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.