Essential Adorno

The Germans and Austrians driven to the United States by Nazism included Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim and Erik Erikson, who today elicit wide recognition. Yet the social philosopher and critic T. W. Adorno was among the most brilliant of these refugees and remains among the least known; he has not traveled far beyond the academic specialists.

One purpose in publishing “Critical Models” is to introduce a more public Adorno to the public. Henry W. Pickford, the editor and translator, wants to correct the picture of Adorno as a “stereotypical mandarin aesthete.” These essays from the 1950s and ‘60s represent the more approachable Adorno, an engaged philosopher addressing questions of teaching, student examinations, German identity, sexual morality, television and even astrological horoscopes published in the newspaper. Many of these essays originated as radio talks at a German station. To emphasize their accessibility Pickford includes a transcript of questions and answers that followed one lecture.

Will these pieces and exchanges facilitate Adorno’s reception? A query about what he meant by the phrase “the self-alienation of society” elicits a page and a half of response. An Adorno radio talk is to a National Public Radio commentary what Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” is to Mickey Mouse.

With a corrosive intelligence Adorno wrote on almost everything, including a lengthy analysis of the Los Angeles Times’ daily astrology column. His collected works amount to about 20 thick volumes. He could be a victim of his own genius, however. Social psychologists might know of “The Authoritarian Personality,” a study of prejudice and anti-Semitism which Adorno helped run, edit and write; literary critics might know of his essays on Kafka or Beckett; philosophers, his writings on Edmund Husserl or Soren Kierkegaard; musicologists, his studies of Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg and Richard Wagner. But few know all his writings.

The only child of an assimilated German Jewish merchant and his Italian wife, a professional singer, Adorno belonged to a group of leftist scholars dubbed the “Frankfurt School,” who assembled in Frankfurt am Main in the late 1920s. His writings first appeared under the name Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. Sometime in the ‘30s Wiesengrund contracted to a “W.,” apparently in a futile effort to minimize the German and Jewish profile of the Frankfurt School as it went into exile.

The history of this group and its many associates has become a small academic industry. The short course on the Frankfurt School would outline its roots in German idealism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, but nothing about the school is short or simple. Even its funding, which derived from an international grain market magnate, Hermann Weil, remains controversial. Bertolt Brecht, the poet and playwright, maliciously considered writing a sketch satirizing these ponderous leftist thinkers, supported by a millionaire. Adorno returned the swipe; he commented that Brecht spent two hours a day pushing dirt under his fingernails to make himself appear proletarian.

With the rise of Hitler, the Frankfurt scholars began fleeing Europe, mainly to New York and Los Angeles. Some, like the literary critic Walter Benjamin, did not make it. Those who reached American shores were grateful, but Adorno never felt at ease in the new world and returned to Germany after the war. Others in the Frankfurt School flourished abroad; for instance, Herbert Marcuse became an honored and sometimes controversial professor at Brandeis University and UC San Diego. The ‘60s turned Marcuse and Adorno if not exactly into gurus--they were too complex and scholarly for that role--then into fonts of a heady radicalism for a new student generation. Before she went her own way, Angela Davis, Marcuse’s most famous student, made the trek to Frankfurt to study with Adorno. She found him difficult to understand but noted that her deficient German was not the sole cause. Adorno proved difficult for German students as well.

In fact, the complexity of Adorno is legendary. Yet it is unfair to label Adorno a long-winded pedant. He was in fact the opposite. He disdained weighty academic tomes; he preferred polemics, essays, shorter treatments and aphorisms. His titles frequently refer to the fragmentary nature of knowledge--”Interventions,” “Prisms,” “Catchwords.” He published several volumes of essays under the simple title “Notes on Literature.” His major philosophical work, written with Max Horkheimer, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” is subtitled “Philosophical Fragments.” He saw himself as far removed from an all-seeing philosopher. Yet none of this should suppose that his essays were provisional or hastily done; in fact, his work was finely crafted.

He concurred with the statement that “there has never been a great philosopher who was not also a great writer.” He assailed platitudes and hackneyed phrases. One of his books, “Jargon of Authenticity,” savaged the lax idiom of existential philosophers, mainly the followers of Martin Heidegger. “Critical Models” opens decrying the “abuse of language.” Adorno explained his return to Germany in 1949 by his inability to find the exact nuance and rhythm in English.

The reasons for his return went beyond language, however. “I simply wanted to go back to the place where I spent my childhood where what is specifically mine was imparted to the very core,” he writes in an essay in this collection. He adds: “Perhaps I sensed that whatever one accomplishes in life is little other than the attempt to regain childhood.” This sentence captures a utopian and nostalgic note that infused his writings. At the risk of simplifying, it might be said that Adorno’s work occupies a space defined by utopia and fascism. Adorno is a utopian thinker in an age that has obliterated utopia.

Adorno’s most famous sentence, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” speaks to the impossibility of happiness in a murderous world. Philosophy, he states in this collection, “must come to know, without any mitigation, why the world--which could be paradise here and now--can become hell itself tomorrow.” The words--”can become”--might mislead. For Adorno, barbarism was not only the possible future but the real past. In “Education After Auschwitz,” he scorns talk of “the threat of the relapse into barbarism.” It is no threat. Auschwitz “was this relapse.”

The dark vision, the utopian thread, the philosophical concepts, the leftist orientation, the vastness of his canvas: All this set Adorno apart from the prevailing American social science that prized statistics and narrow programs. Adorno had little patience with methodologies that worshiped numbers but spurned issues because they seemed too big to be reliably researched. As he recalls in a memoir in this collection, he was chilled by the demand of the sociologists, “Where is the evidence?” For Adorno, legitimate concerns about methods tilted into anti-intellectualism: “Skepticism about what is unproven can easily turn into a prohibition upon thinking.”

From his philosophy to his persona, Adorno rubbed against the American grain. He recounts being shocked by a question from a “charming” American colleague: “Tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?” For Adorno the question reflected the half-digested psychologizing and stereotyping he despised. In the same manner, an inquiry about hobbies repelled him, inferring an activity pursued to kill time: “Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would be a mockery of them.”

If Adorno displayed the stiffness and hauteur of turn-of-the-century German Jewry, he also exemplified its incandescent intelligence. Many of the essays in this collection crackle--his reflections on the 1920s, progress, sexual taboos, the German past. Yet it would be misleading to claim that they all do. Pickford has done a superb job of annotation and, inevitably, a less superb job of translating. In the opening sentences of this collection, Adorno’s idiosyncratic German turns into clunky English. Even consummately translated, however, Adorno would irritate the impatient. He demands time and effort--and rewards them.

In 1969 the German New Left turned against the 66-year-old Adorno; the young rebels wanted their old teacher to join them on the barricades protesting capitalism, university conditions and American foreign policy. Adorno, who died later that year of a heart attack, responded in a series of reflections that is included in this collection. Characteristically both philosophic and concrete, Adorno rejected the crowds and their programs: “Weak and fearful people feel strong when they hold hands while running.”

In refusing to cater to passing political demands, Adorno believed an element of resistance inheres in thinking itself; it keeps alive a moment of happiness and utopia, a scent of a better world. Adorno may never be very popular, but in an age of cynicism and practicality, he is more essential than ever.