Early years: Frankfurt Theodor W. Adorno was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in
Frankfurt on 11 September 1903, the only child of Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952) and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946). His mother, a
Catholic from
Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his father, an
assimilated Jew who had
converted to
Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. His mother wanted her son's surname to include her own, Adorno. Thus, his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Upon his application for
US citizenship, his father's surname, Wiesengrund, was dropped from the name. His mother and aunt provided a vibrant musical life during his childhood. Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by
Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve. At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren Middle School before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Before his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of
György Lukács's
The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with
Ernst Bloch's
The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write: Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism that swept through the Reich during the
First World War. Along with future collaborators
Walter Benjamin,
Max Horkheimer, and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them
Max Weber,
Max Scheler and
Georg Simmel, as well as his friend
Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from how this tradition had discredited itself. Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family,
Margarete, or Gretel, moved into the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she became acquainted with Benjamin,
Bertolt Brecht, and Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s. After fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg,
Schreker,
Stravinsky,
Bartók,
Busoni,
Delius, and
Hindemith—but also began studying music composition at the
Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers
Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the
Frankfurter Zeitungs literary editor, of whom he would later write: Leaving grammar school to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to
Hegel and
Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the
Zeitschrift für Musik, the
Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the ''''. In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky's ''
The Soldier's Tale'', which in 1923 he called a "dismal Bohemian prank." In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances that either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence that Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible. "No cathedral," he wrote, "can be built if no community desires one." In the summer of 1924 Adorno received his
doctorate with a study of
Edmund Husserl's
phenomenology under the direction of the unorthodox
neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met his most important intellectual collaborators, Horkheimer and Benjamin. Adorno met Horkheimer through Cornelius's seminars, and Horkheimer subsequently introduced him to
Friedrich Pollock.
Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer
Alban Berg's Three Fragments from
Wozzeck premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and mutually agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture that had grown up around
Schoenberg. In addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with
Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist
Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he and Berg attended public lectures by the satirist
Karl Kraus, and he met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the
Hungarian Soviet Republic. Berg, whom Adorno called "my master and teacher," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends: After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's Two Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 2, was performed in Vienna, providing a welcome interruption from his preparations for the
habilitation. After writing the Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique, as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for voice and piano, Op. 6, Adorno presented his habilitation manuscript,
The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche (
Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre), to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application because the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In the manuscript, Adorno sought to emphasize the epistemological status of the
unconscious as it emerged from
Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both
Nietzsche and
Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature." Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's Four Songs for medium voice and piano, Op. 3, was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930, Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the
Musikblätter des Anbruchs. In a proposal for transforming the journal, he sought to use
Anbruch to champion radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of
Pfitzner, the later
Richard Strauss, as well as the
neoclassicism of
Stravinsky and
Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music," "On Twelve-Tone Technique," and "Reaction and Progress." Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced. According to Adorno,
twelve-tone technique's use of
atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can
tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer. At this time Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer
Ernst Krenek, discussing problems of atonality and the twelve-tone technique. In a 1934 letter, he sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929, he accepted
Paul Tillich's offer to present a habilitation on
Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title
The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to
Idealism and
Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness," and "leap"—instructive for
existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the university conferred on Adorno the
venia legendi in February 1931. On the very day his revised study was published, 23 March 1933,
Hitler seized dictatorial powers. Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the
Institute for Social Research, an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar
Leo Löwenthal, social psychologist
Erich Fromm, and philosopher
Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture "The Actuality of Philosophy" created a scandal. In it Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier but also challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with
Benjamin's
The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the
Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments that should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open." Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal,
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not an Institute member, the journal published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938), and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as a social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of
historical materialism, as concepts like
reification,
false consciousness, and
ideology began to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, due to the presence of another prominent sociologist at the institute,
Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique that held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in the autumn of 1934, Adorno began work on a
Singspiel based on
Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer titled
The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he never completed. By the time he fled Hitler's Germany, Adorno had already written over 100 opera or concert reviews and 50 critiques of music composition. As the
Nazi party became the largest party in the
Reichstag, Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing is certain," he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked. In March, as the
swastika was run up the flagpole of the town hall, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the Institute's offices. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July, and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood." As a "non-
Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterward, Adorno was forced into 15 years of exile.
Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles After the possibility of transferring his
habilitation to the
University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain at his father's suggestion. With the help of the
Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at
Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of
Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of
Edmund Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the
Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and begun making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" in the Viennese musical journal
23, "On Jazz" in the institute's
Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in
Europäische Revue. But Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the
Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms,
Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, which later became
Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, and Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished opera
Lulu. At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with
Walter Benjamin about the latter's
Arcades Project. After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on 9 June 1937 and stayed for two weeks. While he was in New York, Horkheimer's essays "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" and "Traditional and Critical Theory," which would soon become instructive for the institute's self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on 8 September 1937. A little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take with the
Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist
Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adorno's work continued with studies of Beethoven and
Richard Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for "the precision of their materialist deciphering" as well as the way in which "musical facts ... had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me." In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize
Dialectic of Enlightenment—man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on 16 February 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in
Newark, New Jersey, to discuss the Project's plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music. Although he was expected to embed the Project's research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with
data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it." Thus, Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project's topic, "Music in Radio." Adorno was primarily interested in how musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony," he wrote, "heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert hall where people sit as if they were in church." In essays published by the institute's
Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with the atrophy of musical culture that had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies—toward conformism, trivialization, and standardization—already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the Project. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was prolific, publishing "The Radio Symphony," "A Social Critique of Radio Music," and "On Popular Music," texts that, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, are found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation,
Current of Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute. In addition to helping with the
Zeitschrift, Adorno was expected to be the institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of
Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger
Arcades Project. In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks that had become manifest through Benjamin's "
The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility". At around the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic," which would later become
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in
Colombes, they entertained few delusions about their work's practical effects. "In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe," Horkheimer wrote, "our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle." As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of antisemitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported
Franz Leopold Neumann's thesis, according to which
National Socialism was a form of "
monopoly capitalism"; on the other were those who supported
Friedrich Pollock's "
state capitalist theory." Horkheimer's contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian State," "The End of Reason," and "The Jews and Europe," served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic. In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what
Thomas Mann called "German California", setting up house in a
Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his
Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion," he wrote after reading the manuscript. The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as
Philosophical Fragments, the text waited another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through the chapters that treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both
Homer's
Odyssey and the
Marquis de Sade, and analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism. With their joint work completed, Adorno and Horkheimer turned their attention to studies on antisemitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the
Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the
American Jewish Committee. In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity." Adorno wrote that fascist propaganda encourages identification with an
authoritarian personality characterized by traits such as obedience and extreme aggression.The result of these labors, the 1950 study
The Authoritarian Personality, was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the
F-scale personality test. After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "
enemy aliens", became increasingly restricted. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who was not naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms that conclude
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday that was later published as
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like
emigration,
totalitarianism, and
individuality, as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling, and the impossibility of love. In California, Adorno made the acquaintance of
Charlie Chaplin and became friends with
Fritz Lang and
Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study, the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, films' visual aspects. Adorno also assisted
Thomas Mann with his novel
Doktor Faustus after the latter asked for his help. "Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work—I mean, Leverkühn's work—might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?" At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as
The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return, Adorno had reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of
Philosophy of New Music and completed two compositions:
Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op. 7, and
Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Däubler, op. 8.
Postwar Europe Return to Frankfurt University Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic as a professor at the
University of Frankfurt am Main, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music at the
Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, with seminars on "Kant's Transcendental Dialectic," aesthetics, Hegel, "Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge," and "The Concept of Knowledge." Adorno's surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus, and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened, holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of
Max Frisch, culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness. Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy, and the Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought.
Essays on fascism Starting with his 1947 essay
Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler, Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), published as a contribution to the
Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of '
qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the
authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions. In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays,
The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959) and
Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated
National Socialism in the
mindsets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again. Later on, however,
Jean Améry—who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity" ("absolute Negativität"), using a language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache"). Adorno contended that the culture industry, through mass media, especially radio, had contributed to the development of fascism in Germany. In his view, the "authoritarian voice" arises from the intimacy of broadcast and social practices of radio listening. After seven years of work, Adorno completed
Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967–68, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans
Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection, which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself."
Confrontations with students Student
protests of 1968 took place in West Germany during the same period as the publication of
Negative Dialectics. Trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's 1967 state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam, and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the
emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz." The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of
Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon, Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of
Péter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the
Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on
Goethe's
Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a meeting with the Berlin
Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. However, as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the disruptions students experienced in university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine
alternative, which, following the lead of
Hannah Arendt's articles in
Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's
Writings and
Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin's longtime friend
Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of
Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. Relations between students and the West German state continued to deteriorate. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman,
Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the
Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in
Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb." Adorno would refer to the radical students as "stormtroopers (
Sturmabteilung) in jeans." In September 1968, Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of
Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possible any more." After striking, students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment, and the police were brought in to close the building.
Later years Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by
Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zürich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris, where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on
Aesthetic Theory. In June 1969, he completed
Catchwords: Critical Models. During the winter semester of 1968–1969 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics. For the summer semester, Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking," as well as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object. But at the first lecture, Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled. After a student wrote on the blackboard, "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head. Yet, Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement, which would have only strengthened the conservative thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno cancelled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to
Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of
Matterhorn to restore his strength. On 6 August, during a vacation in
Visp, he died of a
heart attack. ==Intellectual influences==