan’ so’ fruit?”
and comes a girl, then: “Com’ ov’r her’,
Li’l lass, com’ an’ I’ll giv’ ya a pear.”
 
Thus blessings still flow from the hand
of von Ribbeck of Ribbeck in Havelland.
 
21. “Conversion” [Konversion], a terminus technicus to explain (according to Freud’s economical model) the “leap from the psychical to the somatic innervation,” that is, the libido is separated from its idea or presentation [Vorstellung] during the process of repression, and the resultant liberated libidinal energy is “converted” into somatic innervations, physical symptoms of psychical disfigurement. “Conversion hysteria” [Konversionshysterie] is a form of hysteria characterized by conversion symptoms. On conversion cf. Freud, Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen (1894) and “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse” (1905); English: “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in vol. 7 of The Standard Edition. On conversion hysteria cf. Freud, “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben” (1909); English: “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in vol. 10 of The Standard Edition.
22. Dante, Inferno, canto 5.
23. Paragraph 174 of the Criminal Code, entitled “illicit sexual relations with dependents” [Unzucht mit Abhängigen], defines dependent as someone entrusted to another through education, training, charge, or care, or dependent on another through official or institutional position, and includes seven pages of commentary on the law’s application. Cf. Strafgesetzbuch, vol. 10 of Beck’sche Kurzkommentare (Munich/Berlin: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963), 511–517.
24. Cf. Karl Kraus, “Kinderfreude,” in Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität, Werke, vol. 11 (Munich/Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1963).
25. Cf.: “But it must be remembered that it is the usual practice of the fascist to dress his most antidemocratic actions in a legalistic cloak.” (Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950], 974). See further the work on prejudice by the social psychologist Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1954), e.g., in the chapter entitled “The Prejudiced Personality”:
The Nazis were noted for their emphasis upon conventional virtues. Hitler preached and in many respects practiced asceticism. Overt sex perversion was violently condemned, sometimes punished with death. A rigid protocol dominated every phase of military and social life. The Jews were constantly accused of violating conventional codes—with their dirtiness, miserliness, dishonesty, immorality. But while pretentious moralism ran high, there seemed to be little integration with private conduct. It was sham propriety, illustrated by the urge to make all expropriation and torture of the Jews appear “legal.” (399)
See also p. 235; the chapter affirmatively summarizes The Authoritarian Personality. Adorno is certainly drawing on the work of two emigré legal scholars who were his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in New York City. Franz Neumann’s comprehensive study Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944) undertook a sociological interpretation of “the political pattern of National Socialism.” Otto Kirchheimer wrote several analyses, including “The Legal Order of National Socialism,” held as a public lecture at Columbia University in December 1941 and published in the Institute’s Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (9 [1941]: 456–75). These early essays are collected with biographical and bibliographical material in Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer, ed. F. Burin and Kurt Shell (New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1969). In the 1955 Festschrift to Horkheimer, Kirchheimer published an article to which Adorno may be alluding, “Politische Justiz” (in Sociologica: Aufsätze, Max Horkheimer zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet, vol. 1 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955], 171–99; English version, “Politics and Justice,” Social Research 22 [1955]: 377–98 and reprinted in Politics, Law, and Social Change, 408–27). The argument was expanded in Kirchheimer’s best known work, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). For a historical and theoretical treatment, see William E. Scheuermann, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
26. On folkways, note the seminal study by William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn, 1906), one of a group of American works of sociology the restored Frankfurt Institute planned to translate into German during the 1950s. The project never materialized, and these books remain unavailable in German.
On Durkheim’s concept of fait sociaux cf. the first chapter of Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982). Cf. also Adorno’s introduction to Emile Durkheim, Soziologie und Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967); reprinted in GS 8:245–279.
27. See for example section 4 of the second essay in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).
28. Cf. the “Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
29. A snub at Max Scheler’s “material theory of value ethics”: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (1916), reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Bern/Munich: Francke Verlag, 1966). English: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
30. In his voluntaristic radicalization of Kant’s principle of the moral law, Johann Gottlieb Fichte claimed that since deontological morality is based solely on reason, it is unconditioned, self-evident, and self-affirming. Cf. in particular J. G. Fichte, System der Sittenlehre: Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (1798).
31. The F-scale (F for fascism) was developed in the Berkeley Study Group to detect through content analysis, opinion polls, and interviews latent (fascist) authoritarian impulses in the American population.
32. The “Case of Vera Brühne” or the “Brühne Affair” was the media sensation of the summer of 1962, though she was only the secondary defendant in a five-week-long Munich murder trial covered extensively by the German press. Her friend, Hans Ferbach, was accused of murdering the Munich doctor Otto Praun and his companion Elfriede Kloo. Ferbach was allegedly acting on behalf of Brühne, who was Praun’s mistress and had been promised the inheritance of a property in Spain by him, only to learn that he wanted to sell the real estate. Praun and Kloo were found dead on Maundy Thursday 1960, and the case was first deemed by local police a homicide and suicide by Praun. Two years later rumors and accusations led the police to reopen the case and prosecute, when neither Ferbach nor Brühne could at that time provide a reliable alibi for the night of the killings. There was no evidence linking Ferbach, let alone Brühne, to the deaths aside from Brühne’s putative motive. The prosecution paraded several “girlfriends” of Brühne who dilated at length upon the dissolute character of the codefendant. The defense responded by introducing a secondary line of slanderers who suitably besmirched the characters of the initial witnesses. Other highlights of the trial included Vera Brühne’s daughter, Sylvia Cosiolkofsky, who had first told police investigators that her mother had confessed the murders to her but then rescinded her statement when put on the stand. Between the contradictory statements there was enough time for the daughter to fatally run down a pensioner in her mother’s automobile while intoxicated. The prosecution’s star witness, Siegfried Schramm, testified that Ferbach confessed the crime to him when both were being held in custody while awaiting trial. However, Schramm’s testimony too was liable to skepticism since he was an acknowledged police informant and professional con man with four convictions for fraud, who five days after testifying was again convicted of fraud and forgery.
Vera Brühne became a celebrity, and newspapers and magazines of the stature of Die Zeit and Der Spiegel joined the tabloids in reporting regularly on her alleged “unbourgeois” lifestyle. On June 8, 1962, Ludwig Ferbach and Vera Brühne were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
On the juridical dubiousness of the verdict cf. Frank Arnau, Der Fall Brühne-Ferbach: Autopsie eines Urteils (Munich: Verlag “gestern und heute,” Kurt Hirsch, 1965). Adorno also refers to the case of Vera Brühne at the conclusion of his review of Karl Kraus’s Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität (Morals and Criminality) in Noten zur Literatur. Cf. Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:56–57.
The Meaning of Working Through the Past
1. “Aufarbeitung” is here translated as “working through” and requires clarification since it does not wholly coincide with the psychoanalytical term “working through” (Durcharbeitung), though it is related. Its common meaning is that of working through in the sense of dispatching tasks that have built up and demand attention, catching up on accumulated paperwork, etc. It thus conveys the sense of getting through an unpleasant obligation, clearing one’s desk, etc., and some politicians and historians with less sensitivity to language than Adorno began using the term in reference to the need to reappraise, or “master” the past (the German for the latter being Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which connotes both confrontation and overcoming). At the outset of the essay Adorno contrasts “working through” (aufarbeiten) with a serious “working upon” (verarbeiten) of the past in the sense of assimilating, coming to terms with it.
2. Adorno’s reply to the highly critical appraisal of the postwar Frankfurt Institute’s Gruppenexperiment by the respected, conservative psychologist Peter R. Hofstätter, who defended what Adorno had disparagingly called the “positivist-atomistic” method of orthodox opinion survey (which defines public opinion as the sum of individual opinions). Hofstätter reinterpreted the material to indicate that by the study’s own standards only 15% of the participants could legitimately be considered authoritarian or undemocratic, a percentage fully comparable to that in any other Western country: there was no “legacy of fascist ideology” in Germany, no danger from the right. Furthermore, Hofstätter attacked the study’s authors as totalitarian moralists and idealists themselves. He described the qualitative analysis (Adorno’s contribution to the study) as “nothing but an accusation, or a demand for genuine mental remorse” and countered that “there is simply no individual feeling that could satisfactorily correspond to constantly looking at the annihilation of a million people”; therefore “the indignation of the sociological analyst” seemed “misplaced or pointless,” because according to Hofstätter, moral reflection on personal guilt was a private affair. Peter R. Hofstätter, “Zum ‘Gruppenexperiment’ von Friedrich Pollock: Eine kritische Würdigung,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 9 (1957): 97–104.
Adorno’s reply is no less polemical: “The method is declared to be useless so that the existence of the phenomenon that emerges can be denied.” According to him, Hofstätter’s criticism indicates the appeal to collective narcissism: “Hofstätter considers ‘it is hardly possible that a single individual could take upon himself the horror of Auschwitz.’ It is the victims of Auschwitz who had to take its horror upon themselves, not those who, to their own disgrace and that of their nation, prefer not to admit it. The ‘question of guilt’ was ‘laden with despair’ for the victims, not for the survivors, and it takes some doing to have blurred this distinction with the existential category of despair, which is not without reason a popular one. But in the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose; one might be suspected of harboring resentment” (Adorno, “Replik zu Peter R. Hofstätters Kritik des Gruppenexperiments,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 9 [1957]: 105–117; reprinted in GS 9.2:378–394, here 392–393).
3. Radio version: “I do not do wish to go into the question of neo-Nazi organizations. From the communication by Harry Pross you’ve learned more, and more starkly, about it than presumably most of us knew. Those of us who have gathered here see very little of what we want not to happen again—the fact that we do not want it already separates us from the others. But I consider . . . .”
4. Radio and first published versions continue: “Compared with this, the continued existence of radical-right groups, which by the way during the last weeks suffered a severe rebuff from the voters of Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein, seems to me to be only a surface phenomenon.”
5. Cf. Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht, bearbeitet von Friedrich Pollock, vol. 2 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, im Auftrag des Instituts für Sozialforschung herausgegeben von Theodor W. Adorno und Walter Dirks (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955).
6. Radio version: “You all, ladies and gentlemen, are familiar with . . . .”
7. Radio version adds: “or at least it is hardly reflected upon.”
8. Radio and first published versions have “naive” instead of “lax.”
9. Reference to Mephistopheles’s reaction to Faust’s death in part 2, after the latter finally says “Abide, you are so fair!” [“Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”] when contemplating his intentions for bettering the lot of humanity:
MEPH.:    Now it is over. What meaning can you see?
It is as if it had not come to be,
And yet it circulates as if it were.
I should prefer—Eternal Emptiness.
Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Doubleday, 1961], 468–471, ll. 11595–11603)
 
10. Cf. several essays included in the following collections: Hermann Heimpel, Der Mensch in seiner Gegenwart: Acht historische Essais (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954, 1957); Kapitulation vor der Geschichte? Gedanken zur Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956, 1957, 1960).
11. Radio and first published versions interject the following paragraph:
This German development, flagrant after the Second World War, coincides with the lack of historical awareness [Geschichtsfremdheit] in the American consciousness, well known since Henry Ford’s “History is bunk*,” the nightmare of a humanity without memory. It is no mere phenomenon of decline, not a reaction of a humanity that, as one says, is flooded with stimuli and cannot cope with them. Rather it is necessarily connected to the advancement of the bourgeois principle. Bourgeois society is universally situated under the law of exchange, of the like-for-like of accounts that match and that leave no remainder. In its very essence exchange is something timeless; like ratio itself, like the operations of mathematics according to their pure form, they remove the aspect of time. Similarly, concrete time vanishes from industrial production. It transpires more and more in identical and spasmodic, potentially simultaneous cycles and hardly requires accumulated experience any more. Economists and sociologists, such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber, have ascribed the principle of traditionalism to feudal forms and the principle of rationality to bourgeois forms of society. But this means nothing less than that recollection, time, memory is being liquidated by advancing bourgeois society itself, as a kind of irrational residue, similar to the way advancing rationalization of the industrial means of production reduces along with the remains of the artisanal also categories like apprenticeship [the radio version interjects: “that is, the gaining of experience”]. If humanity divests itself of memory and breathlessly exhausts itself in continually conforming to what is immediately present, then in doing so it reflects an objective developmental law.
12. For instance: “Here came to consciousness and received its plain expression, what German is: to wit, the thing one does for its own sake, for the very joy of doing it; whereas Utilitarianism, namely the principle whereby a thing is done for the sake of some personal end, ulterior to the thing itself, was shewn to be un-German.” Wagner goes on, first, to identify this “German virtue” with the highest principle of Kantian aesthetics, the autonomy of art, and, second, to advocate this principle as a national policy “which assuredly presupposes a solid ordering of every nearer, every relation that serves life’s necessary ends” (“German Art and German Policy” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, vol. 4, Art and Politics [New York: Broude Brothers, 1966; reprint of 1895 London edition by Routledge & Kegan Paul], 35–148, here pp. 107–108). Cf. also Adorno’s “What is German?” in Catchwords (this volume).
13. Cf. Franz Böhm in his preface to Gruppenexperiment, the published results of a study undertaken by the Institute for Social Research exploring ideologies of various population groups in postwar Germany:
 
What is it then that produces the shock when reading the present investigation?
  I would like to think that it is a double aspect.
      First of all the overly clear perception that alongside the so-called public opinion, which expresses itself in elections, referenda, public speeches, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, the platforms of political parties and groups, parliamentary discussions, political meetings, there is also a non-public opinion, whose contents can diverge very considerably from the contents of the actual public opinion, whose statements however circulate alongside the statements of the public opinion like the monetary units of a second currency—indeed they have perhaps a more fixed and stable rate than the values of actual public opinion, which we flaunt according to propriety in public, especially for the audience abroad, and of which we imagine they represent our own and only currency, as though they expressed what we really mean to say, although, after all, they are only formal expressions we use when we are wearing our Sunday clothes. Yes, it almost appears as though what circulates about us as public opinion represents the sum of those (mutually contradictory) opinions we wish people would believe are our true opinions, whereas non-public opinion is about the sum of those (likewise mutually contradictory) opinions that we actually have.
      Second, the likewise overly clear perception of what the non-public opinion actually looks like. So that is what many of us actually think!
      In other words: the one shock results from the perception that we have two currencies of opinion, each encompassing a whole bundle of diverse opinions. And the other shock overcomes us when we look at the values comprising the unofficial opinion.
(Franz Böhm, “Geleitwort,” in Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht, bearbeitet von Friedrich Pollock, vol. 2 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie [Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955], here excerpted from pp. xi–xii)
 
Cf. also Franz Böhm, “Das Vorurteil als Element totaler Herrschaft,” in vol. 17 of Vorträge gehalten anläßlich der Hessischen Hochschulwochen für staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung (Bad Homburg vor der Höhe: Verlag Dr. Max Gehlen, 1957), 149–167.
14. First published version is more cautious: “Certainly one may hope that democracy is more deeply rooted . . . .”
15. Radio and first published version: “with Western democracy” instead of “with the West.”
16. Radio and first published version: “deadly serious” instead of “obvious.”
17Wir Wunderkinder: a film satire of the so-called economic miracle in West Germany, it depicts the unprincipled career of a small-town operator during four decades of German history: first a dashing Nazi leader, then a successful financier in postwar West Germany, his unswerving self-interest and opportunism insure his success. Directed by Kurt Hoffmann; 1958 Filmaufbau.
18KdF = “Kraft durch Freude” [“Strength through Joy”], National Socialist recreational organization (whose name supposedly was invented by Hitler himself) set up in imitation of a similar Italian organization “Dopolavoro” founded by Mussolini with the purpose of stimulating workers’ morale. A new form of industrial relations and mass tourism, the KdF program encompassed package holiday tours on its own ocean liners and via the state railway system as well as subsidized theater and concert performances, exhibitions, sports, hiking, folk dancing, and adult education courses. The organization, part of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeits-front), received massive state subsidies for the purpose of demonstrating the enlightened labor policies of the National Socialists in eliminating classes within the Third Reich.
The KdF was comprised of the following offices: (1) the “After Work” department organized theater performances, concerts, etc. as well as political education courses for ca. 38 million people (1933–1938); the “Sport” department organized factory sports for “military training” and “racial perfection”; the “Beauty of Labor” department sought to improve working conditions and the aesthetic contours of the workplace; the “Military Homes” department promoted contacts to the armed forces and the State Labor Service; the department “Tour, Travel, Vacation” until 1938 organized vacation trips for ca. 10 million people. As the German Labor Front put it in 1940, “We did not send our workers off on vacation on our own ships or build them massive sea resorts just for the fun of it. . . . We did it only in order for them to return to their workplaces invigorated and with a new orientation.”
19Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921); English in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
20. Radio and first published version: “automatically” instead of “pharisaically.”
21. Radio and first published version: “features of horror” instead of “grotesque features.”
22. Radio and first published version: “Just as the witch trials took place not during the high point of Scholasticism but during the Counter-Reformation, that is when what they wanted to reinforce was already undermined, so too has nationalism first become completely sadistic and destructive in an age in which it was already toppling.”
23. In his article, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), Simmel draws on Le Bon and Freud to arrive at the following interpretation:
By identifying himself with the mass, the individual in his retreat from reality employs the same escape mechanism as the psychotic, i.e., regression to that infantile level of ego development when the superego was still represented by external parental power.
   However, through this temporary regression he gains one advantage the individual psychotic does not have. The submergence of his ego into the group enables him to overcome his actual infantile impotence toward reality; he attains instinct freedom with the power of an adult. This circumstance allows him, by way of a mass psychosis, to return to reality, from which the individual psychotic must flee. (47)
 
Summarizing the parallelisms between a collective psychosis and an individual psychosis, we can say: The mass and the psychotic think and act irrationally because of regressively disintegrated ego systems. In the individual psychotic mind the process of regression is of a primary nature and is constant. In the collective psychotic mind regression is secondary and occurs only temporarily. The reason for this is that in the individual psychotic, the ego breaks with reality because of its pathological weakness, whereas in the mass member, reality breaks first with the ego. This ego, by submerging itself into a pathological mass, saves itself from individual regression by regressing collectively. Flight into mass psychosis is therefore an escape not only from reality, but also from individual insanity.
   This insight gives us our answer to the enigmatic question why apparently normal individuals can react like psychotics under the spell of mass formation. Their ego is immature as a result of superego weakness. The immature individual who, under the stress of environmental circumstances, is on the verge of losing contact with reality, can find his way back to it when his ego, carried by the spirit of the group, finds opportunity for the discharge of pent-up aggressive instinct energies into the object world. (49–50)
24. Radio and first published version: “the self-reflection” instead of “the autonomy.”
25. Radio version adds: “They experience their own autonomy in a certain sense as a burden.”
26. Radio version interjects: “if it hasn’t always been so.”
27. Radio and first published version: “objects” instead of “subjects.”
28. Radio version interjects: “to use an example Franz Böhm likes to adduce . . . .”
29. First published version has “anti-Semitism” instead of “fascism,” and the radio version continues here: “In our work this is that danger for which in America they use the saying ‘preaching to the saved*,’ [also, denen predigen, die ohnehin bereits gerettet sind].”
30. Snub at Heideggerian existentialism.
31. Radio version interjects: “subjectively, that is, the appeal to individuals . . . .”
32. Radio version interjects: “individuation, that is, that it concerns this specific girl and not everyone.”
33. Cf. #233 of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1678):
Afflictions give rise to various kinds of hypocrisy: in one, pretending to weep over the loss of someone dear to us we really weep for ourselves, since we miss that person’s good opinion of us or deplore some curtailment of our wealth, pleasure, or position. The dead, therefore, are honoured by tears shed for the living alone. I call this a kind of hypocrisy because in afflictions of this sort we deceive ourselves. There is another hypocrisy, less innocent because aimed at the world at large: the affliction of certain persons who aspire to the glory of a beautiful, immortal sorrow. Time, the universal destroyer, has taken away the grief they really felt, but still they obstinately go on weeping, wailing, and sighing; they are acting a mournful part and striving to make all their actions prove that their distress will only end with their lives. This miserable and tiresome vanity is usually found in ambitious women, for as their sex precludes them from all roads to glory they seek celebrity by a display of inconsolable affliction. There is yet another kind of tears that rise from shallow springs and flow or dry up at will: people shed them so as to have a reputation for being tender-hearted, so as to be pitied or wept over, or, finally, to avoid the disgrace of not weeping.
(La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock [London: Penguin, 1959], 67–68)
34. Radio version and first published version have the following addition to the conclusion: “Whatever aims at the more humanly decent organization of the whole, be it theoretically or practical-politically, is at once also resistance against the relapse.”
Opinion Delusion Society
1. The liberal Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung ran from 1872 to 1939. In 1933 its owners were bought out, and it was “brought into line” by the Nazi regime.
2. Presumably Adorno is referring to Sartre’s anecdote of his friend’s cousin Jules in Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1954), 60ff. English: Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George Becker (New York: Schocken, 1948). The translated excerpt with which Adorno was acquainted (it is also cited in The Authoritarian Personality) after portraying the anti-Semite per se turns to “secondhand antisemites” who “are no one; and since in spite of everything, one must appear to be something, they murmur, without thinking of evil, without thinking at all, they go about repeating some formulas they have learned and that give them the right to enter certain drawing rooms,” and recounts the anecdote as follows:
These secondhand antisemites take on, without much cost to themselves, an aggressive personality. One of my friends often cites the example of an old cousin who came to dine with his family and about whom they said with a certain air: “Jules cannot abide the English.” My friend cannot remember ever hearing anything else about Cousin Jules. But that was enough: there was a tacit agreement between Jules and his family. They ostensibly avoided talking about the English in front of him, and this precaution gave him a semblance of existence in the eyes of his relatives and at the same time gave them an agreeable feeling of taking part in a sacred ceremony. And if someone, under certain specific circumstances, after careful deliberation and as it were inadvertently, made an allusion to Great Britain or its Dominions, Uncle Jules pretended to go into a fury and felt himself come to life for a moment. Everyone was happy. Many people are antisemites in the same way as Uncle Jules was an Anglophobe, and of course they have not the faintest idea what their attitude really implies. Simple reflections, reeds bent in the wind, they would certainly never have invented antisemitism if conscious antisemitism had not already existed. But they are the ones who, in all indifference, insure the survival of anti-semitism and carry it forward through the generations.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, “Portrait of the Antisemite,” trans. Mary Guggenheim Partisan Review 13 [1946]: 163–178, here 176–177)
3. “Rationalization” [Rationalisierung]: process through which the subject attempts to provide a logically coherent or morally acceptable explanation for behavior, actions, thoughts, feelings, etc., whose real motives are unknown. Freud particularly speaks of the rationalization of a symptom, a defense mechanism, a reaction-formation. Delusion also can be rationalized in that it creates for itself a more or less extensive systemic structure of explanation. Cf. especially Freud, “Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia paranoides)” (1911); English: “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in vol. 12 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). The term was popularized by Ernest Jones in his Rationalization in Everyday Life (1908).
4. German traffic signals include a cautionary yellow light after the red and before the green.
5. Presumably alluding to the following passage from the “Preface” to the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) (Werke [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], 3:56):
That habit should be called material thinking, a contingent consciousness that is absorbed only in material stuff, and therefore finds it hard work to lift the self clear of such matter, and to be with itself alone. At the opposite extreme, argumentation [Räsonieren] is freedom from all content [of thought], and a sense of vanity toward it. From it is demanded [by Hegel’s method] the effort to relinquish this freedom and, instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content, to sink this freedom in the content and let it move by its own nature, that is, by the self as its own, and to observe this movement. This refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept, either arbitrarily or with wisdom obtained from elsewhere, constitutes a restraint that is itself an essential moment of the concept.
(G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 35–36; translation modified)
6. Cf. Bertolt Brecht’s two “teaching-plays” entitled Der Jasager and Der Neinsager (1929–1930); English: He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No, trans. Wolfgang Sauerlander, in The Measures Taken and other Lehrstücke (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 61–79.
7. First published version interjects a sentence at this point: “In the persistent irrationality of society that is rational merely in its means, not in its ends, especially opaque is the societal fate of the individual; he remains a fate as in the myths from time immemorial.”
8. According to Mannheim, the majority is treated as a privileged group in order to counteract feelings of atomization and personal insecurity as part of the techniques of modern mass manipulation. Cf. Karl Mannheim, Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (Leiden, 1935); English: Man and Society, trans. Edward Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940). Adorno criticizes Mannheim extensively in “Sociology of Knowledge and its Consciousness,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
9. Cf. “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 318–457. Cf. Max Horkheimer, “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism,” in Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and the Social Sciences: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
10. Adorno is alluding obliquely to Hegel’s notion of “determinate negation” [bestimmte Negation]. Consciousness applies its own standard of truth to itself and discovers itself to be one-sided and incomplete such that when “the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form [of consciousness] has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself” (G. W. F. Hegel, “Introduction,” The Phenomenology of Spirit, 50–51; German: Phänomenologie des Geistes, 3:74).
11. The preceding paragraph did not appear in the first published version.
12. First published version ends this sentence slightly differently after the comma: “whose substantiality has dissolved into the movement of spirit.”
13. Adorno’s (mis-)citation of “was wird schon sein” presumably refers to the above passage, which in a very similar context he correctly cites and interprets along similar lines in “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:262, referring to Endspiel, trans. Elmar Tophoven (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1957).
14. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), sociologist and theoretician of science, advocated the mathematical and econometrical analysis of society, based on the tenet that economic relations are paradigmatic of all social relations. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), founder of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim believed that only the free-floating intelligentsia was capable of transforming the conflict of societal interests into a conflict of ideas because it was classless and free of self-interest, and therefore could gain insight into the total ideology of society at any given time.
15. Immanuel Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766); English: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, trans. E. F. Goerwitz (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900).
16. Erich Jaensch (1893–1940), phenomenologist and psychologist who gained prominence in Nazi Germany with his book Der Gegentypus (Leipzig: Barth, 1938), which evaluated character typologies based on successful personality “integration,” with German nationalist and peasant types topping the list. The “anti-type,” which Jaensch explicitly associated with Jews and foreigners, was characterized by synesthetic perception, capacity for ambiguity, “lability,” and individuality. Adorno may be alluding to the sustained comparison drawn by one of his colleagues from the Authoritarian Personality project: “Jaensch concentrates on a very articulate description of the most desirable type from the standpoint of Nazi ideology and this type shows marked similarities to our description of the authoritarian personality. The fact that Jaensch glorifies this pattern while our attitude is one of reserve, or criticism, add to the interest of the parallelism. The parallel delineation lends confidence to our interpretation of our results, since they are concurred in by psychologists glorifying the authoritarian personality” (E. Frenkel-Brunswick, “Further Explorations by a Contributor to ‘The Authoritarian Personality”’ in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” ed. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda [Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981], 225–275, here p. 252).
17. First published version: “perduring” instead of “tenacious.”
18. Franz Leonard Schlüter was named by the regional coalition government to the post of minister of culture in Lower Saxony in May 1955. Schlüter, a frustrated patriot (judged by the Nazis unfit for military service because of his Jewish mother) who had failed his doctoral exams and been under investigation for improper conduct as head of the criminal police in Göttingen after the war, had been a vociferous member of the nationalist “German Party of the Right” (Deutsche Rechtspartei) before joining the right wing of the liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP) in 1951. At that time he also founded a Göttingen publishing house that printed several works by former Nazi ideologues and functionaries as well as by professors who were forbidden to lecture by denazification strictures. In protest to Schlüter’s appointment, the rector of Göttingen university, Prof. Dr. Emil Woermann, and the entire university senate resigned. The Göttingen Student Union, broadly supported by the professors, initiated large-scale student strikes and demonstrations. On 9 June 1955, fifteen days after assuming the post of minister of culture, Schlüter submitted his resignation and a month later resigned also from the FDP leadership. On the third anniversary of his “fall,” Schlüter’s publishing house brought out under an anonymous author a three-hundred page book (Die große Hetze: Der niedersächsische Ministersturz, Ein Tatsachenbericht zum Fall Schlüter [Göttingen: Göttinger Verlagsanstalt, 1958]) recounting in detail the compromised writings published during the Nazi regime by Woermann and other prominent Göttingen professors.
19. First published version does not have this paragraph.
20. The German proverb is “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz.”
21. Anatole France, L’ île des pingouins (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1908); English: Penguin Island, trans. A. W. Evans (New York: Dodd Mead, 1925).
22. First published version continues here with the following sentence, “If this is correct, then it is based on a situation that can hardly be changed by mere consciousness alone,” and the text continues with the sentence “The reification of consciousness that deserts and defects . . . .” The final published version adds new material between the first sentence of the paragraph and this latter sentence.
23. Cf. Adorno’s aphorism in Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 39: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (original in GS 4:43). The saying gained a certain notoriety, as Adorno commented at the beginning of a lecture course on ethics in 1963: Probleme der Moralphilosophie, ed. Thomas Schröder (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 9.
24. First published version interjects: “similar to the way existential philosophy and logical positivism come together in several philosophies . . . .”
25. First published version ends here.
Catchwords
Introduction
1. “Content of thought” cannot convey the density of Adorno’s expression das Gedachte, which is the substantivized past participle of the verb “to think” (denken) but also of the verb “to remember, be mindful of” (gedenken); the interrelationship between these two actions is central to the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s philosophy of nature.
2Negative Dialektik, in GS 6; English: T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).
3. Cf. “Résumé über Kulturindustrie,” in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica, in GS 10.1:337–345. English: “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” trans. Anson Rabinbach, New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 12–19, reprinted in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 128–135; and in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 85–92.
4. “Refunction” (umfunktionieren) in Brecht refers to the practice of alienating a term, situation, etc. from its habitual context and redeploying it in a critical fashion; “Brecht has coined the phrase ‘functional transformation’ (Umfunktionierung) to describe the transformation of forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia—an intelligentsia interested in liberating the means of production and hence active in the class struggle” (Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock [London: NLB, 1973], 93).
5. Adorno’s philosophy lecture course “Introduction to Dialectics” was disrupted in April 1969 by members of the Women’s Council of the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, the Socialist German Student Association), following months of tension between student protesters and members of the Institute for Social Research, including the student occupation of the sociology department’s building, confrontations with Habermas and Adorno, etc. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 609–635. For Adorno’s reaction, see in particular his interview “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm,” Der Spiegel, no. 19 (1969): 204–209 (reprinted in GS 20.1:402–409). English: “Of Barricades and Ivory Towers: An Interview with T. W. Adorno.” Encounter 33 (September 1969): 63–69.
Notes on Philosophical Thinking
1. First published version has a different “dedication”: “Rejected by the editors of the Festschrift for Herbert Marcuse; all the more warmly dedicated to him.”
2. Radio version: “The division between that about which and that which is thought.”
3. Radio version and first published version: “demythologization” instead of “enlightenment.”
4. Radio version abbreviates, goes to “Philosophical thinking begins . . . .”
5. In The Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith [New York: St. Martin’s, 1965], 92–3, 153) Kant defines the “spontaneity of the concepts” (as opposed to the ‘receptivity’—the capacity of receiving sensible impressions) as the faculty of knowing an object by producing concepts that organize those sensible impressions:
If the receptivity of our mind, its power of receiving representations in so far as it is in any wise affected, is to be entitled sensibility, then the mind’s power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of knowledge, should be called the understanding. Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding. To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (A 50–1, B 74–5)
Spontaneity can be either empirical (containing sensations, i.e. requiring the physical presence of the intuited object) or pure (relations of concepts without appeal to sensible intuition). In the second edition Kant specifies the relationship between pure spontaneity and self-consciousness:
That representation which can be given prior to all thought is entitled intuition. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the “I think” in the same subject in which this manifold is found. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or, again, original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation “I think” (a representation which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which in all consciousness is one and the same), cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation. The unity of this apperception I likewise entitle the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori knowledge arising from it. (B 132)
6. Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 182–183) speaks of the “depth” of human understanding in the context of his discussion of the schemata of the understanding, the means by which empirical objects have categories of the understanding applied to them and thus become conceptually recognizable:
These conditions of sensibility constitute the universal condition under which alone the category can be applied to any object. This formal and pure condition of sensibility to which the employment of the concept of understanding is restricted, we shall entitle the schema of the concept. The procedure of understanding in these schemata we shall entitle the schematism of pure understanding. . . .
    The concept “dog” signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents. This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to ourgaze. (A 140, B 179ff.)
7. The transcendental apperception (see note 5 above) represents the formal, necessary synthesizing unity of a consciousness such that it can organize and recognize its intuitions and representations as belonging to it: “For the manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness . . . only in so far as I can grasp the manifold of the representations in one consciousness, do I call them one and all mine” (B 132, 134). However, the unity is a functional one only, an “I think” that necessary accompanies my representations, but no substantive intuition of an “I.” This entails the impossibility of the subject of awareness (i.e., the private world) connecting with the objective (common) world in a representational-mimetic fashion. Whoever seeks introspective self-knowledge expects to find a subject of awareness, an ego, but only finds more and more objects and never any subject. Hume established this point (Treatise of Human Nature, I. iv), and Kant accepted it and explained why the transcendental subject can never be an object. Cf. the “Transcendental Dialectic,” book 2, chapter 1 in the Critique of Pure Reason.
8. First published version: “therein presumably lies the mystery [Geheimnis] of thinking,” a formulation that perhaps drew too close to Heidegger’s exegesis in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929); English: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1962).
The radio version does not include this paragraph.
9. Object-relationship (Objektbeziehung) in psychoanalysis refers to the type of relationship between a subject and its environment, whereby the relationship represents a complex result of a certain organization of personality, a more or less fantasized apprehension of objects (object-choice and object-love) and certain privileged forms of psychic defense. The relationship is wholly reciprocal: not merely how a subject comes to choose or construct its objects, but also how the objects inform the psychic activities of the subject. In Melanie Klein this thought is expressed much more strongly: objects that are “projected” or “introjected” literally exert an influence (e.g., persecutory, compensatory, calming, etc.) on the subject.
Mentioned by Freud, e.g., in “Trauer und Melancholie” (1917); English: “Mourning and Melancholia,” in vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), but not really a fully developed part of his conceptual apparatus.
10. Radio version and first published version: “determine” instead of “establish.”
11. In the radio version the paragraph ends here.
12. Cf. Kant’s preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B xvi–B xxiv) and in particular the following footnote:
Similarly, the fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies gave established certainty to what Copernicus had at first assumed only as an hypothesis, and at the same time yielded proof of the invisible force (the Newtonian attraction) which holds the universe together. The latter would have remained for ever undiscovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator. The change in point of view, analogous to this hypothesis, which is expounded in the Critique, I put forward in this preface as an hypothesis only, in order to draw attention to the character of these first attempts at such a change, which are always hypothetical. But in the Critique itself it will be proved, apodeictically not hypothetically, from the nature of our representations of space and time and from the elementary concepts of the understanding.     (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 25)
13. The German is “Genie ist Fleiß.”
14. Radio and first published version: “primitive” instead of “naively imputed.”
15. In the radio version the paragraph ends here.
16. Cf. Hegel’s “Preface” to the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Werke [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], 3:17–18):
Still less must this complacency which abjures science claim that rapturous haziness is superior to science. This prophetic talk supposes that it is staying right in the center and in the depths, looks disdainfully at determinateness (Horos), and deliberately holds aloof from concept and necessity as from reflection, which is at home only in finitude. But just as there is an empty breadth, so too is there an empty depth; and just as there is an extension of substance that pours forth as a finite diversity without the force to hold the diversity together, so there is an intensity without content, one that holds itself in as a sheer force without spreading out, and this is in no way distinguishable from superficiality. The power of spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition [Auslegung].
(G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 6; translation modified)
Commentators note that Hegel’s critique is directed against J. Görres and C. A. Eschenmayer, who turned the Kantian negative knowledge (that we cannot know things in themselves, but only as they appear to us) into a positive claim for the power of enthusiasm and prayer as the closest we are able come in knowing divinity and things as they really are. The Greek images is apparently introduced by Hegel here in the sense of ‘conceptual definition’; further connotations include “goal,” “end,” “purpose,” as well as “border,” “measure.”
In the radio version this paragraph ends here.
17. A thinly veiled allusion to the “originary” phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.
18. Antonio Canova (1757–1833) and Bertel Thorwaldsen (1768–1844): leading neoclassicist sculptors of their age.
19. Cf. the final sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969).
20. Radio version excises next two sentences, goes to “Where the philosophical thought . . . .”
21. In the radio version the paragraph ends here.
22. Cf. Aphorism 283 in the fourth book of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House: 1974), 228–229.
23. Radio and first published version: “with every necessary reservation” instead of “with every expectation of cheap ridicule.”
24. Adorno plays on the ambiguity of the preposition and verbal prefix nach, which can mean (among much else) “after” in the temporal and spatial senses. So denken “to think” but nachdenken “to reflect deeply upon”; Vollzug “action, performance” is the nominalization of the verb vollziehen, “to perform, carry out”; nachvollziehen, “to comprehend, understand something that has occurred as though one had done it oneself,” from which Adorno coins the analogous noun Nachvollzug, here translated as “reconstruction.”
25. Radio version of this sentence: “Nonetheless to him who observes it in itself, to the extent that he really knows [weiß] what he wants to come to know [erkennen], philosophical thinking seems also to be able to come to know it.”
First published version of this sentence: “Nonetheless to him who observes it in itself, philosophical thinking seems to be able to come to know [erkennen] what he wants to come to know, to the extent that he really knows [weiß] what he wants to come to know.”
26Darstellung is rendered “exhibition” in Kant, and elsewhere “presentation,” at times “representation.” Both Benjamin and Adorno devoted significant texts to the question of the adequate philosophical presentation of a given problem. Walter Benjamin, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London/New York: NLB, 1977; Verso, 1985). T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
27. Radio and first published version: “if not indeed” instead of “possibly.”
28. Radio version excises the following and goes to “Benjamin once alluded . . . .”
29. Cf. Adorno: “The greater demands Benjamin makes of the speculative concept, the more unreservedly, one might almost say blindly, does this thought succumb to its material. He once said, not out of coquettishness but with absolute seriousness, that he needed a proper dose of stupidity to be able to think a decent thought” (“Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992], 2:225).
30. Adorno plays on Gegenstand, “concrete object,” and Vergegenständlichung, “concretion, concretization.” The mentioning of Ursprünglichkeit, “primordiality,” confirms that Adorno is taking yet another swipe at Heidegger’s ontology.
31. Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason:
Hitherto the concept of philosophy has been a merely scholastic concept [Schulbegriff]—a concept of a system of knowledge which is sought solely in its character as a science, and which has therefore in view only the systematic unity appropriate to science, and consequently no more than the logical perfection of knowledge. But there is likewise another concept of philosophy, a cosmical concept [Weltbegriff] (conceptus cosmicus), which has always formed the real basis of the term “philosophy,” especially when it has been as it were personified and its archetype represented in the ideal philosopher. On this view, philosophy is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae), and the philosopher is not an artificer in the field of reason, but himself the lawgiver of human reason. In this sense of the term it would be very vainglorious to entitle oneself a philosopher, and to pretend to have equalled the pattern which exists in the idea alone.     (Critique of Pure Reason, 657–658 [A 839/B 867])
Cf. also Kant, Logik, A 23–24 for a similar presentation of the opposition. In “What is Enlightenment” (1784) he uses similar language to define the “public use” of learned reason.
Reason and Revelation
1. G. W. F. Hegel, “Revealed Religion,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 453–478.
2. Cf. the chapter “Die absolute Freiheit und der Schrecken” in G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 3:435–6. “Kein positives Werk noch Tat kann also die allgemeine Freiheit hervorbringen; es bleibt ihr nur das negative Tun; sie ist nur die Furie des Verschwindens.” English: “Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 359).
3. Radio and first published version: “far more pitiless and evil” instead of “far more vicious.”
4. Radio and first published version: “suppress with violence” instead of “suppress through intimidation.”
5. Radio and first published version: “an essential element” instead of “some.”
6. Radio and first published version: “this moment only seemingly [nur scheinhaft] has become independent in relation to the totality” instead of “admittedly even this moment has become independent in relation to the totality.”
7. “Transcendental homelessness,” a concept made famous by Georg Lukács in his Theorie des Romans (1920). English: Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).
8. “Über die Lehre Spenglers” (1924), reprinted in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), 10:172–179. English: “On the Theory of Spengler,” in Thomas Mann, Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1933), 217–230.
9. Radio and first published version: “monstrous” instead of “colossal.”
10. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 23–24 [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, A. A. 8:412f.]. There Kant defines the will as the capacity to choose what reason alone, independent of subjective desires, recognizes as practically necessary or “good.” Because human beings are not completely rational creatures, constraint plays a role: “if the will does not of itself completely accord with reason (as is actually the case with men), then actions which are recognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent, and the determination of such a will according to objective laws is necessitation [Nötigung]. That is to say that the relation of objective laws to a will not thoroughly good is represented as the determination of the will of a rational being by principles of reason which the will does not necessarily follow because of its nature.”
11. For Hegel, “ethical substance” [Sittlichkeit] is “substantial” [substantiell] if its rules, or virtues, are embedded in the community as such, without the need for anything like a (Kantian) transcendental derivation of “the moral law.”
12. Radio and first published version: “as for instance in the American magazine Time.”
13. Radio and first published version: “its pragmatic elements” instead of “its factual content.”
14. Radio and first published version: “the transparently agrarian relations” instead of “the transparent relations of the ‘primary community*.”’
15. Cf. “Franz Kafka,” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), II/2:423. English: “‘In Kafka,’ said Soma Morgenstern, ‘there is the air of a village, as with all great founders of religions”’ (“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken, 1968], 125–26).
Cf. also Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, II/3:1231f.; and Adorno/Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 1928–1940 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 94.
Soma Morgenstern (1890–1976), Jewish lawyer turned writer, whom Adorno met in 1925 during his stay in Vienna; Morgenstern later worked as the Viennese correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung; in 1938 he emigrated to Paris, where he met Benjamin, and in 1941 to New York.
16. Cf. T. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (1962), GS 2:166. English: Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 117.
Progress
1. Throughout this essay Adorno plays on the double meaning of Menschheit, which like its usual translation, “humanity,” can signify an abstract principle as well as the sum of existing human beings (that is, “humanness” on the one hand, “humankind” on the other). In the first “model” of Negative Dialectics, in a section entitled “Ontical and Ideal Moments,” Adorno explores this ambiguity of Menschheit in Kant’s moral theory, concluding “Kant must have noticed the double meaning of the word ‘humanity,’ as the idea of being human and as the totality of all men; he introduced it into theory in a manner that was dialectically profound, even though playful. His subsequent usage vacillates between ontical manners of speech and others that refer to the idea. . . . He wants neither to cede the idea of humanity to the existing society nor to vaporize it into a phantasm” (Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Seabury Press, 1973], 258). In this essay Menschheit is consistently translated as “humanity” to preserve the doubleness. By contrast German Humanität, which also occurs in the essay, derives from the Latin humanitas, and signifies not the ontic human species but rather the ideal of humane refinement as a mark of civilization; it is translated as “humanitarianism.”
2. Here, as in his essay on Kafka in Prisms (and GS 8:229), Adorno’s partial quotation neglects Kafka’s emphasis on the mutual implication of progress and belief. Kafka’s aphorism is quoted in its entirety by Benjamin in “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death”: “‘To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.’ Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels are set in a swamp world. In his works, created things appear at the stage Bachofen has termed the hetaeric stage. The fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion” (Illuminations, 130).
3. “Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle weinend sich aus diesem Bund” from Friedrich Schiller’s ode “An die Freude” (1786).
4. First published version has: “For the element of enlightenment within it, that of demythologization, which terminates . . . .”
5. “Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen / Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn” from “Zahme Xenien VI,” translated in Goethe: Selected Verse, ed. David Luke (New York: Penguin, 1981), 280.
6. “The fact that the subjective purpose, as the power over these processes (in which the objective gets used up through mutual friction and sublates itself), keeps itself outside of them and preserves itself in them is the cunning of reason.
“In this sense we can say that, with regard to the world and its process, divine Providence behaves with absolute cunning. God lets men, who have their particular passions and interests, do as they please, and what results is the accomplishment of his intentions, which are something other than those whom he employs were directly concerned about” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991], here p. 284). German: G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 8:365 (§209 and Zusatz). Cf. also Wissenschaft der Logik II, Werke 6:452 (“C. Der ausgeführte Zweck”) and Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke 12:49 and 119.
7. I.e., the fifth and sixth theses.
8. Cf. the fifth proposition of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History”:
The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
 
The highest purpose of nature—i.e. the development of all natural capacities—can be fulfilled for mankind only in society, and nature intends that man should accomplish this, and indeed all his appointed ends, by his own efforts. This purpose can be fulfilled only in a society which has not only the greatest freedom, and therefore a continual antagonism among its members, but also the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others. The highest task which nature has set for mankind must therefore be that of establishing a society in which freedom under external laws would be combined to the greatest possible extent with irresistible force, in other words of establishing a perfectly just civil constitution. For only through the solution and fulfillment of this task can nature accomplish its other intentions with our species. Man, who is otherwise so enamoured with unrestrained freedom, is forced to enter this state of restriction by sheer necessity. And this is indeed the most stringent of all forms of necessity, for it is imposed by men upon themselves, in that their inclinations make it impossible for them to exist side by side for long in a state of wild freedom. But once enclosed within a precinct like that of civil union, the same inclinations have the most beneficial effect. In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight—whereas those which put out branches at will, in freedom and in isolation from others, grow stunted, bent and twisted. All the culture and art which adorn mankind and the finest social order man creates are fruits of his unsociability. For it is compelled by its own nature to discipline itself, and thus, by enforced art, to develop completely the germs which nature implanted.
(From “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2d ed. [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991], 45–46)
9. Adorno alludes to Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929); English: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1962).
10. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Theological-political Fragment” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. E. Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 312–313.
11. Adorno here alludes to a seminar presentation made by one of his students, Karl Heinz Haag, that has been preserved in the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt. Haag later briefly touches on some aspects of this paper in his Der Fortschritt in der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), esp. 37–39.
12. Cf. Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (trans. E. F. J. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969]), 1:185 (§36, on art):
Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reasons or grounds and consequents, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea. We can therefore define it accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason, in contrast to the way of considering them which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience.
And in chapter 41, “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature,” “There is no greater contrast than that between the ceaseless, irresistible flight of time carrying its whole content away with it and the rigid immobility of what is actually existing, which is at all times one and the same; and if, from this point of view, we fix our really objective glance on the immediate events of life, the Nunc stans becomes clear and visible to us in the center of the wheel of time” (ibid., 2:481).
13. Adorno surely relies here on the severely abbreviated version of the essay “Die Rückschritte der Poesie” [“The Regression of Poetry”] by Carl Gustav Jochmann (1789–1830), which Walter Benjamin published with an introduction in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8 (1939/40): 92–114. Benjamin presented what originally appeared as the fourth of five sections comprising Jochmann’s anonymous book Über die Sprache (Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1828). Jochmann makes the distinction between material progress in the natural sciences and the lack of progress in the “spiritual domain”: whereas the natural sciences progress in terms of technical ability, knowledge, and the domination of nature, the intellectual “internal development” operates in the opposite direction, as the destruction of reigning prejudices, as the reinvestment of the world with imagination. The investment through fantasy was the chief characteristic of lyric poetry, and Benjamin’s excision of this section of Jochmann’s text misled Adorno to think that Jochmann had prophesied the end of art (cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II/3:1393; and Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, GS 7:501).
14. First published version has slightly different sentence: “it is the Hegelian ‘Furie des Verschwindens,’ which plunges one concept after another into the Orcus of the mythical.”
15. Cf. “On the Tarantulas” and “On Redemption” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 99–102, 137–142.
16. First published version: “behavior” instead of “attitude.”
17. Adorno here both invokes and corrects Walter Benjamin’s theory of the “dialectical image,” the cognitive armature of the studies composing his unfinished Arcades Project [Passagenarbeit]. Benjamin, who Adorno felt was too much under the sway of the surrealists, had suggested that juxtapositions of historical material in “constellations” would release the archaic dream and wish images lodged in the collective unconscious at the threshold to modernity. In a now renowned exchange of letters, Adorno rejected the theory’s implied idealism: “If you transpose the dialectical image into consciousness as a ‘dream,’ then not only has the concept been disenchanted and made more tractable, it has also thereby forfeited precisely the objective interpretive power which could legitimate it in materialistic terms. The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness but rather dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness” (Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor [London: NLB, 1977; Verso, 1980], 140–41). Indeed the present essay can be considered a practical exposition of Adorno’s viewpoint.
18. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme: With Appendixes by Marx, Engels, and Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970).
19. First published version: “is one with” instead of “reinforces.”
Gloss on Personality
1. Cf. Karl Kraus, “Niemand geringerer als” in Die Fackel 20, no. 474–483 (23 May 1918): 23–25.
2. In the first published version, Adorno provides the source in a footnote: Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 101 [A. A.: V, 87]. English: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3d. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 90; translation modified.
3. German Person, persönlich, Persönlichkeit: “person,” “personal,” “personality.”
4. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 40–41; German: Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten, BA 78 [A. A. IV: 434–435]:
In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.
Whatever has reference to general human inclinations and needs has a market price. Whatever, without presupposing any need, accords with a certain taste, i.e., a delight in the mere unpurposive play of our powers, has an affective price; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, i.e., a price, but has an intrinsic worth, i.e., dignity.
Now morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in himself, for only thereby can he be a legislating member in the kingdom of ends. Hence morality and humanity, insofar as it is capable of morality, alone have dignity.
5. Cf. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan/West-östlicher Divan, rendered into English by J. Whaley (London: Oswald Wolff, 1974), 130–133. The relevant passage:
SULEIKA:       Volk und Knecht und Überwinder,
Sie gestehn zu jeder Zeit:
Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinder
Sei nur die Persönlichkeit.

Jedes Leben sei zu führen,
Wenn man sich nicht selbst vermißt:
Alles könne man verlieren,
Wenn man bliebe, was man ist.
Translation:
Nations, ruler, slave subjected,
All on this one point agree:
Joy of earthlings is perfected
In the personality.

Every life is worth the choosing
If oneself one does not miss;
Everything is worth the losing
To continue as one is.
 
6. First published version has footnote: Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke I (Darmstadt, 1960), 235.
7. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen,” in Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, part 1: Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, ed. Albert Leitzmann, vol. 1, 1785–1795 (Berlin: Behr’s Verlag, 1903), 282–287 [citation from p. 283]. First published version gives footnote: ibid. [Werke 1 (Darmstadt 1960)], 235.
8. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Old and New Tablets,” no. 20, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 209.
9. Adorno’s term “specialized personnel” [Fachmenschentum] alludes to Max Weber’s coinage in the opening pages of his introduction to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920–21); English: introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), where he very ambivalently evaluates the unique conjunction of specialization and thoroughgoing administrative organization in Western rationality.
10. Adorno is here alluding to the policy aim of a “fully formed society” (formierte Gesellschaft) ironically since he replaces the conclusive past participle with the open-ended present participle. The concept of formierte Gesellschaft was introduced in 1965 by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard under the influence of the economist Götz Briefs and the philosopher Eric Voegelin (whose diagnoses suggest the influence of Carl Schmitt). It held that following the eclipse of the estates in early modernity and the class system in postwar German society, organized special interest groups, industrial cartels, unions, etc., all seeking power and benefits from the welfare state, represented an increasing potential for dissent and threatened economic and social order and even parliamentary rule. Before Erhard could bring concrete proposals to the Bundestag for reinforcing social and economic stability, his policy statement was attacked by the Left as undemocratic and his political position weakened drastically.
11. First published version differs slightly: “nor would he fortify himself in his pure selfhood, his being so and not differently.”
12. “Drum, so wandle nur wehrlos / Fort durchs Leben, und fürchte nichts!” from Hölderlin’s poem “Dichtermuth.” First published version has footnote: Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe (Stuttgart, 1955), 68. English: Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 200–203.
Free Time
1. Radio version has “conformist sociologies” instead of “conciliatory sociologies,” presumably an allusion to Erving Goffman’s theory of ‘social roles’; cf. his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959).
2. Radio version: “the difference between work and free time has been branded, become a taboo” instead of “branded as a norm.”
3. Radio version: “Organized free time is branded with compulsion” instead of “organized free time is compulsory.”
4. The Youth Movement [Jugendbewegung] was a protest movement around the turn of the century, influenced by the cultural pessimism of Nietzsche and progressive-alternative educational theories, largely undertaken by middle-class urban adolescents who rejected the industrial, Wilhelminian bourgeois lifestyle in favor of a romantic “return” to nature, simplicity, sincerity, and self-reliance. By 1914 the movement had over 25,000 members and after the war split along confessional (Protestant and Catholic) and political (socialist, communist, conservative) lines. Certain völkisch aspects of the conservative wing of the movement fed easily into the National Socialist ideology, and in 1933 all those groups that had not incorporated themselves into the Hitler Youth [Hitler Jugend] were disbanded.
5. Radio version: “more important than the situations, which . . . .” instead of “than the flirtation.”
6. Cf. for instance Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage,” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1861).
7. Schopenhauer on boredom: §57 of The World as Will and Representation (trans. E. F. J. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969]) in general is a discussion of desire and pain (want, need) and boredom as the fundamental constitutive qualities of human existence. Cf. also Horkheimer: “Perhaps Helvétius was not wrong when he connected boredom, which Schopenhauer sees only as evil and at most responsible for superstitions, as a reason for imagination, to real culture. The division between leisure [Muße] and boredom [Langeweile] is not distinct; people don’t attain either of them. In technical civilization they are so fundamentally ‘cured’ of their heaviness, that they forget how to resist. But resistance is the soul of Schopenhauer’s philosophy” (Horkheimer, “Schopenhauer und die Gesellschaft,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Sociologica II: Reden und Vorträge [Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962], here p. 122).
8. Cf. Schopenhauer: “As we have said, the common, ordinary man, that manufactured article of nature which she daily produces in the thousands, is not capable, at any rate continuously, of a consideration of things wholly disinterested in every sense, such as is contemplation proper. He can direct his attention to things only in so far as they have some relation to his will, although that relation may be only very indirect” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:187 [§36]). Cf. also 2:426.
9. Radio version: “to the objective eternal sameness” instead of “to objective dullness.”
10. Cf. act 3, scene 1 of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804):
A man with eyesight clear and sense alert,
Who trusts in God and his own supple strength,
Will find some way to slip the noose of danger.
Mountain-born was never scared of mountains.
(Having finished his work he puts the tools away.)
There now! That gate should serve another twelvemonth.
An axe in the house will save a joiner’s labor.
(Reaches for his hat.)
(Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. and ed. William F. Mainland [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972], 64–65 [ll. 1508–1513])
11. Perhaps Adorno’s clearest explanation of pseudo-activity can be found in prose piece #91, “Vandals,” in Minima Moralia (composed during his American emigration, published in 1951):
Doing things and going places is an attempt by the sensorium to set up a kind of counter-irritant against a threatening collectivization, to get in training for it by using the hours apparently left to freedom to coach oneself as a member of the mass. The technique is to try to outdo the danger. One lives in a sense even worse, that is, with even less self, than one expects to have to live. At the same time one learns through this playful excess of self-loss that to live in earnest without a self could be easier, not more difficult. All this is done in great haste, for no warning bells will announce the earthquake. If one does not take part, and that means, if one does not swim bodily in the human stream, one fears, as when delaying too long to join a totalitarian party, missing the bus and bringing on oneself the vengeance of the collective. Pseudo-activity is an insurance, the expression of a readiness for self-surrender, in which one senses the only guarantee of self-preservation. Security is glimpsed in adaptation to the utmost insecurity.
(Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott [London: NLB, 1974], 139 [GS 4:155–156])
Cf. also pp. 130–1 (GS 4:145) and Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 63. The concept is clearly related to Adorno’s analysis of the “manipulative type” in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 767. The concept in fact was first defined by Erich Fromm in his analysis of Scheinaktivität in “Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 95–118.
Adorno returns to the concept in his diagnosis of student actionism in the essays “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” and “Resignation,” this volume.
12. The study in March 1966 was never evaluated and published, though its data were incorporated, together with several other Institute studies using the new A-Scale (studies of Germans’ reactions to the Eichmann trial, political tendencies among German youth, pupils’ reactions to civic education in select Gymnasien, German prejudices toward Gastarbeiter, and stereotypes of Chinese), in the appendixes to Michaela von Freyhold, Autoritarismus und politische Apathie: Analyse einer Skala zur Ermittlung autoritätsgebundener Verhaltensweisen, vol. 22 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971), esp. 273, 300, 303, 307, 317.
Taboos on the Teaching Vocation
1. German Lehrer refers exclusively to primary and secondary education. Professoren (professors) have “teaching duties” [Lehrtätigkeiten], but these generally stand below research in terms of importance.
2. University degree required for the teaching profession.
3. Radio version: “reasons” instead of “motives.”
4. Hellmut Becker (1913–1993), lawyer, who defended among others Foreign Service Secretary of State Freiherr von Weizsäcker in the Nuremburg trials, then went on to pursue legal and cultural-political aspects of education and education reform. He was a close associate of Adorno’s, and the two often debated issues of educational reform, the societal role of education, etc. in lectures and radio programs. Cf. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker, 1959–1969, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970).
Explicit allusions to the “administered school” can be found in his Probleme einer Schulreform (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1959), 105–118. Cf. also “Die verwaltete Schule,” in Hellmut Becker, Kulturpolitik und Schule: Probleme der verwalteten Welt, Serie Fragen an die Zeit, ed. Theodor Eschenburg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1956).
5. German Korps and Korporationen were originally dueling societies, and though today they are roughly equivalent to fraternities or student social clubs at the university, many maintain an aristocratic-militaristic ethos.
6Gymnasium: German secondary school with emphasis on classical humanist education. Its contrastive counterpart is the Realschule, with emphasis on mathematics and natural sciences.
7. Radio and first published versions: “one would need to investigate it empirically; I doubt it.”
8. Cf. the preface to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:xixf.
9. The anecdote, which Adorno relates in the untranslatable dialect of his native Hessen, refers to the following chapter in the poet’s biography. In 1796 Hölderlin received a position as private tutor for the patrician Gontard family in Frankfurt. He fell in love with his pupil’s mother, Susette Gontard, whom he glorified in his lyrics as “Diotima.” The husband Jakob Gontard apparently confronted Hölderlin about the liaison, and he was forced to leave his position in 1798. Hölderlin maintained clandestine contact with Susette Gontard until her death in 1802, which it is believed contributed to his final mental collapse.
10. Radio and first published version: “In the sense of this image world [Bilderwelt], this imagerie, the teacher . . . .”
11. In the twenty-fifth “adventure” of the Nibelungenlied Hagen, the vassal of King Gunther, leads the royal retinue to visit the king’s sister Kriemhild, who, following the murder of her husband Siegfried by Hagen, has married the Hun Etzel and, notwithstanding twelve years of marriage, still plans to avenge Siegfried’s death. While searching for a ford or ferry across the swollen Danube, Hagen meets two water nymphs who warn him that all the company will be killed by the Huns with the sole exception of the king’s chaplain. To test the prophecy Hagen hurls the chaplain into the raging waters of the Danube as they cross by ferry, and the chaplain, who cannot swim, remarkably survives and remains on the near side of the river. Thus Hagen knows that the entire retinue is fated to perish and vows to fight to the bitter end.
12. On Hartmann von der Aue (late 12th c. Swabian Minnesänger) and literacy, cf. the opening of his Der arme Heinrich, here in prose translation:
“There was once a knight so well-educated that he could read whatever he found in the way of books. His name was Hartmann, and he was a vassal at Aue. He would frequently consult books of various kinds in which he hoped to find anything calculated to promote the glory of God and at the same time enhance his own standing in the eyes of his fellowmen. Now he is prepared to recount for you something he found in a text. He has named himself in order that the effort he has put into it may not go unrewarded, so that anyone hearing or reading it after his death may pray to God for his soul’s salvation. They say that he who prays on behalf of another is at the same time acting as his own advocate and redeeming himself thereby as well” (The Narrative Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. R. W. Fisher [Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1983], 158).
13. First published version includes the following footnote by Adorno, which was removed from subsequent editions: “My thanks to Jacob Taubes for this reference.”
14. “Limit situation” [Grenzsituation], a term of art from existential phenomenology, introduced by Karl Jaspers (in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen of 1919 and Philosophie of 1932) and adopted by Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, indicating those situations where one’s existence (Dasein) becomes “transparent” to its own historicity and contingency: e.g., battle, suffering, dread, etc.
15. “Ein Landarzt,” in Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Max Brod together with Heinz Politzer (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), vol. 1. English translations generally have the title “A Country Doctor.”
16. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1993). Originally published in 1899.
17. Cf. chapter 5 of The Trial (ca. 1914) in Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Douglas Scott and Chris Waller (London: Picador, 1977).
18. In the radio version Adorno interjects—“‘a gentleman is never intentionally rude*,’ is an English saying—. . . .”
19. In the radio version Adorno uses the colloquial and gender specific Backfisch (half-grown, teenage girl) instead of the foreign “teenager.”
20. Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat oder das Ende eines Tyrannen (1905). In 1947 the book was reissued under the title of its film version Der blaue Engel (1930, directed by Josef von Sternberg), in which Marlene Dietrich played the chanteuse Rosa Fröhlich. English: The Blue Angel: The novel by Heinrich Mann; The film by Josef von Sternberg (New York: Ungar, 1979). Cf. Adorno’s polemic against the reissuing of the novel with the title altered to Der Blaue Engel in “Ein Titel,” and “Unrat und Engel,” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11:654–660; English: “A Title,” and “Unrat and Angel,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:299–304.
21. Radio version begins the next paragraph as follows: “This partiality, however, is detested most of all in the person with a claim to intellectual authority. He is seen in general to be someone who lives in an unreal world, like the unlucky hero . . . .”
22Traumulus (1924), a tragic comedy written by Arno Holz and Oskar Jerschke. A sexual indiscretion by a schoolboy and the subsequent small-town gossip about him lead inevitably to his suicide.
23. Karl Kraus, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität, Werke, vol. 11 (Munich/Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1963). Cf. Adorno’s review of this volume: “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität: Zum elften Band der Werke von Karl Kraus,” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11:367–387; in English: “Morals and Criminality: On the Eleventh Volume of the Works of Karl Kraus,” in Notes to Literature, 2:40–57.
24. Adorno’s Fachmensch (specialized person) alludes to Max Weber’s coinage “Fachmenschentum” (“specialized personnel”) in the opening pages of his introduction to the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920– 21); English: introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), where he very ambivalently evaluates the unique conjunction of specialization and thoroughgoing administrative organization in Western rationality.
25. Radio version interjects: “—I mean the idiosyncratic sensibility of the children.”
26. Radio version: “The school has an immanent tendency to close itself off with an astounding violence”; first published version: “The school has an immanent tendency to seal itself off.”
27. Tucholsky and a female acquaintance meet a child who has run away from the children’s home. The director of the home, Frau Adriani, demands the child’s return, and Tucholsky records their conversation when he brings the child back:
“So the child fled to you! That’s just great! It’s lucky for you that you brought her back on my instructions right away! She won’t run away any more—that I can promise you. What a creature! Well you just wait . . .”—“But the child must have had a reason to run away!” I said. “No, she had none whatsoever. She didn’t have any reason.” “Hm. And what will you do with her?”—“I will punish her,” said Frau Adriani, at once both satiated and hungry. She stretched in her chair. “Please permit me a question: how will you punish her?” “I don’t need to answer that question—I don’t have to. But I will tell you, for it is in accordance with Frau Collin’s wishes that the child be dealt with strictly. So she will be confined to her room [Zimmerarrest, a military term], and will receive the small penalties, work, she cannot go outside with the others—that’s how it’s done here.”—“And if we asked you to waive the punishment . . . would you do that?—“No. I could not decide to do that. You can ask all you want . . . Is that what you came to ask me?” she added with a sneer.
(Kurt Tucholsky, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Bänden, ed. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz J. Raddatz [1931] [Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1960], 9:87)
28. Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964), educator, in 1906 founded and oversaw the progressive “Free School Community Wikkersdorf.” In his book about the school,Der Gedankenkreis der Freien Schulgemeinde (1914), he presented his theory of the independent “culture of youth,” which had a wide influence on the Youth Movement.
29. Richard Matthias Müller, Über Deutschland: 103 Dialoge (Olten and Freiburg i. Br.: Walter, 1965), 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966). Short, sardonic dialogues between a Catholic father and his son that expose the hypocrisy of the Federal Republic’s contemporary political palaver regarding the recent past, relations with the German Democratic Republic, the Allied powers, etc.
30. Radio and first published versions: “This is implied by an experience that no one can evade. We all have experienced the relapse of humanity into barbarism, in the literal, indescribable, and true sense. Nothing can be added to the word ‘Auschwitz.’ But barbarism is a condition . . . .”
31Entbarbarisieren, Adorno’s neologism, modeled on and likely a corrective deepening of “denazification” [entnazifizieren]. The radio version is more direct: “thus, that something like Auschwitz does not happen again in the world, essentially depends on individuals becoming debarbarized.”
32. Radio and first published versions have the following sentence next: “Boger’s ideology was that of pedagogical corporal punishment; even at his trial he was clamoring about the youth’s lack of discipline.”
Education After Auschwitz
1. Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) and Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930); English: vols. 18 and 21, respectively, of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
2. First published version: “helpless” and “helplessness” instead of “desperate” and “desperation.”
3Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933) by Franz Werfel. Set in Syria in 1915, the novel recounts the resistance offered by the Armenians against more numerous and better equipped Young Turk forces. The Armenian forces entrench themselves on the mountain Musa Dagh for forty days and, on the verge of being overwhelmed, are rescued by an Anglo-French naval squadron. English: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop (New York: Viking, 1934).
4. See the essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” this volume.
5. First published version: “resistance, rebellion” instead of “spiteful resentment.”
6. German translation Tote ohne Begräbnis of Jean Paul Sartre, Morts sans sépulchre in Théatre, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). English: The Victors, in Three Plays, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: Knopf, 1949).
7. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1946); numerous reprints. English: Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Berkley, 1950).
8. First published version: simply “has not yet succeeded” without the comparative.
9. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972; reprint, New York: Continuum, 1989), esp. 231–236.
10. Cf. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn, 1906). Cf. also Soziologische Exkurse: Nach Vorträgen und Diskussionen, vol. 4 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1956), 157; and T.W. Adorno, Einführung in die Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 77. Adorno planned to have Sumner’s book translated into German when he returned to Frankfurt after the war.
11Rauhnächte: hazing ritual during the nights of Christmastide; Haberfeldtreiben: old Bavarian custom of censuring those perceived by the community as (often moral or sexual) reprobates who have been overlooked by the law. Cf. T. W. Adorno, Einführung in die Soziologie, 65, where Adorno speaks of “Oberbayerische Haberfeldtreiben” in the context of the conceptual opacity of Durkheim’s faits sociaux.
12. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), numbers 82, 210, 260, 269; The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), number 26; “On the Old and New Tablets,” no. 29, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 214.
13. Wilhelm Boger was in charge of the “escape department” at Auschwitz and took pride in the fact that it had the fewest escapes of any concentration camp. As one of the twenty-one former SS men brought before the “Frankfurt” or “Auschwitz” trials (1963–1965), Boger was accused of having taken part in numerous selections and executions at Auschwitz as well as having mistreated prisoners so severely on the “Boger swing” (a torture device he invented) during interrogation that they subsequently died. The court found him guilty of murder on at least 144 separate occasions, of complicity in the murder of at least 1,000 prisoners, and of complicity in the joint murder of at least 10 persons. Boger was sentenced to life imprisonment and an additional five years of hard labor.
14. First published version: “objects” instead of “material.”
15. See Adorno’s interpretation of “The ‘Manipulative’ Type” in The Authoritarian Personality, by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow, Studies in Prejudice, ed. Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flower-man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 767–771.
16. See part 3 of “Egoism and the Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era,” (1936) in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
17. Original reflections on “L’inhumaine” in Paul Valéry, “Rhumbs” in Œuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard 1960), 620–621.
Cf. Adorno’s review of recent German translations of Valéry, “Valéry’s Abweichungen” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11:158–202, esp. 177–178, where he cites the passage as translated by Bernhard Böschenstein (Windstriche [Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1959]; reprinted in Paul Valéry, Werke, vol. 5, Zur Theorie der Dichtkunst und vermischte Gedanken, ed. Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt [Frankfurt: Insel Verlag 1991]). The English version of Adorno’s essay (“Valéry’s Deviations,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991] 1:137–173, here p. 153) quotes Valéry from the Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Matthews, Bollingen Series 45, here vol. 14, Analects, trans. Stuart Gilbert ([Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970], 190): “The revolt of common sense is the instinctive recoil of man confronted by the inhuman; for common sense takes stock only of the human, of man’s ancestors and yardsticks; of man’s powers and interrelations. But research and the very powers that he possesses lead away from the human. Humanity will survive as best it can—perhaps there’s a fine future in store for inhumanity” [translation corrected].
18. The “technological veil,” as Adorno and Horkheimer first conceived it, is the “excess power which technology as a whole, along with the capital that stands behind it, exercises over every individual thing” so that the world of the commodity, manufactured by mass production and manipulated by mass advertising, comes to be equated with reality per se: “Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication. This is how the technological veil and the myth of the positive is woven. If the real becomes an image insofar as in its particularity it becomes as equivalent to the whole as one Ford car to all the others of the same range, then the image on the other hand turns into immediate reality” (“The Schema of Mass Culture” (1942), trans. Nicholas Walker, now in Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein [London: Routledge, 1991], here p. 55). Original in GS 3:301. Adorno used the concept throughout his works, e.g., the 1942 text “Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie,” GS 8:390, and the 1968 text “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft,” where he defines it as follows: “The false identity between the organization of the world and its inhabitants caused by the total expansion of technology amounts to upholding the relations of production, whose beneficiaries in the meantime one searches for almost as much in vain as the proletariat has become invisible” (GS 8:369).
19. Radio version is stronger here: “If I may voice a suspicion here, concerning how this fetishization of technology comes about, then I would like to say that people who cannot love, that is those who constitutively, essentially, are cold, must themselves negate even the possibility of love, that is, withdraw their love of other people from the very outset, because they cannot love them at all, and at the same time apply to means whatever has managed to survive of their ability to love.”
20. Cf. Adorno’s qualitative evaluation of the clinical interview with “Mack,” the exemplary subject prone to fascism as presented in Authoritarian Personality, 789; cf. also pp. 55, 802.
21. According to Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal. And therefore men, even when they do not require one another’s help, desire to live together,” where “common advantage” and “friendship as political justice” hold states together. Cf. Politics, 1278b16–25 and Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a21–28 and 1160a9–14.
22. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
23. Radio version and first published version continue as follows: “Similar behavior can be observed in innumerable automobile drivers, who are ready to run someone over if they have the green light on their side.”
24. Charles Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire; ou, Invention du procédé d’industrie attrayante et naturelle distribuée en séries passionnées (1829). English: Charles Fourier, The Passions of the Human Soul, and their Influence on Society and Civilization, trans. Hugh Doherty (London: Hippolythe Baillière, 1855).
25. Radio version: “First of all, it is necessary to learn about the objective and subjective mechanisms that led to this, as well as to learn about the stereotypical defense mechanisms that prevent working against such consciousness.”
26. First published version: “then people perhaps will not give vent to these traits so unrestrainedly.” Radio version: “When one no longer has the feeling that countless people are all similarly waiting for outrages to be committed, rather when one knows that they are deformations and the entire cultural consciousness is permeated with the intimation of the pathogenic character of these traits, then people will perhaps not give vent to it so unrestrainedly.”
On the Question: “What is German?”
1. The proverb is even more ill-fated in German, literally: “No crow pecks out the eye of another.”
2. Radio and first published version: “rage” instead of “indignation.”
3. A loose quotation of Wagner, which in its entirety reads: “What German is: to wit, the thing one does for its own sake and for the very joy of doing it” (Richard Wagner, “Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik,” translated by William Ashton Ellis as “German Art and German Policy,” in volume 4 [Art and Politics] of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works [New York: Broude Brothers, 1966; reprint of 1895 ed. by Routledge & Kegan Paul], 4:107). Related observations can also be found in Wagner’s essay “Was ist Deutsch?” (1865/78) translated as “What is German?” ibid., 149–169.
4. Adorno here nominalizes Hegel’s terms for the relationship between consciousness and knowledge: an sich (“in-itself”), für anderes (“for-something-else”) with the modification für andere (“for-others”).
5. Radio and first published version: “realizations” instead of “manifestations.”
6. Allusion to Hölderlin’s “An die Deutschen.” English: “To the Germans,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 59 and 123.
7. Radio and first published version: “the radical seriousness of spirit” instead of “the unwavering radicalism of spirit.”
8. In the radio version Adorno pronounces this explicitly as a foreign word.
9. In the first published and radio broadcast versions of this article the paragraph continues as follows: “Years ago Max Frisch had already sharply criticized the kind of culture of the spirit that itself becomes a value and a substitute satisfaction, by pointing out that several of those responsible for the Nazi atrocities were excellent pianists or were connoisseurs who listened to records of Beethoven or Bruckner symphonies in their headquarters.”
10. Reprinted in GS 8:20–41. The original lecture appeared in Psyche 6 (April 1946).
11. Radio version does not have this paragraph.
12. A graphic illustration of Adorno’s point: Hegel’s work has been translated into English under the two titles, Phenomenology of Mind and Phenomenology of Spirit.
13. Ulrich Sonnemann, “Zum 60. Geburtstag von Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno,” reprinted in Sonnemann, Müllberge des Vergessens: Elf Einsprüche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 41–47.
14Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (1964), GS 6:413–526. English: Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
15. Reference to Hans Pfitzner’s Von deutscher Seele (1921), a “romantic cantata” based on motifs from the poet J. von Eichendorff for four solo voices, mixed chorus, orchestra, and organ. Adorno may be responding to Thomas Mann, who championed Pfitzner in the essays “Von der Tugend” and “Ästhetizistische Politik,” in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918–1920), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), 12:375–427, 537–567; English: “On Virtue” and “The Politics of Estheticism,” in Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Frederick Unger, 1983), 273–314, 396–418.
16. Cf. for example, “What the Germans are Missing,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 43–49. Also on the sphere of profundity [Tiefe, Tief-sinn] cf. section 15 of the first volume and aphorism 289 of the second volume in Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19, 280.