PART II—
MEMORIES AND MEMORIALS

6—
Sociology of Literature in Retrospect

By Leo Lowenthal

For more than a half century I have primarily concerned myself with the sociology of literature and the problem of mass culture. With financial support from the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, I began in 1926 with studies on German writers in the nineteenth century.^[1] Discernible in these studies is the socially critical spirit that motivated this group of then still young scholars to reject conventional research methods and to seek a new and bolder mode of analyzing material in the social and human sciences—in short, to dare to break through the walls of the academic ivory tower, where specialists pursued their professional interests without any social or moral consciousness. I had the privilege of being one of the first members of this group, which I

[1] Cf. Leo Lowenthal, "Studies on the German Novel in the Nineteenth Century," in Literature and the Image of Man, vol. 2 of Communication in Society (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), pp. 221ff.

joined in 1926 at the invitation of Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock.

The years of my academic training were devoted to the study of sociology and literature. Later, in my first independent work, I attempted to apply what I had learned from Marx, Freud, and the great philosophical tradition of Europe to a new appraisal of European literature since the Renaissance. Like many other intellectuals in my circles of that time, I was convinced of the decadence of Western society. All of us felt Hitler's threatening advance, and the rest of the so-called civilized world we considered to be impaired. We strove, each according to his own knowledge and inclination, to interpret historical and contemporary problems in such a way as to reveal their socially regressive or progressive character. We rejected the concept of a "value-free science" as an unpardonable renunciation of the moral responsibility of those who, amid the general misery of average people, had the good fortune to lead the life of an intellectual. If some of the formulations in what follows appear partisan or even angry, I offer no apologies. On the contrary, I would be pleased by such accusations. There was reason enough for anger—in the scientific enterprise as well as in public life.

Since my school days I have been attracted to literature, and it is certainly no coincidence that I spent several years as a German teacher at a Gymnasium in Frankfurt before joining the Institute. I suspect that from the outset I tended toward literary criticism, for as a high school student and young teacher I had experienced the utterly banal approach to the teaching of literature practiced by most instructors and supported by the officially approved textbooks. More than anything, however, I was irritated by the utterly conventional choice of literary texts. Because I lived through the years after World War I as a politically rebellious, if not out-and-out revolutionary, young man, it seemed to me quite natural to apply the practical experience gained in school and in politics to my theoretical endeavors within the academy.

I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to

pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, it was almost impossible to find allies in approaching this task from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure, there were Franz Mehring's articles, which I read with interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings hardly went beyond the limits of a socialist journalist writing in essentially the same style about literature as about politics and the economy. Georg Lukács hadn't yet published his impressive series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and literary interpretation. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his fine little book The Theory of the Novel (1920), which I learned practically by heart. Besides Levin Schücking's small volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major influence I can recall was Georg Brandes's monumental work on the literary currents of the nineteenth century.

Nonetheless, I had the courage, or even the hubris, to plan an ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish, and German literature, the beginning of which was to consist of the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on the writers and literary schools that the German literary establishment either punished by total silence ("Young Germany" and Friedrich Spielhagen, for example), raised up into the clouds of idealistic babble (Goethe and the Romantics), or relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology (C. F. Meyer and Gottfried Keller).

In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of literature; for reasons I hold to be sociologically and artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth century. While I am in no way ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and between literature and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation

between substructure and superstructure, between social currents and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some—frequently in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language—are so concerned with "mediation" that the connections between social being and social consciousness become almost obscured.

I

The first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforchung —the only one we managed to publish in Germany before the Hitler-night descended—gives an indication of what Critical Theory means: namely, a perspective, based on a shared critical fundamental attitude, that applies to all cultural phenomena without ever claiming to be a system. It includes critical analysis of philosophy, economics, psychology, music, and literature.

Critical Theory—a term, by the way, that we began to use only in the late thirties—should not, then, be understood as anything more than this collective "common denominator." As the only survivor of the founding years in the twenties, I feel almost ill at ease. . . . Why should I survive and not the others, who in 1926 invited me to join an intellectual alliance they had created in an institutionalized form two years earlier? We did not speak of "Critical Theory" at that time, and the thought of a "school" was certainly far from us. We were and remained "Nay-sayers," in the tradition of Hegel's particular form of negation; each one of us tried to express what was wrong in his particular field and, therefore, in our society. We were consciously on the periphery of established power. Even now, as you will see, this position on the periphery, this marginality, remains for me in my work, and perhaps even in

my own perception of life, the most important category. What I have tried to do in the last fifty years is guided by my unbroken commitment to the European literary heritage and simultaneously to the critique of the production of commodities and words for a manipulated and manipulable mass market. I shall now try to sketch my critical approach.

II

First, the most important thing to stress is that art and consumer goods must be held strictly apart. I cannot accept any of the current radical attempts, either in Germany or in the United States, to do away with this distinction. To be sure, the consumption of high art can also turn into mass culture and play its part in manipulating society. I need only remind you of Wagner's role during the Hitler years, about which Adorno has written extensively. More peculiar examples are found in the history of theater direction, for example, when bourgeois common sense trivializes the socially inherent tragedy of marriage and love. Here I am thinking of an eighteenth-century English production of Othello in which the Moor does not kill Desdemona in the final scene but rather realizes his own mistake and asks her forgiveness so that they can be eternally happy on earth; or, for another example, when in a turn-of-the-century staging of Ibsen's Doll's House in Munich, Nora, at the end of the play, closes the door not from the outside but from within and returns to her boring husband—for, after all, a woman's place is in the home. These are certainly examples that reflect the social climate. In contrast, certain materials, originally produced as articles of consumption, can sometimes—if seldom—pass into the realm of folk art, or rather of folkloric mythology. But those are borderline cases. And I must not neglect to point out certain differences between the American and the European scene. In the United States the sociology of literature is more or less limited to content analysis and the

study of the effects of mass culture, with particular emphasis on commercial and political propaganda. The model used in these studies is behavioristic, that is, unhistorical; sociology of literature in the sense of an analysis of art remains suspect. I sense today in Europe an inclination to perceive a work of art merely as a manifestation of ideology, which strips it of its specific integrity, that is, its historically conditioned, but also rationally creative and cognitive, role. To put it in a more provocative form: Marxist literary criticism is not merely totally adequate, it is indispensable in the analysis of mass culture. It must, however, be applied with utter caution to art itself and must, as a critique of social illusions, limit itself to the residues that are unequivocally ideological in nature.

To put it in even stronger terms: art teaches, and mass culture is learned; therefore, a sociological analysis of art must be cautious, supplementary, and selective, whereas a sociological analysis of mass culture must be all-inclusive, for its products are nothing more than the phenomena and symptoms of the process of the individual's self-resignation in a wholly administered society.

III

I would like to speak first of the sociology of literature as art. Adorno once said, "Works of art . . . have their greatness only insofar as they let speak what ideology conceals. They transcend, whether they want to or not, false consciousness." Literature is not ideology. We are not engaged in research on ideology; rather, we have to focus our attention on the special truth, the specifically cognitive aspect, that the literary work imparts. This does not mean "new criticism"; on the contrary, it implies studying the social history of art and its reception, as suggested in Marx's comments on Greek tragedy and the novels of Balzac. At this point I would like to identify the great themes of literature as I perceive them from a sociologically critical perspective. To begin with the

most general: literature is the only dependable source for human consciousness and self-consciousness, for the individual's relationship to the world as experience. The process of socialization—that is, the social ambience of the private, the intimate, and the individual—is raised to consciousness by the artist, not only for his time but also for our time, and thereby functions as a constant corrective to our false consciousness. Awareness of this aspect of art has come to be an important issue on the intellectual agenda only in the past fifty years, when the Western world entered into a severe crisis with the rise of totalitarianism. The sociology of art is indeed one of Minerva's owls. The sociology of literature, rightly understood, should interpret what seems furthest removed from society as the most valid key to understanding society, especially its defects. Psychoanalysis, by the way, in revealing the social dimension of the most intimate aspects of body and psyche, is a good model for what I am attempting to express. Of particular importance to me is the role of a critical sociology of literature in the analysis of the social ambience of the intimate and the private, the revealing of the sociological determination of such phenomena as love, friendship, the human being's relationship to nature, self-image, and the like. This approach does not mean reductionism, however. Literature is no mere site to be plundered. I reject all attempts to regard literature as a tool for learning facts about such institutions as the economy, the state, and the legal system. Social scientists and social historians should be forbidden from regarding literature as a source for raw materials. Literature teaches us to understand the success or failure of the socialization of individuals in concrete historical moments and situations. The novels of Stendhal, for instance—in particular, Lucien Leuwen —would be a perfect source for studying the transitions of forms of experience from a feudal to an aristocratic to a bourgeois type of individual.

If what I have said thus far seems too formalistic, let me assure you that a critical perspective is absolutely necessary. When I speak of the history of the individual's socialization, I also speak of the

history of his sufferings, and of his passions. The literature I am familiar with, that of Western Europe since 1600, is the history of human passion in our everpresent crisis, the long-endured story of tension, promises, betrayal, and death. The literature of bourgeois society makes the permanent crisis of the individual apparent. A criterion of literature as art demands assessing whether and to what extent the crisis is manifested as being permanent. And thus we enter the precarious realm of the fringe, or marginality.

The most extreme form of the marginal existence, that is, the conscious or unconscious critique of society, is expressed in the emphatic utterances of those characters who know humanity's death sentence to be already sealed before we enter the so-called fullness of social life. Stendhal has one figure, with whom he identifies, say somewhere in The Charterhouse of Parma : "I can see nothing other than a death sentence which characterizes a real human being. . . . Everything else can be bought." And a half century later, Walter Pater assures us in his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry :

Well, we are all condamnés , as Victor Hugo says: we are all under a sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song.^[2]

This means, in the language of a neo-Romantic, that art alone communicates what is truly good in human life and experience; it is a promise of happiness that remains unfulfilled.

Here I come to the most significant aspect of marginality, namely, the sociology of the artist himself. He has a skewed view of

[2] Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London, 1912), p. 238.

the world. By looking at the world obliquely, he sees it correctly, for it is indeed distorted. The artists is no Cartesian but rather a dialectician focusing on the idiosyncratic, on that which does not fit into the system. In short, he is concerned with human costs and thus becomes an ally of Critical Theory, of the critical perspective that is itself a part of critical praxis.

The marginal in the work of art is represented by groups, situations, and protagonists.

First, from the perspective of Critical Theory, the literary artist becomes our ally as the spokesman for the collective of outcasts , of the poor, the beggars, the criminals, the insane, in short, of all those who bear the burden of society. Here, however, the true dialectic of art is immediately apparent, making it meaningless to interpret it, in the sense of Adorno's remark cited above, as mere ideology. In the writer's representation—which comes nearer to reality than unmediated reality itself—the collectivity of those excluded from profits and privileges is shown to be the true first nature of humankind. In the collectivity of misery, the possibility of true humanity is revealed not as distortion, but as an immanent indictment. It is a dialectical irony that those who least correspond to a trivial bourgeois-ideological concept of the individual bear the mark of liberated, autonomous humaneness.

Here I may perhaps refer to my analysis of the works of Cervantes as an example of social groups on the periphery:

There are two, not mutually exclusive, ways of looking at the marginal figures of Cervantes; they are the refuse of a society that has cast them aside, and they are, by virtue of their own right, moralists. . . .

All these marginal creatures, the beggars, the crooks, the gypsies, the insane, constitute "overheads" of society, to which they are either unwilling to belong or from which they are forcibly excluded. But while they are accused, indicted, and confined, they themselves in turn are accusers. Their very existence denounces a world they never made and

which wants no part of them. The artist, in giving these people a voice, may seek to inspire uneasiness on the part of those who have profited by the prevailing order. The author's voice is the voice of the losers. The other aspect in which the marginal figures may be viewed leads us back to the concept of the utopian. The marginal figures not only serve the negative function of indicting the social order; they also positively demonstrate the true idea of man. They all serve to show the possibilities of Utopia, where everyone has the freedom to be his own deviant case—with the result that the very phenomenon of deviation disappears. The outcast society of robbers and thieves who are plying their trade on the fringes of Seville, and the society of gypsies encamped on the outskirts of Madrid, are grotesque utopian prototypes: everybody works according to his own talents, and everything is shared by everybody. . . .

The meaning of Cervantes' critical idealism is even clearer in The Little Gypsy . . . . The tribal chief says: "We observe inviolably the law of friendship; no one solicits the object of another man's affection; we live free from the bitter curse of jealousy. . . ." Thus at the threshold of the new society Cervantes describes the law by which it operates and confronts it with its professed measure: the autonomous and morally responsible individual. And this responsible and independent man is to be found only at the margin of society, which at once produces and expels him.^[3]

The most extreme case in which a critical perspective attempts to highlight the cognitive character of peripheral groups portrayed by literature is that of woman. Even since the Renaissance, the literary artist has made female protagonists the true revolutionary critics of a defective society. Ibsen once said, "Modern society is not

[3] Leo Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man , pp. 43–46. (Translation emended.)

a human society; it is merely a society of males." However, this disenfranchisement of woman has not only negative but also positive consequences.

Ibsen's men never practice what they preach, and the only principle by which they live—the materialism of personal gain—they never admit. The women, too, are materialistic, but their materialism is clearly of a different nature, and it is, above all, openly articulated. It is a conscious dramatic irony that morality is preached by the egotists, whereas egotism is preached by the moralists.

Second, situation-marginality and group-marginality are very closely related. Significant examples are found in Shakespeare's plays, especially in The Tempest, King Lear , and Timon of Athens , where the characters are driven out into the wilderness of unsocialized nature. Here nature is not perceived as raw material to be abused and exploited by a class society's lust for power—an exploitation that parallels that of the marginal groups of society of which I just spoke. When in these plays nature emphatically appears in the form of the untamed elements, it heralds at the same time a reconciliation of nature and man. Outraged nature forms an alliance with outraged man in order to indict an evil society. In The Tempest this is made very clear, as unmastered nature leads the human being's second nature, his reified and socialized mask, back to his true nature. The marginal situation of absolute poverty (not to be confused with Robinson Crusoe's situation), which initially besets Prospero, Lear, and Timon, eventually turns into a blessing and thus represents the anticipation of utopia. Implicitly or explicitly (and this I can only boldly assert without proof), utopia—the reconciliation of human nature and nature—remains the fundamental theme of authentic literature.

Third, where the protagonist himself appears as a peripheral figure, the synthesis between marginal groups and marginal situations has been reached, or at least anticipated, all the way from Rabelais's Pantagruel to, if you will, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum ,

and into the present—here, the identity of the average person in class society and that of the protagonist are totally incompatible. Don Quixote is symbolic of a critique of bourgeois society, of its manipulated conformism from its late feudal forms around 1600 up to the present day. He is the ahistorical symbol of a genuine historical materialism. In every situation he is insane—that is, he is sane; in every encounter he is irrational—that is, he is rational. He is the only one who is really happy, nearly fulfilled—precisely because he sees society from an oblique critical perspective and "straightens it out" by his fantastic deeds. By converting his critical idealism into practice, he represents the fulfillment of the potential of every individual. Although he is destroyed and finally dies, he still stands for the premonition of what life could be. His fantasies anticipate what remains invisible in this damaged world. To quote Hegel:

We find in Don Quixote a noble nature in whose adventure chivalry goes mad, the substance of such adventures being placed at the center of a stable and well-defined state of things whose external character is copied with exactness from nature. . . . In all the madness of his mind and his enterprise he is a completely consistent soul, or rather his madness lies in this, that he is and remains securely rooted in himself and his enterprise.^[4]

In short, in him, through him, the identity of theory and practice is realized.

Before I turn briefly to the topic of mass culture, I would like, as a transition, to refer once more to Stendhal, who to my mind is the master analyst of the experience of socialization, and who, if in a now dated way, anticipates a social climate in which genuine experience becomes completely overpowered by conformism. And this is indeed the essential characteristic of mass culture. When, in Lu -

[4] G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art , trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 374–75.

cien Leuwen , Lucien can endure the decadent restoration society as little as the juste-milieu of the new bourgeois world, he toys—as does the hero of Wilhelm Meister's Travels —with the idea of emigrating to America. This quotation speaks for itself:

All Lucien's sensations had been so dreary since he came to Nancy that for want of anything better to do, he let this republican epistle absorb his attention. "The best thing to do would be for them all to sail to America. . . . And would I sail with them? I am not quite such an imbecile! . . . I should be bored in America among men who are, it is true, perfectly just and reasonable, but coarse, and who think of nothing but dollars."^[5]

Bordeom is indeed the key word; it is the form of experience in which nineteenth-century artists express the perspective of Critical Theory in relation to the emerging manifestations of modern life.

IV

When I think about my own works on the analysis of mass culture, it is easy for me to appreciate the term "boredom," because this term offers access to the most significant factor: the crippling of imagination that obstructs artistic experience and gives free rein to the forces of manipulation. The extent to which the "administration," or suppression, of the imagination is part of the business of mass culture can be made clear in a few examples. In the United States, as well as in Germany, book clubs are a big business. One enterprise, called "Time Books," offers a "Time Reading Program." For a modest sum, three or four books are delivered each month and, with them, participation in a "planned approach" to

[5] Stendhal, Lucien Leuwen , trans. Louis Varèse (New York, 1950), vol. 1, p. 35.

reading, which guarantees that "though your time may be limited, you will be reading widely and profitably . . . many books that are truly timeless in style and significance." The reliability of selection is beyond doubt: "This plan draws its strength from the fact that the editors spent thousands of hours finding the answers to questions that you, too, must have asked yourself many times. . . . It is part of their job to single out the few books that tower over all others." Significance, quality, and relevance of the publications are assured: "In each case, the editors will write special introductions to underline what is unique in the book, what impact it has had or will have, what place it has earned in literature and contemporary thought." In addition, a kind of religious sanction is bestowed upon the wrappings: "The books will be bound in durable, flexible covers similar to those used for binding fine Bibles and Missals."

Another example: the Literary Guild, one of the most successful American book clubs, recently offered inexpensive special editions of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary , and Dumas's Camille . The advertisement reads about as follows: "These three classical novels, which are now published together in an attractively bound set, tell the story of a trio of tragic and unforgettable ladies who risked their lives for love and thereby lost everything. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a woman who gives up her aristocratic society for the cause of an insuperable passion; Dumas's Camille, a lady who makes the highest sacrifice for the man she loves; and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a tender dreamer whose romantic longing leads to an act of violence." These descriptions illustrate how art is degraded into commodities of mass culture. After all, the triumphs and tragedies in love experienced by Faust's Gretchen or Anna Karenina are not eternally valid statements about the nature of woman; they are, rather, to be seen as specific perceptions about women in certain circumstances. It would not be such an outrageous act of manipulated mass culture if, instead of tossing such books cheaply onto the mass market, the experts were to proclaim that these ladies are all neurotics and

would certainly be better off today after psychoanalytic treatment! In short, the organization and "administration" of the imagination is taken over by agencies of social control, and here reductionism, including that of the behavioral sciences, is a justifiable method, indeed the only appropriate method.

Mass culture reinforces and signals the instructions in the late-capitalist world that promote a false collective. In this sense, I have always regarded my studies as political. Two examples in particular come to mind, which appear to me symptomatic of the shattered bourgeois self-consciousness and the insurmountable impotence that characterized the mood of wide strata of the middle classes. One of the examples is related to literary reception, the other to genre, both of which are closely related.

One of my studies had as its subject the reception of Dostoevsky in Germany at the turn of the century, as documented in a voluminous corpus of books, as well as in articles, journals, and newspapers. It soon became clear to me that the massive reception of Dostoevsky's works was not necessarily a function of their aesthetic quality but rather of deeper social-psychological needs. With the probable exception of Goethe, Dostoevsky was the most written-about literary figure at that time. The analysis of the material revealed that the reception of Dostoevsky's works illuminated significant idiosyncrasies of German society in a time of total crisis: infatuation with the so-called irrationalism of the artist; the alleged mystery in the life of the individual; the wallowing in the "dark regions of the soul," the glorification of criminal behavior—in short, indispensable elements that were later incorporated in the psychological transfiguration of violence by National Socialism.

That studies on reception can have social-political significance was confirmed years later when I took a closer look at the reviews of the writer I had predicted—years before the event—would be a Nazi-sympathizer: Knut Hamsun. A history of the reception of Hamsun's works can reflect the development of political conscious-

ness all the way from liberalism to the slogans of the authoritarian state. Indeed, bourgeois literary criticism was not nearly as surprising as the Social Democratic responses. The observations on Hamsun that appeared in Neue Zeit , the leading theoretical journal of German Social Democracy, reveal as early as the nineties a clear political stance: Hamsun's novels are to be rejected; they do not portray living human beings but rather vague attitudes that have nothing to do with tendencies directed toward positive change.

The volumes of Neue Zeit from the early years of World War I and the immediate postwar years, however, contain glowing descriptions of the same writer who twenty years before had been so unambiguously rejected. What was previously judged as "empty atmosphere" and "mere nervous stimulus" was now perceived as "gripping depictions of life and soul in which the most vivid reality with all its lights and shadows is transposed into the allegory of innermost life." The author who impressed the earlier critics as an "amorous exclamation point in a melancholy easy chair" had now grown to such "solitary greatness" that one might not compare him with others without doing him an injustice; what had in his novels previously been seen as "ephemeral as the atmosphere" suddenly became "a parable of the eternal." After World War I, this hymn of praise was joined by the liberal spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, as well as those of the proletariat that Hamsun so despised. Conventional bourgeois criticism and Neue Zeit criticism both belong to the same constellation: that of political resignation and a susceptibility to ideological seduction within broad social strata in Central Europe.

My studies on genre examined the biographical fashion. I attempted to analyze, in two different societies, popular biographies as an illuminating criterion for significant transformations in political and social structure. The first study was carried out in Germany before 1933. It is difficult today to imagine the flood of popular biographies that inundated Europe and Germany at that time. Already by 1918, the popular biography was the classic example of

German bourgeois escapist literature. Biography is both the continuation and the inversion of the novel. In the bourgeois novel, documentation functions as raw material. In the popular biography, on the contrary, the various kinds of documentation—that huge pageant of fixed data, events, names, letters, and so on—come to take the place of social relationships, which have become the individual's fetters; the individual is, so to speak, nothing more than a typographic element, a column heading that winds its way through the book's plot, a mere excuse to attractively arrange a certain body of material. The heroes of the popular biography have no individual destinies; they are nothing but functions of the historic. Latent relativism, although rarely the manifest credo of this literature, is always present. Conscious cynicism of the masters is completely absent, but what remains is the need to cloak the helplessness of the losers. The aestheticism of the nineties, the fin de siècle , could be called the very epitome of activity when compared to the fatigue and weakness emanating from the writers of popular biographies. In these testimonies to the immortality of mortality, in this maze of superlatives and uniquenesses through which reason can never hope to guide us, the writers are every bit as lost as their readers.

Popular biographies in the United States operated in a different social context. I attempted to show in my work on the triumph of mass idols in several American high-circulation magazines the structural change in the treatment of popular biographies in the period of transition from liberal capitalism to manipulated collectivism. I called it the transition from the idols of production to the idols of consumption. Whereas around the turn of the century the so-called heroes were the representatives of production, at the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties these "heroes" were increasingly replaced by athletes and entertainers, especially those of the cinema, who appeared to be "newsworthy" because of their private affairs rather than their productive functions. The identification offered to the reader was no longer with entrepreneurial

success but rather with the imitation of consumption. Ultimately, the German and the American phenomena share certain identical characteristics, although in different political contexts. As I put it then:

The distance between what an average individual may do and the forces and powers that determine his/her life and death has become so unbridgeable that identification with normalcy, even with philistine boredom, becomes a readily grasped empire of refuge and escape. It is some comfort for the average person who has been robbed of the Horatio Alger–dream and who despairs of penetrating the thicket of grand strategy in politics and business, to see his heroes as a bunch of guys who like or dislike highballs, cigarets, tomato juice, golf and social gatherings . . . just like he himself. He knows how to converse in this sphere of consumption and here he can make no mistakes. By narrowing his focus of attention he can experience the gratification of being confirmed in his own pleasures and discomforts by participating in the pleasure and discomforts of the great. The large confusing issues in the political and the economic realm and the antagonisms and controversies in the social sphere are all submerged in the experience of being at one with the lofty and powerful in the sphere of consumption.^[6]

V

With the power of a seemingly prophetic insight, Shakespeare, in act 3, scene 2, of Hamlet , suggests the threat to the autonomy of the individual through social manipulation, although he certainly

[6] Leo Lowenthal, "The Triumph of Mass Idols"; first published as "Biographies in Popular Magazines," in Radio Research, 1942–1943 , ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York, 1944); later published in Literature and Mass Communication , vol. 1 of Communication in Society (New Brunswick, N.J., 1985), pp. 203–35.

could not have guessed that finally, nearly four hundred years later, the Guildensterns would defeat the Hamlets.

Hamlet: Will you play upon this pipe?

Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot.

Hamlet: I pray you.

Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.

Hamlet: I do beseech you.

Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.

Hamlet: 'Tis as easy as lying; govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.

Hamlet: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood! do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Guildenstern represents, if you will, mass culture, which mediates social domination, which tries to force the individual to obedience and plays with him as on a passive, but well-prepared, instrument.

What finally happened is clearly expressed in the words of the American poet, Randall Jarrell, who has the following to say in his book Poetry and the Age:

The poet lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even

the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind. . . . the average article in our magazines gives any subject whatsoever the same coat of easy, automatic, "human" interest.^[7]

Jarrell contrasts Goethe, who stated, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing," with Somerset Maugham, who once said, "The finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: 'I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.'" And Jarrell closes with the observation that "popular writing has left nothing to the imagination for so long now that imagination too has begun to atrophy." In short, the wasting away, the end of imagination, is the end of freedom.

I cannot say anything definitive about the possibility of genuine artistic experience in the present day. Although the acquaintance with great art is certainly growing, an acquaintance without genuine experience, rooted in critical openness, only serves to support the system. Acquaintance and experience are mutually exclusive. I am very concerned about the dwindling possibility of the aesthetic experience as experience of freedom in today's world. I can say no more. What I have tried to convey here was perhaps not so much a summary of my work in the sociology of literature as a chapter of a perhaps too presumptuous intellectual autobiography, an autobiography, however, that—and I will not be falsely modest—does not lose sight of the marginality of the field. As an intellectual, one certainly can, and possibly ought to, live on the margins. And for me, sociology of literature has served me in that respect quite adroitly.

[7] Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York, 1953), p. 18.

7—
Theodor W. Adorno:
An Intellectual Memoir

By Leo Lowenthal

Adorno was a genius, and his work, which is now published in more than twenty volumes, encompasses the intellectual universe of Western civilization, concentrating on but not limited to philosophy, the social sciences, musicology, and significant events of public life. It would be absurd for me to try to convey a systematic summary of Adorno's unique enterprise. Rather, I shall discuss it in a fragmentary style. In doing so, I find myself in tune with Adorno's own approach: to disavow consistently any legitimacy for a system. The famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with his friend Max Horkheimer, has the German subtitle Philosophische Fragmente [Philosophical Fragments], which was unfortunately omitted in the English version. His first writings on Richard Wagner were entitled "Fragments on Richard Wagner," and many of his books were called "notes" or "essays" or something similar. Adorno looked to Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, and Walter Benjamin as models of

this literary form. The style has a characteristic open-ended, probing quality, and its format is essayistic, aphoristic, or fragmentary. In Adorno's case it was justified by his famous philosophical bon mot on Hegel's system: "The whole is the false."

We met in late 1922, brought together by the eminent writer, philosopher, and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer. Ten years later we found ourselves working together in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, and we continued a close association for about twenty years. Our relationship was stormy at times, as is almost unavoidable in a community of high-strung intellectuals. It fills me with emotion to find, for instance, that Martin Jay, who is by now the preeminent historian of our Institute, in an article called "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship" (a subtitle that ironically might serve as a proper characterization for the mutual relationships of all of us) noted that in 1927 Adorno "brooded over his chances for successful habilitation and complained about his rivalry with a mutual friend, Leo Lowenthal, in the ranks of the Frankfurt Institute"; or that four years later, in 1931, "possibilities of Kracauer contributing to the new Institute journal were discussed, with Adorno lamenting that his hands were tied by Leo Lowenthal, whom he described as 'king of the desert' [Wüstenkönig ] at the Institute."^[1] Well, I never had a crown, and Adorno gained his professorial appointment.

Maintaining a fragmentary format, I would first like to discuss the areas and problems on which Adorno and I either engaged in brotherly collaboration or shared scholarly interests, and then I would like to make some observations on the frequently rebellious criticism raised by some of his students and disciples.

[1] Martin Jay, "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship," in Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985), p. 222.

As some of you know, the Institute continued the publication of its journal—which originated in 1932 in Germany, where it lasted only one year—first in Geneva and then in New York as an essentially German-language outlet for our work. It was, in the true sense of the word, a joint enterprise, because all the major articles were subject to critical scrutiny by the entire group. To give a personal example, in 1937 I published an essay on Knut Hamsun with the subtitle "A Prehistory of the Authoritarian Ideology," at a time when Hamsun's membership in the Norwegian Nazi-Quisling Party was still unknown. Adorno wrote a lengthy footnote for my essay, in which he drew close parallels between Hamsun and Sibelius, whose music expressed similar elements of contempt for men oppressed in the glorification of a rigid, pantheistically colored concept of nature. Collaborative closeness is also documented by the first three theses on anti-Semitism that are incorporated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and, above all, by our studies in the seductive and potentially dangerous devices of the American fascist agitator. This work culminated in my book Prophets of Deceit, to which Adorno anonymously contributed a draft of an introduction in addition to copious substantive comments and suggestions. Conversely, I had the privilege of participating in the original draft of the research plan for the famous Authoritarian Personality, on which Adorno was a senior author, and of contributing my own comments and suggestions on his chapters of this monumental work. In a similar spirit of collegial and intellectual solidarity, Adorno wrote the major text of a section in an essay of mine on popular culture, which we properly called "Some Theses on Critical Theory and Empirical Research."

It is indeed in this area of popular or mass culture—or, as Adorno called it, "the culture industry"—that our interests frequently converged. It is, by the way, not without irony that many topics for this symposium mention Adorno's work on mass culture, a term that

he, with his discriminatory perception for linguistic nuances, intensely disliked. In 1967 he expressly stated this in a postscript to the essay published in the Dialectic of Enlightenment twenty years earlier:

The term "culture industry" was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of "mass culture." We replaced that expression with "culture industry" in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.^[2]

I am proud that Adorno approved and used my shorthand definition of fascist agitation as well as culture industry as "psychoanalysis in reverse," that is, as more or less constantly manipulated devices to keep people in permanent psychic bondage, to increase and reinforce neurotic and even psychotic behavior culminating in perpetual dependency on a "leader" or on institutions or products. We both saw modern anti-Semitism and culture industry as ultimately belonging in the same social context even though at times they go different political ways. What is at stake here, as Adorno never grew tired of repeating, is the ever-increasing difficulty of genuine experience mediated primarily through art, whose independence and integrity has been increasingly sabotaged by the sophisticated apparatus of social manipulation and domination. Significant is the inexorable paralysis of productive imagination and artistic experience leading to a conversion of cognitive effects into sales psychology. Culture industry provides the inescapable commodity charac-

[2] Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 12.

ter of all its products and imperceptibly extinguishes the differences among these products themselves and the general or specific advertising purposes for which they are created. We agreed that the culture establishment refused to take any responsibility by ignoring completely the meaning of mass culture and conveniently indicting its technology alone for its miserable productions; we agreed that the dividing line between art and commodity culture must not be obfuscated and that the unholy alliance of social domination with the naked profit motive hardly promotes a state of consciousness in which, in Adorno's words, Freizeit would turn into Freiheit —leisure into freedom.

I would like to let Adorno speak with his own words, first in regard to the dividing line between art and culture industry: "The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. . . . The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control."^[3] I might add as a melancholic personal comment that I find it ever more difficult to persuade my students, despite their predominantly radical persuasion, to accept these irreconcilable differences—another illustration of how the infamous positivist value-neutrality is affecting and infecting the best of us.

Adorno stressed the inescapable fate of people to succumb to the culture industry whether they want it or not:

The phrase "the world wants to be deceived" has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not merely, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle—if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification, they desire a deception

[3] Ibid., p. 13.

which is nonetheless transparent to them. . . . Without admitting it, they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.^[4]

It was once a theoretical dream of our inner circle that, in addition to the social theme of authority, we would engage in a joint study of all aspects of the decay of the essence and concept of the individual in bourgeois society and its conversion to mere illusion and ideology. However, whereas the theme of authority received profuse elaboration in what are now almost classic books, that of the individual remained merely a guiding perspective. Adorno, for instance, continually emphasized the hollow cult of the so-called personality and the exultation of the allegedly autonomous individual in the era of monopoly capitalism. I pursued the same theme in my own studies on the literary genre of biography—in this country as well as in Europe—and its role as a sham device that pretended human specificity when in fact the true meaning of the particular has been perverted. When I wrote on the cultural changes in the selection and treatment of biographies in popular magazines, from what I called "heroes of production" to "heroes of consumption," Adorno admonished me in a letter of November 1942 to emphasize the theoretical function of biographies in present society and particularly within the context of mass culture. He said, and I could not agree more, that "ultimately, the very concept of life as a self-developing and meaningful unity has as little reality today as the concept of the individual, and it is the ideological function of the biographies to conjure up the fiction on arbitrarily selected models that there is still such a thing as life. . . . Life itself in its completely abstract appearance has become mere ideology."

While my own emphasis in the analysis of this trivial genre was on the shallow solace it offered the politically impotent and histor-

[4] Ibid., p. 16. (Translation emended.)

ically disoriented middle classes in Europe before the advent of fascism, Adorno's profound reflections stressed the awesome paradox that the same apparatus of culture industry that extinguishes private idiosyncratic consciousness falls all over itself in an endless praise of personality and individuality. In his words, culture industry's "ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation . . . the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heartthrobs."^[5] Narcissistic as it may sound to some of you, this report of brotherly collaboration and intellectual exchanges should be understood solely as a foil: I wish to bring into relief Adorno's great contribution to a critical understanding of modern society's inescapable network of domination and of its seemingly inescapable reinforcement of the psyche of man, without which this very mechanism of domination would cease to be effective. This theme inspired his continual admonition: "Don't participate"—arguably the leitmotif of his life's work, against which all the weakness of personality or idiosyncracies of life-style weigh very little.

Thinking about Adorno's merciless, but always theoretically founded, indictment of the social phenomena themselves, as well as their faulty, distorted, and manipulated pseudo-interpretations in bourgeois philosophy, social research, and literary criticism—just to name a few of the dubious intellectual enterprises—I cannot help but be reminded of the original theological meaning of the Greek term skandalon . Every thought he ever had and every word he ever said created a new Ärgernis [irritant] for his foes and friends alike.

At this point I would like to break off my brotherly tribute to this genius, whose much too early demise might not be unconnected to the skandalon he adhered to without compromise until the end at his post as Germany's most prominent academic teacher and outstand-

[5] Ibid., p. 14.

ing citizen of the Western European avant-garde. He would have been the first to understand that the implacability implied in each of the intellectual positions he held needed constant refinement and defense against facile acceptance by followers and angry misinterpretations by adversaries. Nothing is more ironic than the term "Frankfurt School," which presupposes a body of learnable statements and doctrines that one could live with, comfortably or uneasily—whatever the case might be—henceforth. I truly believe that no one who, either directly or indirectly, belonged to our circle at its beginnings over a half century ago would ever have felt comfortable with this term. As a matter of fact, the by now indeterminably large corpus of books, articles, doctoral theses, symposia, and seminars has almost "industrialized" the Frankfurt School; many of these works seem to be little short of talmudic disputations about the meaning of this or that theorem at different periods or about the relation of this or that writer or scholar in this or another phase. When Adorno chose as the subtitle of his first major collection of fragments and aphorisms the words "Reflections from Damaged Life," he did not offer to repair such damage. But many, if not most, of his disciples—indeed, students of all shades of the school—could not and cannot accept the absence of political and cultural remedies. I cannot help but think that their call for action is not so far removed from the all-pervasive advocacy of fashionable pseudo-psychological cures that are about to poison many of our contemporaries. If I appear irate, you are not misreading me, but it is an ire grounded in compassion for the restless youth and the now equally restless middle-aged who have looked in vain to Adorno for salvation; he was not, and did not want to be, a messiah.

In stressing some of their collective misreadings, I may perhaps be able to add to an understanding of Adorno's intellectual heritage. I start with the ad hominem argument: Adorno as a human being. One of the most popular objections to radical thinkers has been the vulgar argument that they should practice what they preach—although they are not really preaching anything—by staying away

from all the amenities of the good life. Brecht's comments on the financial resources of the Institute and the upper-class backgrounds of some of its principal members (which I believe to be in poor taste) are well known. I take more seriously the elegant observation of Lukács, who, in the preface to a new edition of his Theory of the Novel in 1962, commented as follows:

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss," which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as "a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss, between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered."^[6]

I have never heard that miserable living conditions and substandard nutrition are necessary prerequisites for innovative thought. If Marx and Nietzsche at times suffered insults of material deprivation, their theoretical creativity survived, not because of but despite such painful conditions. I might also add that Georg Lukács found his own ways of comfortable survival in a political environment where many other heretic Marxists, who were not privy to Lukács's strategy of adaptive behavior, had their heads chopped off. This is an example of an older contemporary, though, not of a "rebellious son." The sons' favorite outcry, to which all of us have been exposed at times, is against the cardinal sin of what they call "elitism." In a lengthy essay by W. V. Blomster entitled "Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond" there is a section called "Adorno: ad personam":

In an age when psychological interpretations of almost all phenomena are irresistible, it is astonishing that so few ques-

[6] Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 22.

tions have been asked about the man Adorno and the degree to which his own psychological constitution might have conditioned—indeed, limited—his work in music. Although this may seem at best a peripheral concern within this study, several observations demand inclusion here. . . . There are moments of uneasiness in working with Adorno when one finds in his position the imprint of that "authoritarian personality" which he himself fought so vehemently. . . . Little remains to be said upon Adorno's elitism and snobbishness; precisely in his work in music, however, it is felt that a greater humility might have vastly increased his effectiveness.^[7]

Blomster is in error. The litany about elitism has been sung for a long time in many quarters, young and old, particularly when it comes to the considerable demands made upon the reader to engage in great efforts to follow the thought but not the thinker. I will return to this issue toward the end of this essay. May it suffice for the moment that it is exactly this kind of biographical and psychological reductionism that Adorno always opposed in his extensive studies of the literary arts (I might say, I learned a good deal from him whenever I succumbed to an ad hominem shortcut in my own critical work in literature).

I take more seriously a second paradigm, according to which Adorno cut the connection between theory and practice so sacred to Marxist doctrine. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, for a short while a prominent spokesman of the German New Left before he died in a tragic accident, took Adorno to task for allegedly cutting this umbilical cord. Although, according to Krahl, Adorno understood the ideological contradictions of bourgeois individualism and his "intellectual biography is marked by the experience of fascism," he nevertheless remained entrapped in the very contradictions he overtly diagnosed.

[7] W. V. Blomster, "Sociology of Music: Adorno and Beyond," Telos, no. 28 (Summer 1976): 109.

Adorno's cutting critique on the ideological existence of the bourgeois individual irresistibly trapped him in its ruin. But this would mean that Adorno had never really left the isolation that emigration imposed on him. . . . Production of abstract labor is mirrored in his intellectual subjectivism. This is why Adorno was not able to translate his private compassion for the wretched of the earth into an integral partisanship of his theory toward the liberation of the oppressed.^[8]

It seems to me that Adorno gave the correct answer with his often-quoted sarcastic observation that he did not know that Critical Theory had given license to throwing Molotov cocktails. True, had Adorno and his friends manned the barricades, they might very well have been immortalized in a revolutionary song by Hanns Eisler. But imagine for a moment Marx dying on the barricades in 1849 or 1871: there would be no Marxism, no advanced psychological models, and certainly no Critical Theory. The call to arms the ultraradical disciples directed at their teachers—legitimate as their intentions may have been—has merely produced excesses, the consequences of which have become only too obvious in the troubled state the New Left finds itself in today.

This leads to another, more serious, aspect of this perverted rebellion. In an introduction to a short piece by Adorno called "Culture Industry Reconsidered," Andreas Huyssen, an editor of New German Critique, in fall 1975 endorsed Hans Mayer's misguided formulation about Adorno's "secret hostility toward history."^[9] I do not want to be disrespectful of Hyssen, whose good intentions are shown in his praise of Adorno as "one of the first to use critical Marxist thought to illuminate Western mass culture,

[8] Hans-Jürgen Krahl, "The Political Contradictions in Adorno's Critical Theory," Telos, no. 21 (Fall 1974): 164.

[9] Andreas Huyssen, "Introduction to Adorno," New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 3; Mayer's charge is made in Der Repräsentant une die Märtyrer (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 165.

which for years had been dismissed by conservative culture critics with elitist moralizing"; however, his reproach of Adorno, that he "consistently avoided historic specificity in his work," is plainly absurd. There seems to be an attempt on the part of these youthful followers (or nonfollowers) to demand an activist pseudo-historic participation, almost on a day-to-day basis and in a spirit of team-dictated partisanship. At least, that is how I interpret Huyssen's condescending remark that, although Adorno's "thought unmistakably developed in reaction to critical events," his hostility to history was nonetheless severe: "This hostility in turn reflects his rejection of the determinate negation as a key concept of the philosophy of history and indicates his insistence on negativity and refusal as crucial elements of a modern aesthetic."^[10] This perplexes me! Every member of the Institute's inner circle not only was immersed in Hegelian philosophy and the classical aspects of Marxian dialectics but also continuously emphasized "determinate negation" as the key concept of any critical theory. Huyssen himself, a few pages later, after the first outburst seemed forgotten, correctly quoted the following words from Adorno's essay "Culture and Administration":

The authentic cultural object must retain and preserve whatever goes by the wayside in that process of increasing domination over nature which is reflected in expanding rationality and ever more rational forms of domination. Culture is the perennial protestation of the particular against the general, as long as the latter remains irreconcilable with the particular.^[11]

I do not really know how to explain this vogue of vague accusations except as what I suspect to be an understandable "morning-after" malaise in the wake, and at the wake, of the student

[10] Huyssen, "Introduction to Adorno," pp. 4–5.

[11] Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture and Administration," Telos, no. 37 (Fall 1978): 97. (Translation emended.)

movement. When hope for radical political change in our day or tomorrow collapsed, Critical Theory offered itself to many of the young as a convenient scapegoat. To the great pain and sorrow of its creators and practitioners, above all Adorno, it was forgotten that critical thought itself is adequate practice. It clashes with and is resisted by the cultural and, in part, political establishment, which always wants to convert the skandalon of nonconformist theory into a mere scandalous aberration and to recommend—and, if possible, contribute to—the liquidation of leaders and followers of Critical Theory. In that respect, Adorno's work and life in post-Hitler Germany serve as eloquent testimony to his historical sensitivity and his knowledge that only by a determined no, which he so admirably practiced, could historical progress and regression be kept alive in critical consciousness.

The attempts to catch Adorno in his alleged contradictions caused by lapses in historical consciousness are a continuation of my theme of filial rebellion. The same Mr. Huyssen perceived an irreconcilable contradiction between an Adorno who spoke, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, of the autonomous individual as "a phenomenon of the bourgeois past" and one who, in his later essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered," allegedly revived this "autonomous individual" as a "precondition for democratic society." But if one reads the text carefully, it becomes apparent that, first of all, Adorno never intended to "reconsider" his theory of cultural industry but rather, as the German text clearly states, to write a "résumé," that is, a summing up of what he explicated, with Horkheimer, in the original essay. Furthermore, Adorno expressly says at the end of the new essay that culture industry's anti-enlightenment and mass deception has "turned into a means for fettering consciousness." He then dialectically states that autonomous individuals would only develop if there were no culture industry "obstructing the emancipation for which human beings could be "—not, as a translator incorrectly renders it, are —"as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit." The point here is unmistakable:

capitalism will not provide the emancipation that, according to every good Marxist, including Adorno, would technically be possible every day, since "the productive forces" would allow the termination of misery and domination. In contrast to his critic, Adorno remained rather melancholic, if not desperate, about the seemingly unresolvable—for the time being at least—intertwining of the establishment and its nonautonomous subjects (in the true sense of the term subjection ). This is the opposite of a "retraction" of the original thesis of "enlightenment as an instrument of rationalized domination and oppression."

More painful even than the eagerness to trip Adorno in contradictions is the eagerness to take him to task for overlooking some very obvious historical phenomena. In a recent book by Otto Karl Werckmeister, Ende der Ästhetik, which, to my knowledge, has not been translated, we read:

When Adorno until the very end defended modern art [meaning avant-garde art] against an imagined front of cultural conservatism, as if modern art still needed social certification, he missed the consequences of its complete assimilation in the late-capitalist culture. Culture and police both watch over the borderline of reality and art. On this side of the border, Adorno's negative-utopian glorification of art and the affirmative ideological function of art in bourgeois culture are much closer to each other than Adorno's concept of their absolute contradiction.^[12]

To this schoolmasterly reprimand for having failed to do his homework, I can only say that the whole theory of avant-garde modern art, in which Adorno was really the leader of our group, consists precisely in defending the thesis that avant-garde art is the only reservoir of genuine human experience, and therefore of opposi-

[12] Otto Karl Werckmeister, Ende der Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 31.

tional consciousness, which itself is in constant danger of being suffocated through the loving profit-tentacles of the culture industry. Indeed, nobody was more aware than Adorno of the enormous dangers to the survival of "auratic" art (to use Benjamin's term).

Let me give you one last example of this chorus of critics (some of whom, I am sorry to say, I cannot differentiate from Beckmesser in the Meistersinger ). It is fairly well known that Adorno's work in musicology and the philosophy and sociology of music developed the theory of the indispensable unity of performance and the intent of the composition. In particular, he spent a good deal of his efforts demonstrating the distortion of serious music by the technology of electronic reproduction, including, but not limited to, broadcasting and recording. I am not a musicologist, but I know something about the necessary relationship of a work of art and the social frame within which it is presented or performed, and I must assume by analogy that the horrors of televised Shakespeare are comparable to the distortion of musical listening of which Adorno speaks. (It is, by the way, at this juncture that I would like to say that I believe in the superiority of Adorno's aesthetic theories over those of Walter Benjamin. But this is a topic for others to ponder.) In a slick German literary journal I found a review of volume fourteen of Adorno's writings in German—which, incidentally, came out not too long ago in English under the title Introduction to the Sociology of Music . The reviewer, Helmut Heissenbüttel, did not like Adorno's typology of the music listener, and he quickly expressed regret that poor Adorno did not live to the day when the recording industry permitted variations of musical interpretation through the plethora of available records. This, he believed, is now possible thanks to the enormous accessibility to recorded performances composers have provided of their works, which are codified in record catalogs. Heissenbüttel cited with approval the so-called Bielefelder Catalog, "which appears every year with semi-annual supplements," and he reminded readers that in America the Schwann Record and Tape Guide appears every month. Missing heretofore, then, were reliable

guides that listed not only what was available but also what to select and why to select it. This gap has now been filled. I quote from Ulrich Schreiber's Schallplatten Jahrbuch I [Record Yearbook I]:

What is decisive for the listing of a record in this guide is not its market value but the contribution it makes to the formation of knowledge about the composer, about an epoch in the history of music, about musical interpreters and strategies of interpretation. Thus a record [Schallplatte ] is here being taken seriously as an aesthetic, not an economic, phenomenon. For the first time, a comprehensive attempt is being made in German to assign to the record its significance in musical life and to use the medium "record" for a demonstration of changes in the history of musical tasks and consciousness. The records that we recommend for the reader of this guide do not add up to an eternal inventory of classical music, nor are they merely commodities for consumption. It is the essential task of this book to mediate meaningfully between false extremes.

I can only marvel at Heissenbüttel and his uncritical endorsement of Schreiber's thinly veiled industrial enterprise, this epitome of what Adorno called manipulated listening, gegängelte Musik . This naïveté is topped by an insult: Heissenbüttel spoke of Adorno as a caricature of the expert who has now been replaced by a true "leader," the Schallplattenführer —in short, Leader Schreiber. Some of us have always been critical of guidelines as predigested experience of works of art, enterprises that, of course, only serve the purpose of rendering the oppositional character of the artwork into a harmless, so-called aesthetic experience.

Let me juxtapose Schreiber's words on the merits of a Schall-plattenführer with a Time-Life Corporation advertisement, which guarantees that

though your time may be limited, you will be reading widely and profitably . . . books that are truly timeless in style

and significance. This plan draws its strength from the fact that the editors spent thousands of hours finding the answers to questions that you, too, must have asked yourself many times. . . . It is part of their job to single out the few books that tower over all others. In each case, the editors will write special introductions to underline what is unique in the book, what impact it has had or will have, what place it has earned in literature and contemporary thought. . . . The books will be bound in durable, flexible covers similar to those used for binding fine Bibles and Missals.

I invite the audience to make a comparative content analysis between the shrewd public relations agents of the Time-Life Corporation and the Heissenbüttel-Schreiber alliance.

On this note I shall terminate my sampling of manifestations of oedipal rebellion against Adorno. I would like to say one final word about comments that persist from all quarters about the difficulty of reading Adorno.^[13] It is true, Adorno's texts are very difficult. He never intended to make it easy for his professional and intellectual colleagues or for all his readers and listeners. He would not tolerate—another variation of the Adorno skandalon —that what he had to say should ever fit into a mode of easy consumption. On the contrary, the demands he made of himself and his audience are only another variation of his theme of striving for genuine experience in production as well as in received productive imagination. His sense of responsibility for language, his hostility to the all-embracing emergence of a one-dimensional, nonconnotative, unambiguous language of efficiency and predigested derivative thought that leaves no room for the unique and idiosyncratic, for productive imagination and the dissenting voice, reminds me of a letter Coleridge wrote to his friend Southey almost a hundred and seventy

[13] I am well aware that this criticism is often raised against Western Marxism as a whole.

years ago, defending his style of "obscurity" and contrasting it "with the cementless periods of the modern Anglo-Gallican style, which not only are understood beforehand, but, being free from . . . all the books and eyes of intellectual memory, never oppress the mind by any after recollections, but, like civil visitors, stay a few moments, and leave the room quite free and open for the next comers."^[14] I do not know whether Adorno knew of this letter, but I am sure he would have smiled with approval if I had told him about Coleridge's praise of "obscurity" as a witty rejection of linguistic consumerism. And so we come to another thinker who was, like Adorno, the embodiment of the skandalon, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his preface to The Dawn, he wrote:

I have not been a philologist in vain; perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I have even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste, a perverted taste maybe, to write nothing but what will drive to despair everyone who is in a hurry. . . . Philology is now more desirable than ever before . . . it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of "work," that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is intent upon "getting things done" at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not "get things done" so hurriedly; it teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.^[15]

Those of us who knew Adorno will always carry this image of him with us: his "mental doors ajar," and touching everything he did "with delicate fingers and eyes."

[14] Coleridge to Southey, October 20, 1809; in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1959), vol. 3, p. 790.

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. Johanna Volz (London, 1910), pp. xxviii–xxix. (Translation emended.)

8—
Recollections of Theodor W. Adorno

By Leo Lowenthal

What I have to say will come as a relief for those of you who have been participating in this conference for the last couple of days, for I will engage you less intellectually—tragedy is followed by comedy, and you will probably want to laugh about some of my remarks. But classical comedy always has a serious personal perspective, too. I am in a difficult situation, being asked as a survivor to talk about people who are no longer with us, because survival always poses the problem of distinguishing between an event of a purely biological nature and one that, considered from an intellectual standpoint, is not strictly arbitrary. My countryman Goethe frequently grappled with exactly this problem—if I may, for a moment, appeal to such a great standard.

A second personal remark: when one has lived as long as I have and belonged to a group that has gained such historical significance,

one is constantly considered a kind of fragment of history. And indeed, in recent years I have experienced firsthand how history is actually written. Without wanting to cast aspersions on the integrity of friends in the audience who are historians, I must say that I am filled with increasing skepticism. Just recently a portrait of Adorno and myself was created on the basis of passages from letters;^[1] that portrait, however, is less true to the relationship as a whole than the one I am going to sketch tonight—also on the basis of letters. This experience has led me to reflect on the question of documentation. One may reconstruct history from documents, or one may rely on memory; I, however, have the great fortune to possess both documents and a memory, and these serve mutually to correct each other. But this leads to a third personal problem: I am supposed to say something about my recollections of Teddie (it will be difficult to speak of "Adorno" the entire evening, since he is someone I knew since he graduated from high school), and when I speak of my recollections of Adorno, I certainly want to avoid the intrusion of a narcissistic tone. Yet, it is unfortunately impossible for Leo Lowenthal to remember Adorno without here and there mentioning a word (or two) about himself and his work. I would like therefore to ask at the outset for your understanding of such a contradiction.

I would like to present, essentially through letters, several aspects of the life we shared, especially in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. Obviously, this selection has a fragmentary character for the simple reason that we lived together so many years: in Frankfurt, in New York, now and then in California. The accidental, however, is not merely accidental.

I was introduced to Adorno when he was eighteen years old by

[1] See Martin Jay, "Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship," in Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1985), p. 219.

Siegfried Kracauer, who played a major role in our friendship—a friendship with all the positive and ambivalent traits such relationships have. I start with a letter from December 4, 1921, which I have already published, in which Kracauer conveys the following impression of Teddie: "Something incomparable puts him in a position over both of us [Kracauer and myself], an admirable material existence [note a slight ambivalence: Adorno was a very spoiled young gentleman from a well-to-do family] and a wonderfully self-confident character [here now the positive]. He truly is a beautiful specimen of a human being; even if I am not without some skepticism concerning his future, I am surely delighted by him in the present."

Anyway, the Adorno of these years—I don't know whether there is anybody here who knew him back then, I certainly doubt it—was a delicate, slender young man. Indeed, he was the classical image of a poet, with a delicate way of moving and talking that one scarcely finds nowadays. We would meet either at a coffee house—mostly at the famous Café Westend at the opera, where intellectual enfants terribles met—or at one or the other of our parents' places. Naturally, I knew Adorno's parents well, also his aunt Agathe. It was an existence you just had to love—if you were not dying of jealousy of this protected beautiful life—and in it Adorno had gained the confidence that never left him his entire life. For a short period of time, however, my relation to his parents was disturbed by a dissonance perhaps not uncharacteristic for the history of assimilated German Jews. When I accepted my first paying job in 1923—I had just received my Ph.D., a year before Teddie—bearing the overrated title of "Syndic of the Advisory Board for Jewish Refugees from Eastern Europe," Oskar Wiesengrund told his son that Leo Lowenthal was not welcome in his house as long as he had something to do with Eastern European Jews.

There is a remarkable irony in the fact that Adorno asked me many years later, he himself being ill in Los Angeles, to give the

eulogy at his father's funeral. A certain knowledge of the mentality of the German-Jewish middle class, and particularly upper middle class, is required to entirely understand the atmosphere at the time. This might also account for why—this is how I explain it to myself—Adorno had such an incredibly hard time finally leaving Germany (we had to drag him almost physically); he just couldn't believe that to him, son of Oskar Wiesengrund, nephew of aunt Agathe, and son of Maria, anything might ever happen, for it was absolutely clear that the bourgeoisie would soon become fed up with Hitler. This kind of naïve unfamiliarity with the real world—particularly that of Germany and the at first complicated and then not-so-complicated relations of Christians and Jews—must be borne in mind if one is to fully understand Adorno's personal history.

For the moment, I would like to return to several experiences from an early period, when Teddie was about nineteen or twenty, making use of some passages from letters, to which recollections can so superbly be related. I have many recollections. For example, Adorno and Kracauer tell me about their reading of Ernst Bloch and Helmut Plessner; about Bloch they have as yet very little negative to say; Plessner, however, is said to write in an awful jargon, but nevertheless views many problems correctly. Soon they drag Benjamin over the coals in a way that will surprise you (more on that in a minute); I, too, am chided, because at that time I identified strongly with apocalyptic and messianic motifs. I had just finished writing an almost unreadable "master work," "The Demonic: Project of a Negative Philosophy of Religion"—I barely understand a word of it now—and, shortly thereafter, a dissertation on Franz von Baader, both composed in an expressionist style, which caused my friends to constantly poke fun at me. For example, on April 14, 1922, from Amorbach during a hot summer: "It would be a pleasure to take a bath [Bad ], which doesn't mean that you have to plunge right into Baaderlake." And they also wrote to me that I was a professional

apocalyptist, and for professional apocalyptists there was unfortunately no vacancy in Amorbach; but for the sake of a meeting they would be willing to try and find a room in the next town. That was about the tone in which we talked to each other. Yet openly friendly sentences, like this one, for example, from a letter from August 11, 1923, were heard as well: "Although you are constantly with us in our thoughts, it would naturally be nice to have your empirical person around also."

The year 1923 was when Adorno and Kracauer undertook a common reading of Goethe's Elective Affinities and subsequently the first draft of Benjamin's essay on the same work—to which I will return in a minute. On August 22, 1923, Adorno wrote that he was "so pleasantly tired that I don't even want to get down to Elective Affinities ." But they were still reading Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption , about which Teddie had made this comment when Kracauer told him about it: "These are linguistic philosophemes I would not understand even if I understood them"; and in that letter of August 1923 he added: "We would certainly have the real chance to recover if we did not have to fear the mighty dollar's putting a premature ending to our idyll." That was about six weeks before the upward evaluation of the dollar, so I understood his comment only too well. The day before the dollar was revalued I was, for the first time in my life, in Brenner's Park Hotel in Baden-Baden—back then it was still called Hotel Stephanie (we were always bon vivants) or, as Lukács says, the Hotel Abyss; but only for a day, for when the dollar was stabilized, I had to clear out of the hotel and take the train back to Frankfurt—third class. Kracauer and Teddie had similar experiences at the time.

Back to more serious talk, though: Kracauer wrote again about Rosenzweig on August 31, 1923: "As a thinker [he] is and remains an idealist . . . and even his star won't redeem him from that—just as I don't believe that his book will have great success in the future, in spite of Scholem and his brother Benjamin." And Teddie added:

"I've finished reading Elective Affinities and agree with Friedel [Kracauer] on its interpretation"—and now follows a comment that will surprise you—"but definitely less so with Benjamin, who in fact reads into the text rather than extrapolates from it and essentially doesn't grasp the meaning of Goethe's existence." That's how impertinent we were!

Now, to give you another example of the combination of intellectual wit, seriousness, and concern for each other's private lives, I would like to read from a letter written by Kracauer and Teddie together, which will conclude my selection from the twenties. On December 8, 1923, Teddie wrote, on the occasion of my marriage: "I wish you and Golde [my wife] luck; at the same time [I wish] that, as a quiet bourgeois husband, you are less abducted by mail, telegraph, and train from the protected sphere of productive conversations than has been your habit thus far."

Kracauer, however, commented in the same letter on Teddie's remark: "Such pseudo-philosophical, noble rhetoric Teddie regards as naïve, and he prefers to make use of it in small talk, that is to say, in letters, seminars, and discussions with young ladies. His own literary style is, as you probably know, of such a quality as to . . . make Benjamin's . . . scurrilous language sound like . . . baby talk. However, the young philosopher wants it no other way, and I guess we will just have to let him have his way." And here Kracauer made a lovely remark: "If Teddie one day makes a real declaration of love and gives up his perfectly sinful bachelor status . . . for the equally hypocritical state of marriage, his declaration of love will undoubtedly take such a difficult form that the young lady in question will have to have read the whole of Kierkegaard . . . to understand Teddie at all; otherwise she will surely misunderstand him and reject him, because there will definitely be something about a "leap" and about "belief through the absurd," and she will believe that Teddie the philosopher considers her to be

absurd, completely the wrong thing to think." I am sorry that dear Gretel [Adorno] cannot listen to this prophesy today, for in the end the story had a very different outcome. And Teddie responded to this in the same letter with extraordinary wit, alluding to Benjamin's famous last sentence in his Elective Affinities essay,^[2] and criticizing Kracauer thus: "You know him; for me hope remains only for the sake of those without hope, but it is still such a long time till then."

To conclude my account of the twenties, I'd like to mention that this letter of congratulations arrived in Königsberg in a beautifully calligraphed envelope—Kracauer, the architect, was very good at these things. By the way, this reminds me of another one of those episodes—if I may interrupt my account—very characteristic of German Jews. My first wife was from Königsberg in Prussia. My father, an old Frankfurt resident who, like Kracauer, Teddie, and myself, had gone to school in Frankfurt, refused to accompany my mother to my wedding; when I had announced my wedding plans with a young lady from Königsberg he had told me: "You're crazy! Königsberg, that's practically in Russia!" As early as 1923 he had already anticipated the course of world history and so was not behind Teddie's father in his aversion to the East.

Anyway, this letter of congratulations came in an envelope decorated by Kracauer and with the return address: "General Headquarters of the Welfare Bureau for the Transcendentally Homeless"; and below, again in Teddie's handwriting: "Kracauer and Wiesengrund. Agents of the Transcendentally Homeless. General Management at Frankfurt Oberrad." That, of course, is an allusion to Lukács's Theory of the Novel , but at the same time it also anticipates what my

[2] The phrase referred to is from the essay "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften " (Neue Deutsche Beiträge 2, no. 2 [January 1925]: 168): "It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given us."

friend Martin Jay emphasized [in his conference presentation] today:^[3] the being-nowhere-at-home, the homelessness, the existential exile—all this was preformulated in this humorous envelope.

I now turn to the thirties, which are characterized especially by our resettlement in the United States, but also by the founding of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and by our persistent, and ultimately successful, attempts to get Adorno to come to the United States. We stayed in contact—all of us carrying a collective responsibility for the journal, although I was, for the most part, in charge of its management—largely because of the innumerable and extremely stimulating suggestions that Adorno constantly sent to us from Oxford—some to Horkheimer, and some to me as well—about articles we should do or contributions he himself was planning to make. I will give you an interesting example; in a letter dated August 19, 1937, he wrote me concerning an essay on Karl Mannheim (to which I will soon return): "Personally, it matters a great deal to me not to function as a specialist for music, for example, but to be open to a broad range of themes; for this reason I would highly appreciate [this essay's] publication. For in principle I represent the antispecialist attitude, and in this vein I encouraged Horkheimer in his decision to write something about Raffael [the French Marxist] and about Sade, as I would like you perhaps to write something on mass culture in monopoly capitalism. . . . Specialization indeed has its dangers, particularly in the isolated situation in which we find ourselves."

He thus not only divined the specific intellectual interests of each of us with an extremely subtle sympathetic understanding, but he also encouraged us and identified with those interests. And he was ultimately successful: the essay on Sade in Dialectic of Enlightenment is essentially Horkheimer's work, and my book Literature, Popular

[3] Martin Jay, "Adorno in America," in Permanent Exiles .

Culture, and Society was published as the first volume of my collected works.

Here I come to an important point concerning the thirties. Previously—and obviously in vain—I have tried to destroy a legend about whose background no one is better informed than I, since the other parties concerned are no longer alive: that we, using financial means, forced Walter Benjamin to comply with our editorial requests concerning his articles for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and at times to forgo their publication. It might be news to you that Teddie's contributions were subject to the same "censorship"—but without our ever having denied him or Benjamin a penny. The essay on Mannheim he wrote of from London on August 19, 1937, was not accepted, nor was one on Husserl; and in several reviews we made major substantive changes. Thus, for example, I wrote to him on September 21, 1937: "I've had your reviews copied now, and in a form reflecting the consequences of my changes, with which, by the way, Marcuse agrees. . . . If you approve of the abridged versions I would like to ask you to submit the manuscripts . . . so that they can be prepared for typesetting." Teddie then wrote to me on October 31: "That's how it is with my scribbling; it is, fortunately or unfortunately, formed in such a way that ridiculously minor changes can, under certain circumstances, mess up the whole thing. . . . I ask you to accept my proposals in this spirit, and not as an expression of pedantic self-righteousness. I believe that they can be executed almost entirely along the lines of your suggestions for changes. Only the deletions on pages seven and nine have major implications. The essay in its current form has already, as you know, been rigorously abridged. . . . However, I understand very well the . . . considerations that have motivated you to make these deletions. Maybe you can insert a sentence containing the idea of what has been deleted without being offensive. Let me conclude by saying that God will reward you for your effort in such cases."

That's how it really was—we always negotiated our texts with one another. Two of my own essays were not published until much later either. Like everything else, they finally appeared in print via our Flaschenpost .^[4] For example, there was a long study of naturalism that was not published because Meyer Shapiro thought that it was superficial and distorted. Well, I told myself, if that's the way it is, forget it. And another longer essay on German biographies by Emil Ludwig and others was rejected because we didn't want to offend German Jews in exile. But we offended them later anyway! Such negotiations—among other things—led, of course, to arguments and disputes; but when you don't have arguments, then you'd better get a divorce. Finally, though, what counts is not the malicious remarks people occasionally make about each other, but rather the remaining opus.

I would like to pick out one more thing from the correspondence of the thirties, because it illustrates what Teddie meant to me, and I guess also to Horkheimer, who once said to me, "One learns so much from Teddie." Whatever I now know about music, particularly modern music—which, of course, is already old music for you—I learned from him, and I was finally even praised by him as a result. Thus I wrote to him from New York in October 1937 that the Kolisch Quartet had very cleverly performed four concerts, on four consecutive nights, of the music of Beethoven—his late quartets—and of Schönberg, so that you really learned to interpret Beethoven through Schönberg and Schönberg through Beethoven. Teddie responded to this: "I am glad that you also liked the first quartet of Schönberg so much. I think that it is most useful as an

[4] Critical Theory's efforts have often been described as a Flaschenpost , or a "message in a bottle," a phrase coined by Adorno in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott (London, 1974), p. 209. The full phrase is "messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism."

introduction to the mature Schönberg, along with the two major works from the same period, the chamber symphonies and the second quartet. . . . I am of the opinion (and Berg, by the way, was too) that once you have experienced the first quartet, not even the latest and strangest things of Schönberg remain totally unintelligible. I would like nothing better than to demonstrate such things to you in concreto ." And he meant it. Adorno was an extremely generous person concerning all these intellectual things. There was no "I don't have time for that"; when you turned to him for help, he gave you his attention.

Now a couple of words about the forties. This was when Adorno joined Horkheimer's exodus from the East Coast to the West Coast, going to live in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles. It was a time when we engaged in an extremely intense scholarly correspondence, which I don't want to go into now. It was when Horkheimer wrote The Eclipse of Reason, with Adorno as well as Pollock and myself contributing to its composition—it really was a kind of collective effort. The only correspondence in which changes were discussed was between Adorno and me, though, for Horkheimer and I talked about it on the phone. It was also during the forties that Dialectic of Enlightenment originated. Having the chance, on my frequent visits to Adorno's apartment in Southern California, to witness the two of them coin every phrase together remains an unforgettable experience for me, a singular experience—the production of a truly collective work where each sentence originated by joint effort. I, too, had the satisfaction of being able to contribute to some of the book's "Theses on Anti-Semitism." There was an atmosphere of serenity, calmness, and kindness (Gretel was also there quite often), not to mention hospitality, that felt like a bit of utopia—in any case, that's how it seems today. The collective works and discussions on various studies on anti-Semitism fall in the same period as well. I myself took part in the planning of The Authoritarian Personality, occasionally mediating between Teddie and his colleagues, Ameri-

can professors, and playing the role of the appeasing diplomat who doesn't take the quarrels of others seriously. I quieted Teddie, telling him that what the empiricists wanted wasn't so bad, we just had to be patient with them and make them familiar with what we understood as theory, then everything would come out all right.

Here is a particularly interesting personal reminiscence: Teddie wrote to me on December 6, 1942, probably remembering his former illusions about German domestic policy, "I don't want to finish without once again having stated that Hitler will be defeated!" This phrase is remarkable in that not all the core members of the Institute shared his confidence. Thank God Teddie was right.

Another correspondence was initiated the year both his parents and my father died—but I don't want to keep you much longer by going into this. I'd like to point out only one thing from this frequent epistolary exchange, since it reminds me of Teddie's generosity. I was in the process of writing a book on popular culture; I had certain ideas for this topic and wrote Teddie on February 23, 1948: "Whatever thoughts you have about how to organize something like this would help me immeasurably. Do you still remember your extemporaneous reflections"—I remember as if it were yesterday—"when we drove down Sunset Boulevard on a Sunday in thick fog and you conjectured how you would organize a lecture on the sociology of literature? That is exactly the model I have in mind for my present study." Such was the nature of our intellectual solidarity, the imprint of which was so strong that one could live from it for quite some time.

Finally, a few words about the fifties, when Adorno had returned to Frankfurt. First, some personal remarks; on August 5, 1959, he wrote to me: "In about ten days we hope to move into our own apartment, Kettenhofweg 123 [which is still Gretel's address], very close to the university and where the Institute will be located. Right now, they are removing, in a frightful din, the rubble from the lot

on which the Institute will be constructed." By that time several members of the Institute, some of whom are here tonight, were still working in the basement of the destroyed building, located near the corner of what was then Victoriaallee and Bockenheimer Landstraße. I read to you from this seemingly unimportant passage because it is so intimately personal and therefore expresses something of the almost symbiotic relationship we maintained, even over a great distance. A second personal document is relevant only for me; thirty years ago I was here in Frankfurt for a longer period of time, to give a talk in the Institute, and Teddie sent me a telegram on September 25, 1953: "Reservation Hessischer Hof. Most cordially. Teddie." Here I am again at the Hessischer Hof, on almost the same day thirty years later, but this time no Teddie was there waiting for me.

Teddie came back to Frankfurt for the first time in 1948, full of deep longing but also with a certain anxiety about having to teach German students again. He told me about it on January 3, 1949: "I cannot keep secret from you the fact that I was happily overwhelmed by the European experience from the first moment in Brittany [where he had spent his vacation] and that working with students excels everything you would expect—even the time before 1933—in intensity and rapport. And the contention that the quality of the students has sunk, that they are ignorant or pragmatically oriented, is mere nonsense. Instead, much suggests that, in isolation and estranged from politics, they had plunged into intellectual matters with an unequaled fanaticism. The decisively negative factor that is everywhere in evidence derives from the fact that the Germans (and all Europe, in fact) are no longer political subjects, nor do they feel themselves to be; hence, a ghostlike, unreal quality pervades their spirit. My seminar is like a Talmud school—I wrote to Los Angeles that it is as if the spirits of the murdered Jewish intellectuals had descended into the German students. Quite

uncanny. But for that very reason it is at the same time infinitely canny in the authentic Freudian sense." Just let this important letter take its effect on you.

In order not to exhaust your patience I will limit myself to just one more remark. This affects me particularly and expresses an opinion that I share and by which I have been moved throughout this entire conference. Teddie wrote to me on December 2, 1954—sorry to be slightly narcissistic again—regarding the essay I mentioned earlier on the genre of biography that was so popular before Hitler. It was by now perfectly acceptable to publish the essay because we no longer had to show special consideration for formerly exiled Jews, so we planned to include it in an attempted revival of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in the fifties. This plan came to nothing, however, and instead a series of sociological studies arose, to be published by the Institute; its first volume was the festschrift for Max Horkheimer's sixtieth birthday, in which my essay finally appeared.

"Concerning the study on biography," Teddie wrote in December 1954, "I am of the firm opinion that it should be published. Not only because I think it is necessary that you make an acte de présence in the first issue, but also because I believe that the topic has the same relevance today as it did before. The genre is inexterminable, the love of the German people for Stefan Zweig and Emil Ludwig has undoubtedly survived the Jews, and the biographical essays that inundate illustrated magazines (often still featuring Nazi celebrities) derive in large measure from this kind of writing, the dregs of the dregs. Your arguments are so striking that we shouldn't do without it. And your work has methodological significance as well, insofar as it represents a very legitimate parody of the official practice of content analysis. To enumerate sentences of the sort 'Never before has a woman loved like . . .' [I had put together innumerable phrases in which each person states about everybody and everything else that he, she, it, is the greatest thing that ever happened to

the world] is quantification rightly conceived." And now I turn to the passage for the sake of which I selected this letter in conclusion: "Finally," Teddie continues, "I would like to say that I fundamentally do not adhere to the conviction that our works will become outdated for external or thematic reasons a couple of years after they are written; for the emphasis of what we are doing lies, I would think, in a theory of society and not in ephemeral material." I have the same response to some of the criticisms launched during this conference, which allege that the agenda of classical Critical Theory is no longer relevant today. No, I agree with Teddie, who continues his letter: "We, at least, should not pursue the kind of modernity that consists in making abstract chronology the standard for relevance and that thus represents the exact opposite of the truly progressive." I would like to add here, with a certain hope and without aggressiveness, that I've heard as well in the critical melodies of the outstanding papers of this conference a distinctive theme that may resonate longer than our critics would like to concede.

9—
In Memory of Walter Benjamin:
The Integrity of the Intellectual

By Leo Lowenthal

Walter Benjamin ends his essay on surrealism with the image of "an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds."^[1] The essay appeared in 1929 and bore the subtitle "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia." I can hardly find a better way to express the feelings that accompanied my preparation of these remarks in memory of Benjamin. As I studied his work once again, it seemed

[1] Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism," in Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott (New York, 1978), p. 192.

indeed as if a clock were incessantly sounding an alarm: Benjamin's immediacy today set off uninterrupted shocks in my mind and demanded constant alertness.

Although I begin my lecture with similarities that link Benjamin and myself both biographically and intellectually, I am quite conscious that by drawing such parallels I may appear to be equating myself with him. This is not my intention. Being only eight years his junior, I might be tempted to overestimate the value of mere survival and thus see things with which I myself am associated as more important than they are in the context of the fate experienced by a generation of German and German-Jewish intellectuals. When I speak of the past, that is, of Benjamin's oeuvre and the memory of his person, this past becomes entirely present. Benjamin's fundamental themes—and it is not by coincidence that I mentioned his essay on surrealism first—have accompanied me throughout my life.

While the mere fact of outliving someone cannot alone legitimize a memorial address, I do not feel too uncomfortable with my task. In the relationship Benjamin and I had—direct or indirect—there was no discord. Elsewhere, I have spoken out with indignation against insinuations from some quarters concerning allegedly humiliating dependence and intellectual suppression in Benjamin's dealings with the Institute of Social Research. Gershom Scholem, who was to speak to you today, no longer lives. In his memory, I would like to read a few words from his long letter to Benjamin dated November 6 and 8, 1938. Scholem mentions a visit to our Institute in New York, and he reports: "I think the people of the institute have every reason to frame you in gold, even if only in secret. In our brief but harmless encounters, I had the impression that people like Marcuse and Lowenthal realize this as well." There could never be any doubt on that score.

The extent of my involvement with Benjamin's publications in our Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung is meticulously documented in the

notes to his collected works. I will refer here to just one episode regarding his essay "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," published posthumously by Rolf Tiedemann in 1969.^[2] As managing editor of the journal, my main concern was to publish this essay—part of a planned book on Baudelaire belonging to the Arcades Project—as soon as possible. There were repeated delays, owing in part to Benjamin himself and in part to the complex correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin. On August 3, 1938, Gretel Adorno wrote to Benjamin from the Adornos' vacation address: "And now to the most important matter, to Baudelaire. Leo Lowenthal was visiting us here for a couple of days when your letter arrived. We thought it best to show him your letter right away. Lowenthal was beside himself [about the delay] and declard that he absolutely must have the essay for the next issue."^[3]

Then, when the essay arrived, Adorno and I had an argument, which I lost. In a letter to Benjamin dated November 10, 1938, Adorno wrote: "The plan is now to print the second chapter ("The Flâneur ") in full and the third ("Modernism") in part. Leo Lowenthal in particular supports this emphatically. I myself am unambiguously opposed to it."^[4] At that point—and this played a role in the subsequent attacks on Adorno—the essay was not accepted for publication, undoubtedly through Adorno's influence.

He presented his objections bluntly, as the correspondence between him and Benjamin shows. Although Adorno's criticism up-

[2] This essay can be found in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); and in English translation in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973).

[3] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1972–1982), vol. 1, pt. 3, pp. 1084–85.

[4] Adorno to Benjamin, November 10, 1938; quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 142. Also in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1098.

set him at first, Benjamin did put it to use very productively. On the basis of the revision suggested by Adorno, a new, independent essay emerged, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," which we published in 1939, in the last German-language volume of the journal. In his essay, Benjamin explicitly connected his themes of the crisis of aura and the loss of experience, which he had treated separately in his "Storyteller" and "Work of Art" essays.^[5] This decisive shift of emphasis in turn gives the first Baudelaire essay, whose publication I had supported, a weight of its own.

No one who is familiar with the German intelligentsia in the Weimar Republic and in exile will be surprised to learn that my circle of friends and acquaintances overlapped extensively with Benjamin's, among them Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch and Kracauer, Horkheimer and Lukács, Buber and Rosenzweig. These names also signify both definite identity and confrontation, for example in early relations with the Jüdische Lehrhaus initiated by Buber and Rosenzweig. There was another almost tragicomic parallel between our two biographies: Benjamin's Habilitation [qualification as lecturer] for the University of Frankfurt in 1925 was rejected on the basis of objections by German philology professor Franz Schultz and could not be rescued, even by the intervention of Hans Cornelius, philosopher and teacher of Horkheimer and Adorno. A year later the same thing happened to me. In 1926 my Habilitation as well—it was in the philosophy department—was prevented by Schultz in his capacity as dean, although Cornelius supported it most warmly.

As far as I remember, I did not yet know Benjamin personally in 1925, although the themes of our work already overlapped at

[5] All three essays can be found in English in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968). The last two also appear in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2.

important points. Benjamin was greatly interested in Franz von Baader, whose religious philosophy of redemptive mysticism and solidarity with society's lowest classes is evident in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History."^[6] I wrote my dissertation in 1923 on Baader's philosophy of society. Today I gather from Benjamin's review of David Baumgart's biography of Baader,^[7] and from his correspondence with Scholem,^[8] that the vanguard position of this conservative, Catholic philosopher of religion—particularly his political morality and his affinity to those who suffer in this world, to the Proletärs, as he called them—had similarly attracted us both. Although at the time I was very radical politically, I did with a clear conscience write my dissertation about a conservative thinker. It strikes me as an additional confirmation that Benjamin had also been engrossed in this man's writings.

Another more important convergence of our intellectual interests lies in the unyielding critique he conducted in 1931 of the enterprise of literary history and criticism. My first essay in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1932 had borne the title "On the Social Situation of Literature." It passed judgment in its own way on the then-reigning university and literary establishment with its apolitical, lebensphilosophischen, and ultimately reactionary categories. It is hardly a coincidence that these same philologists whom Benjamin had taken to task were not treated gently in my essay either. I am ashamed to admit that I was not then familiar with Benjamin's essay, which had appeared in Die literarische Welt .^[9] Otherwise I would certainly have cited it positively,

[6] In Benjamin, Illuminations, and Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2.

[7] Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 304ff.

[8] Briefwechsel Walter Benjamin–Gerschom Scholem, 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main, 1980).

[9] Walter Benjamin, "Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft," Die literarische Welt 7, no. 16 (April 17, 1931); also in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 283ff.

if not considered my own essay superfluous. Benjamin was quite familiar with my later socioliterary work. I know for example that he was at first hardly enthusiastic about my essay on Knut Hamsun, in which I analyzed Hamsun's novels as anticipations of fascist mentality. But he did appreciate my study on the reception of Dostoevsky in Germany. In these and other studies, I had essentially begun to formulate the now familiar questions of reception theory and Wirkungsgeschichte [the history of effects], admittedly with clear emphasis on the critique of ideology. That coincided with Benjamin's interests. He wrote to me from Denmark on July 1, 1934:

In the few days since my arrival in Denmark, the study of your Dostoevsky essay was my first undertaking. For a variety of reasons it has been extremely productive for me, above all because after your preliminary reference to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, I now have before me a kind of reception history that is precise and in its precision—as far as I know—entirely new. Until now such attempts have never gotten beyond a history of the literary material because a sensible formulation of the essential questions was lacking. An early and interesting venture, which admittedly has little to do with your observations, would be Julian Hirsch's "Genesis of Fame," with which you are probably familiar. In many ways, Hirsch never gets beyond the schematic. In your work one is dealing with the concrete historical situation. One is, however, surprised to learn just how contemporary the historical situation is in which the reception of Dostoevsky has taken place. This surprise gives the reader—if I may infer from myself to others—the impulse that sets his own thinking into motion. . . . A certain continuity of class history right through the world war has been made visible for Germany, as has its mythic apotheosis in the aura of cruelty. In addition, illumination came for me from a remote source, falling all the more revealingly on figures and trends from which literary history's

usual point of view was able to derive but little. I found that the discourses on naturalism confirmed what you had intimated to me in Paris; they met with my unqualified agreement. What you say about Zola is particularly interesting. . . . To what extent has this German reception of Dostoevsky done justice to his work? Is it not possible to imagine any other based on him, in other words, is Gorky's the last word on this subject? For me, since I have not read Dostoevsky for a long time, these questions are presently more open than they seem to be for you. I could imagine that, in the very folds of the work into which your psychoanalytical observations lead, elements can be found that the petitbourgeois way of thinking was unable to assimilate.

My essay on C. F. Meyer and his reception as ideologue of the German national grande bourgeoisie appeared to Benjamin of some importance in another context as well. In his efforts to have an article about our Institute in New York published in the culturally conservative émigré journal Maßund Wert, it occurred to Benjamin to stress the aesthetic contributions as politically unthreatening and yet secretly to point out their political significance to those who knew how to read between the lines.As he informed Horkheimer on December 6, 1937, he wanted to try to introduce, through the back door so to speak, the radical critique of the present that informed the Zeitschrift . He wrote, "The closest we might come to it [the sphere of actuality] would be to approach it in aesthetic disguise, i.e., by way of Lowenthal's studies on the German reception of Dostoevsky and on the writings of C. F. Meyer."^[10]

But the most profound contact between Benjamin and myself lay in our shared fascination with the dichotomy, which has never been resolved and indeed resists resolution, between political, secu-

[10] Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6, 1937; in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 682.

larized radicalism and messianic utopia—this thinking culminated in Benjamin's concept of Jetztzeit [now-time], which was intended to explode the homogeneous continuum of history and the notion of unending progress.^[11] In this messianic-Marxist dilemma, I am wholly on Benjamin's side; even more, I am his pupil. Like him, I initially came into close contact with the idea of the complementarity of religious and social motives through Hermann Cohen's school in Marburg; but also just like Benjamin, I later realized that the way of Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantianism leads into a bad infinity.

The Jewish assimilation into the liberal philosophical tradition (with or without socialist bias) was all the more futile because intellectual liberality remained something foreign in Germany. Just as the German university and later the fascist state drove him away, Benjamin was from the outset never at peace with the institutions of the cultural establishment. Was it prophetic instinct that the school desk, the first institution he confronted, suggested to him the law that would govern his life? In the section "Winter's Morning" from his book A Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen Hundred , he writes: "There [in school], once I made contact with my desk, the whole tiredness, which seemed to have vanished, returned tenfold. And with it the wish to be able to sleep my fill. I must have wished that wish a thousand times, and later it was actually fulfilled. But it was a long time before I recognized that fulfillment in the fact that my every hope for a position and a steady income had been in vain."^[12]

In a letter to Scholem dated June 12, 1938, Benjamin says of Kafka: "In order to do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and

[11] For a good account of Benjamin's complicated concept of Jetztzeit , see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York, 1982), pp. 48ff.

[12] Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1950), p. 38; also in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 248.

its peculiar beauty, one must never forget: it is the figure of one who has failed."^[13] These words apply to Benjamin himself, not only in the tragic sense that he took his life when he was not yet fifty years old (is this his childhood wish to sleep his fill being tragically fulfilled?), but also in the more positive sense that in Benjamin's life and in his work the suffering of the species—of which he spoke in his most significant book—is constantly reproduced. It is impossible to determine—and it makes no difference today—to what extent Benjamin consciously or half-consciously brought about his failure and to what extent it was determined by the historical space in which he had to live. World War I, inflation, expulsion, exile, and internment in France—these facts outline the historical context clearly enough. But his integrity as an intellectual remains decisive in the motif of failure. He was never really able to decide on a bourgeois profession. The educated bourgeoisie, and even the less well educated, could have asked maliciously: what in fact was Benjamin's profession? Even the attempts he made in this direction are not really believable; perhaps he did not quite believe in them himself. He certainly did not follow his father's wish that he establish himself in the business world. His Habilitation was turned down, he never held a steady position as editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung or for any publisher, and finally an attempt to secure a position at the University of Jerusalem went awry. The thought of leaving, by the way, was never without ambivalence for him. And so from 1933 on, he repeatedly promised Scholem that he would move to Jerusalem, and he repeatedly put off going. He stayed in France until the last minute. In his letters to Adorno and to Horkheimer, it becomes clear that he conceived of the Arcades Project as a commitment that could be brought to completion only in Europe, in fact only in Paris. Would the only refuge he seemed once to have decided upon, the home that beckoned, namely membership in the Institute of Social Research, the emigration to the United States that had been

[13] Briefwechsel Benjamin–Scholem , p. 273.

planned to the last detail, the move in with the rest of us in New York, would that have been a satisfactory solution for him? He did not live to see it. What a cruel allegory of failure!

Were there a Benjaminian fate, it would be that of the radical intellectuals of the Weimar Republic and that which followed. He himself was most aware, not only in terms of his own person, but also in his theoretical-political analysis of the intellectual, that there was no such thing as "free-floating" intellect—an idealized concept fashionable at the time in Karl Mannheim's coinage; no such thing as the so-called classless intellectual; no such thing as the "organic" intellectual à la Gramsci; nor even any such thing as the so-called intelligentsia (a word Benjamin thoroughly disliked). He knew that, in a bitter sense, the intellectual is homeless. As a German intellectual, he experienced that homelessness firsthand and paid tribute to France, in whose intellectualism he trusted. In a brief note in the Literarische Welt in 1927, he said the following about the French Association of Friends of the New Russia: "The problematic situation of the intellectual, which leads him to question his own right to exist while at the same time society denies him the means of existence, is virtually unknown in France. The artists and authors are perhaps not any better off than their German colleagues, but their prestige remains untouched. In a word, they know the condition of floating. But in Germany, soon no one will be able to last whose position [as an intellectual] is not generally visible."^[14] In his programmatic essays about French intellectuals—for example, in the essay on surrealism cited above or in the article first printed in our journal, "On the Current Social Position of the French Author"^[15] —Benjamin criticized attempts to restore to in-

[14] Walter Benjamin, "Verein der Freunde des neuen Rußland—in Frankreich," in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 486.

[15] Walter Benjamin, "Zur gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Standort des französischen Schriftstellers," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3, no. 1 (1934): 54–73.

tellectuals an independent status without commitment, stressing by contrast experiences of radical politicization. One must grasp the paradoxical definitions together: "untouched" and "largely visible." The latter points to the necessity of taking a political stand, the former to maintaining the integrity of the intellectual. In the crisis, the intellectual remains "untouched" in his integrity when, instead of withdrawing into the ivory tower of timeless values, he takes a stand.

"Untouched" in the sense of noli me tangere is a fitting word for Benjamin's social stance as an intellectual. His urbanity concealed a willfulness of commitment that used even his urbanity as a weapon. In the genteel elegance of his manner and his epistolary style, Benjamin let his readers know that lines had been drawn, lines that would not allow an infringement on his integrity. He had to pay for that. The intellectual marketplace in both Western and Eastern Europe understood Benjamin's intentions precisely. The Frankfurter Zeitung , in spite of its liberality and the occasional hospitality it showed the avant-garde, refused to publish the polemic essay "Left Melancholy,"^[16] in which Benjamin settled accounts with pseudo-radicals. For him, their radicalism was nothing more than "leftist theater" for the consumption of the educated bourgeoisie, who used this radicalism-by-proxy to put distance between themselves and society's real political and moral problems whenever they paid their conscience-money—which committed them to nothing at all—at the box office and the book store. Benjamin received similar treatment from the other side as well: the truncation—tantamount to rejection—by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of his marvelous Goethe essay,^[17] the genuine radicalism of

[16] Walter Benjamin, "Linke Melancholie: Zu Erich Kästners Gedichtbuch," Die Gesellschaft 8, no. 1 (1931): 181–84; also in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 3, pp. 279ff.

[17] Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," Neue Deutsche Beiträge 2, no. 2 (January 1925).

which was unbearable to the manipulative Soviet cultural policy, speaks volumes.

Was he a pariah? The ragpicker (no one wants to "touch" him), about whom Benjamin has a good bit to say, especially in the Baudelaire essay, knows no disguise, plays no roles. The ragpicker is as he is, stigmatized and yet independent. What he has given up, and what society would not allow him, is mimicry, playing up to the stronger of opposing forces, to those who dominate in society. Mimicry is, as I see it, one of the most perceptive categories for categorizing what is phony, false—false consciousness, false politics, cowardly attempts to find cover. Just think of that passage in his review of Kästner's volume of poetry, which sparked his essay "Left Melancholy," in which Benjamin in a single breath pinions both the feudal mimicry of the lieutenant in the Imperial Austrian Reserves and the "proletarian" mimicry of the disintegrating "leftist" intellectual: the reserve lieutenant of the bourgeoisie, crushed after World War I, who finds a futile resurrection in the Nazi empire; the leftist melancholic who fetches his tidy fees from the bourgeois press while trying to secure the sympathies of radicals internationally, and who ultimately disappears quite helplessly in the witch's cauldron of the 1930s—these are far removed from the failure of Benjamin with his Angelus Novus–like view of the ruins of history. Benjamin remains on the side of marginality, of negativity; he remains the figure on the fringe who refuses to take part. With his persistence in saying no—the "salt of refusal," as he called it in his essay on Stefan George^[18] —he becomes what I am tempted to call the esoteric figure of the intellectual. Most of what has been said about the definition of the intellectual—sociologically, anthropologically, and in terms of cultural politics—amounts to nothing before the figure of Benjamin, who is exactly what intellect should be: independence in a self-imposed exile. Hence every attempt to

[18] Walter Benjamin, "Rückblick auf Stefan George," in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 3, p. 397.

reduce him to a formula in order to fit him into someone's convenient set of categories, rushing to label him messianic or Jewish or Marxist or surrealist, was bound to fail. To use a fitting expression of W. Martin Lüdke's, what remains is the "difference," the idiosyncratic, the endless searching; what remains is the unrelenting, sorrowful gaze.

That can be seen precisely in his essay about Karl Kraus.^[19] In less than flattering terms, Kraus rejected the essay as a psychological portrait of himself. In reality, though, Benjamin's essay is autobiographically inspired: it is testimony for marginal existence and against mimicry; it is testimony of the relentlessness of the ever-watchful court of judgment, of the daily Last Judgment. What a shame Karl Kraus did not understand it.

The following words on Kraus appear in that essay: "Kraus accuses the law in its substance, not its effect. His charge is the betrayal of justice by law."^[20] The linguistic tensions between Recht [right] and Gerechtigkeit [justice], Recht and Gericht [court], that perpetually convening "Last Judgment," are decisive for Benjamin. Perhaps I can make that clearer with two quotes. The first is Schiller's sentence, which has been quoted to death: "World history is the world's court of judgment." The other is by Ibsen: "Writing means holding a day of judgment, judgment over oneself." Neither Schiller's nor Ibsen's formulations could have been acceptable to Benjamin, for they are overcome dialectically. If history is the world's court of judgment (and Hegel agrees that it is), then the victors have not only won the spoils, but they have also declared themselves on the right side of the law. In Benjamin's great formulation, "History has always been written by the victors." Schiller's bourgeois idealism, according to which the world court will have the final word, but only as an "idea," has always been reconcilable—tragically, as

[19] Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," in Reflections .

[20] Ibid., p. 255.

they say—with the continued existence of bourgeois society. And that is what Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse mean with their concept of affirmative culture. Surely Ibsen's phrase about holding a day of judgment is an indictment against the ideology of the individual in individualistic, bourgeois society. But since he assigns to writing and to the writer a role in which the writer preempts truly autonomous human existence, and thereby the passive observer or reader as recipient of his guilt appears to be redeemed with him, the monadic isolation of class society is neither converted nor overcome in revolutionary form.

Burkhardt Lindner, to whom I showed a first draft of this paper, wrote me, adding:

Benjamin's use of "court" stands in radical rejection of "right" (law). He criticizes so-called positive right as a rationalization for dominance and violence; it lays claim to justice only erroneously. Justice must be applied to the individual, to the particular. Justice is the messianic emergence or the purifying, profane power of revolutions. Correspondingly, Benjamin also rejects the notion of world history as world court. Only the revolutionary interruption of history or the messianic cessation of history can disrupt the repressive continuum and pass judgment over what has been.

In the concept of "court of judgment" of which Benjamin becomes the advocate, the motifs of political radicalism and historical materialism are combined with the messianic element of Judaism. This constellation of political radicalism, messianism, and Judaism is characteristic of Benjamin. In the volume of material on his theses "On the Concept of History,"^[21] one finds passages like this: "Each moment is a moment of judgment upon certain moments that pre-

[21] See Materialien zu Benjamins Thesen "Über den Begriff der Geschichte," ed. Peter Bulthaup (Frankfurt am Main, 1975).

ceded it." Or this: "Without some sort of test of a classless society, the past is nothing more than a jumbled collection of facts. To that extent, every conception of the present participates in the conception of the Final Judgment."

At this point, I would like to return once more to the association between Walter Benjamin and the representatives of Critical Theory. Sometimes it even extended to similarities in formulation. As an example, in Horkheimer's programmatic article "Traditional and Critical Theory," published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1937, these words occur: "The intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and find satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. He fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the passivity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be."^[22] Nearly ten years earlier, in 1929, Benjamin had written: "The intellectual adopts a mimicry of proletarian existence without this linking him in the least with the working class. By doing so, he tries to reach the illusory goal of standing above the classes, especially to be sure that he is outside the bourgeois class." And later, in his 1938 essay about our Institute in Mab und Wert, he cites that passage from Horkheimer's essay, adding: "The imperial nimbus in which the expectants of the millennium have cloaked themselves cannot be dissipated by the deification of the proletariat. This insight anticipates the concern of a critical theory of society."^[23]

[22] Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York, 1972), p. 214.

[23] Walter Benjamin, "Ein deutsches Institut freier Forschung," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 522.

Benjamin, like the rest of us, had to go through the painful process of recovering, theoretically and emotionally, from the disappointments dealt us by the history of the Soviet republic and the Communist movement from the mid-twenties on. As I formulated it once before, we felt that we had not abandoned the revolution, but rather that the revolution had abandoned us. Thus arose the disastrous situation of which Jörg Drews speaks in a review of the Benjamin-Scholem correspondence: "The cruel dilemma, namely through what categories and by means of which future-directed group the antifascist intellectual might find orientation, was the central problem for Benjamin after 1930."^[24] It was the central problem for all of us.

Here it once again becomes clear why Benjamin's original confidence in Marburg neo-Kantianism, which attempted to unite Kant's moral system with a socialist conception of progress, ultimately had to be disappointed. Because I underwent a similar development myself about ten years later, I am particularly moved even today by what Benjamin says about that. There is a passage in the drafts of the theses "On the Concept of History," from which I quoted before, in which Benjamin connects the critique of neo-Kantianism with his critique of social democratic thought—linking them in the concept of endless progress, the ultimately quietist attitude of the average socialist. By contrast, Benjamin holds up his certainty of the always-waiting presence of the messianic spark:

In the notion of the classless society, Marx secularized the notion of the messianic age. And that was good. The trouble arises in that social democratic thought raised that notion to an "ideal." That ideal was defined in the neo-Kantian teaching as an "endless task." And this teaching was the school philoso-

[24] Jörg Drews, "Katastrophen Abgerungen: Zum Briefwechsel Zwischen Benjamin und Scholem," Süddeutsche Zeitung 194 (August 8, 1980).

phy of the Social Democratic Party. . . . Once the classless society was defined as an endless task, then the empty and homogeneous future was transformed, so to speak, into an anteroom in which one could wait more or less sanguinely for the appearance of the revolutionary age. In reality there is not a single moment that does not carry with it its own revolutionary opportunity.^[25]

Benjamin had already spoken of the necessity of overcoming neo-Kantianism in his significant short review, dated 1929, called "Books That Have Stayed Alive."^[26] He cites History and Class Consciousness by Lukács, among others, and about Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption he says: "A system of Jewish theology. As remarkable as the work itself is its genesis in the trenches of Macedonia. Victorious incursion of Hegelian dialectic into Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason ."

Here we come once more to the third element I spoke of, which joins the messianic and the political: the Jewish. Some of us long denied its essential role in our development. In retrospect, this must be corrected. After all, Benjamin in his time and I in mine came into contact with positive Jewish influences as a result of our protest against our parents—Benjamin through his encounter with Scholem, I through the friendship of the charismatic Rabbi Nobel, the Buber-Rosenzweig circle, and the Jüdische Lehrhaus, which later became important for Benjamin as well.

The utopian-messianic motif, which is deeply rooted in Jewish metaphysics and mysticism, played a significant role for Benjamin, surely also for Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, and for myself. In his later years, when he ventured—a bit too far for my taste—into

[25] Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1231.

[26] Walter Benjamin, "Bücher die lebendig geblieben sind," Die literarische Welt 5, no. 20 (May 17, 1929).

concrete religious symbolism, Horkheimer frequently said (and on this point I agree with him completely) that the Jewish doctrine that the name of God may not be spoken or even written should be adhered to. The name of God is not yet fulfilled, and perhaps it will never be fulfilled; nor is it for us to determine if, when, and how it will be fulfilled for those who come after us. I believe that the essential thing about practical socialism that so shocked us is the idea that one is permitted to plan for someone else. The notion of something perhaps unattainable, perhaps unnameable, but which holds the messianic hope of fulfillment—I suppose this idea is very Jewish; it is certainly a motif in my thinking, and I suppose it was for my friends as well—but quite certainly it was for Benjamin a shining example of the irrevocable commitment to hope that remains with us "just for the sake of the hopeless."

In the sixth of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin writes: "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."^[27] Now that the edition of Benjamin's collected works is completed, the publishing house and the group responsible for it can collectively regard themselves as the writers of Benjamin's history. It will remain a concern to all of us, especially the younger generation, to defend from the enemy his gift to us (and Benjamin never made that easy for us—which is a gift as well). The enemy comes in many guises, such as the paltry accusation that the appearance of a classic-type edition is a burial ceremony that puts Benjamin firmly and finally into his coffin—and we all know that, particularly in Germany, although a classic may mean hours of nostalgic leisure-reading, it also means ritual quoting and being forgotten. Yet the philosopher of a negative theology, the architect

[27] Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, p. 255.

of history as ruins in temporal and atemporal space, the thinker of the contradiction (whether intentionally or not, he himself is not free of contradictions), the traveler on Hegel's path of positive negation, is entirely safe from the fate of a German classic. This fate cannot touch Benjamin, and indeed, he has already survived the enemy.