Adorno

A Biography

Stefan Müller-Doohm, Rodney Livingstone

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745631097, 9780745631080
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.

This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole.

Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.

To write history is to give the dates a face.

Walter Benjamin

Preface

Curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought.¹

A biography of Adorno lays itself open to the objection that he had no liking for this genre of writing and in fact had grave reservations about the wisdom of exploring writers’ lives in order to discover the key to their artistic or philosophical works. He expressed the hope that in his own case too readers would give preference to his writings rather than to the accidental facts about his life. Of course, he read and made use of biographies; the life of Richard Wagner is a case in point. But he never wearied of warning his readers not to scour musical compositions or literary texts for traces of the author’s experience, subjective intentions or impulses. However, there is a constant temptation to do just that when thinking about Adorno himself. His texts contain many autobiographical allusions to happy childhood memories or sly references to local place names in Frankfurt or the surrounding area. What Adorno thought important was not such reminiscences, but the interplay between the objective content of his work and its historical context, i.e., what he called the force field consisting of the historical situation of the authorial subject, his life and his oeuvre.

This maxim has been the guiding principle of my life of Adorno, which has been completed forty years after his death and at a point in time when he would have been a hundred years old. During the six years and more that I have been working on this book I had a quotation from Adorno standing above my desk in a frame and visible at all times: ‘Even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual life acquire meaning within given social conditions.’²

The present biography attempts to reconstruct the context of Adorno’s life with other people. It is based on the corpus of documents consisting of Adorno’s publications, his published and unpublished letters, a variety of notes and the transcripts of his lectures and talks, as well as interviews with key contemporaries. A large number of other sources and texts belonging to Adorno’s intellectual contemporaries have been consulted. Despite the sheer quantity of the material referred to, it should be borne in mind that there remain documents that have not been made available in the archives or where legal restrictions have prevented access. This applies especially to his correspondence; some letters have been blocked, in particular the highly significant correspondence with Siegfried Kracauer which is preserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Biographies are sometimes distinguished by an emotional distance from their subject. This would be inappropriate in my case. Both as a schoolboy and a student, I had the good fortune to experience directly something of the fascinating intellectual power of this protagonist of critical theory. ‘The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.’³

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the financial support of two projects by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, it was possible to establish the Adorno Research Centre at the Carl von Ossietzky University in summer 1998. Under my direction my colleagues have helped to create the framework which has made it possible to write the present biography. I wish to thank the DFG for its financial support and also for the financing of a replacement professor for the whole of the winter semester 2002/3. It was only this support that it made it possible to complete work on this manuscript.

My personal thanks go to the members of the research group: Dirk Auer, Thorsten Bonacker, Thomas Jung, Jascha Rohr and Christian Ziegler. Without their productive collaboration and vigorous assistance this book could not have been written.

A part of the research consisted of interviews that I conducted with contemporaries of Adorno who were more or less closely associated with him. These interviews were recorded on tape and then transcribed. The two extended interviews with Ute and Jürgen Habermas in their house on the Starnberger See were not only highly instructive but also warmly sympathetic to my project of writing a life of Adorno. I am indebted to both of them for their patience with my questions and for their many suggestions.

I wish to thank a number of other people with whom I was able to conduct highly informative conversations: Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Marianne Hoppe, Ludwig von Friedeburg, Lore Kramer, Elisabeth Lenk, Rudolf zur Lippe, Elfriede Olbrich, Klaus Reichert, Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Alfred Schmidt, Herbert Schnädelbach, Wolfram Schütte and Bernhard Villinger.

In order to refine my own picture of Frankfurt University in the 1960s, I took the opportunity to speak with Uta and Hans-Dieter Loeber, Christa and Walter Siebel and also Eberhard Schmidt. I would like to thank them as well as my friends, whose curiosity over the years has helped me to keep on going.

I was also able to obtain good advice from other people during my work on the biography. In particular, I wish to thank Tom Huhn, Martin Jay, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Alexander Kluge, Wolf Lepenies, Thomas Levin, Ahlrich Meyer, Klaus Neumann-Braun, Jürgen Ritsert, Hartmut Scheible, Rolf Wiggershaus, Gisela von Wysocki and Harro Zimmermann, as well as the universities of Princeton, Berkeley and Columbia (New York) for their hospitality.

This project could not have been carried out without the support of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in Frankfurt and the assistance of its director and her colleagues: Gabriele Ewenz, Christoph Gödde, Henri Lonitz and Michael Schwarz. I owe thanks also to Jochen Stollberg, the director of the Horkheimer, Marcuse and Löwenthal archives in the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main, who helped me in the friendliest way.

In addition, I was assisted in my work by the following archives, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude: the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Archive of the Academic Assistance Council, London; the Leo Baeck Institute, New York; Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach; Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main; Thomas Mann-Archiv, Zurich; Archiv der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main; Stadtarchiv Dettelbach; and Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main.

Since I have the old-fashioned habit of writing my first drafts by hand, Elke Glos had the difficult task of transferring the text to the computer, which she did with endless patience and great understanding. Barbara Vahland made use of her great expertise in pre-editing important sections of the text.

Gertrude Meyer-Denkmann showed great understanding and competence in advising me on the sections of the biography dealing with musical matters.

Thanks to their professionalism, the editorial department of Suhrkamp Verlag headed by Bernd Stiegler have helped to ensure that the manuscript could be completed and available in the bookshops in time for the centenary of Adorno’s birth. I am especially indebted to the cooperation and exchange of ideas with Bernd Stiegler, who has meticulously edited the entire book chapter by chapter.

My increasingly close cooperation with Reinhard Pabst (our almost daily briefings provided emotional support as well as practical help) turned out to be a particular stroke of good fortune. I am indebted to him for a large number of valuable ideas as well as enthusiastic assistance in collecting the photographic materials, a task he finally took over completely.

My wife Heidi encouraged me to make the formulation of many of my ideas more comprehensible at the manuscript stage, and she generously overlooked the months during which I had retreated to my desk.

Oldenburg, April 2003

Illustration Acknowledgements

Günter Adolphs, Bonn: Plate 5

Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 11, 12, 14, 16, 20; figure 5

Archiv Günther Hörmann, Ulm: Plate 19

Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz/Tüllmann-Archiv, Berlin: Plate 28

Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach: Plates 9, 13

Deutsche Presseagentur, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 30

Historisches Archiv des Hessischen Rundfunks, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 27

Horkheimer-Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 17, 18; figure 4

Hotel Waldhaus, Sils Maria: Plate 21

Barbara Klemm, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 29

Stefan Moses, Munich: Plate 25

Reinhard Pabst, Bad Camberg: Plate 6; figure 1

Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno, Oberursel: Plates 2, 4; figure 2

Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 1, 7

Lotte Tobisch, Vienna: Plate 22

Bernhard Villinger, Weissach: Plate 3

Rüdiger Volhard, Frankfurt am Main (photo: Ilse Mayer-Gehrken): Plate 23

All other illustrations come from the collection of the author or Suhrkamp Verlag.

Part I

Origins: Family, Childhood and Youth: School and University in Frankfurt am Main

Family Inheritance: A Picture of Contrasts

Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is coloured through and through by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.

Walter Benjamin¹

Every human being has his own way of dealing with the chance nature of historical events. But equally, individual lives are determined by the gifts bestowed on them by the fairies, both good and wicked, operating through the culture of their time.

Thomas Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno, who was born on Friday 11 September 1903 in Frankfurt am Main, was no exception. At his cradle there was a profusion of gifts of the most varied kind. Symptoma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Dedication 1
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration Acknowledgements
• Part I: Origins: Family, Childhood and Youth: School and University in Frankfurt am Main
• Part II: A Change of Scene: Between Frankfurt, Vienna and Berlin: A Profusion of Intellectual Interests
• Part III: Emigration Years: An Intellectual in a Foreign Land
• Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional and Enduring the Conditional
• Epilogue: Thinking Against Oneself
• Notes
• References and Bibliography
• Index