idarity with the innocent victims of history, and human progress, and the
struggle for alternative Future III had migrated from Judaism and Christianity
and Islam into secular historical materialism and humanism and their praxis
(Benjamin 1977; Horkheimer 1988b). Religious contents had been inverted
into a secular theory and praxis: e.g., the critical theory and action.
From Religious to Secular Discipleship
As a matter of fact, Benjamin, as well as Adorno, was deeply engaged in that
secular, but nevertheless true discipleship, the prototype of which was still
in the context of salvation history, the Jewish Imitatio Deiand the Christian
Imitatio Christi, the task of which was the spreading of the image of perfect
justice and unconditional love, and which would not bring power or respect
or awards or rewards in antagonistic civil society and in its political state,
and which in the 20th century was accompanied by a growing awareness of
its own vanity in the face of the fast arriving alternative Future I – the totally
reified, bureaucratized signal society (Hertz 1956; Benjamin 1977; Bolz and
Reijen 1996; Witte 1985; Scheible 1989; Steinert 1989; Flechtheim 1971). The
more critical Benjamin or Adorno became during the 20th century, the less
academic awards, grants, or titles they received from German, or American,
or French, or any other civil society and state, and the larger their police files
became. Certainly, Benjamin’s academic career was full of disappointments
and sufferings and he was finally driven into suicide by German, French and
Spanish fascism. Only decades after his death did he receive a monument in
Port Bou. Also, Adorno was most vulnerable and suffered much and never
found much recognition by American or European universities and states,
and was hated much by fascists, neo-fascists, and neoconservatives in Europe
and America. Only decades after his death, in 1969, a street was named after
Adorno in his home town of Frankfurt a. M. How could Ludwig von Friede-
burg, when he told me about Adorno’s suffering in the great critical scholar ’s
former office in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, expect anything
else? Von Friedeburg’s father had been a high officer in the German navy
during World War I and II. After von Friedeburg’s father had co-signed the
armistice in Eisenhower ’s headquarter in Reims, he took his own life, because
he could not endure Germany’s defeat a second time. In the last months of
World War II, von Friedeburg himself brought singlehandedly and heroically
a German u-boat from a French to a German harbor. After the return of
Horkheimer and Adorno to Frankfurt in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and
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