Adorno

In Search of a Career 101

critic. His task there was to maintain the position he had won and to
extend it in Frankfurt and beyond.
Towards the end of the 1920s, Adorno played an increasingly active
part in Frankfurt’s cultural life. His role as music critic was just his
official function; his activities went far beyond that. It can hardly have
escaped his attention that the financial resources of private cultural
institutions had been badly squeezed by inflation, and that middle-class
benefactors had also suffered. During Ludwig Landmann’s term of
office as mayor (1924–33), these economic constraints led to a gradual
shift in the relative importance of ‘citizens’ culture and a culture that
was administered municipally’.^26 This shift was an object lesson for
Adorno, since it showed him what can happen to culture when it
becomes the object of administrative attention. He wrote later that what
it led to was ‘the neutralization of culture’. Nevertheless, he thought
that, once the material foundation of traditional liberal and indi-
vidualist culture had been undermined, there was no alternative to
public sponsorship:

The appeal to the creators of culture, that they should withdraw

from the administrative process and keep it at a distance, rings

hollow. It would rob them not only of every opportunity to earn

their living, but also of any conceivable impact, of any interaction

between their activities and society. This is something that even

the most incorruptible work cannot forgo without withering. Those

who boast of their purity, who keep themselves to themselves,

make us suspect that they are the true provincials and petty-

bourgeois reactionaries. The customary argument that creative

minds – and they were always the nonconformists – always had

a precarious existence, and that they nevertheless preserved their

strength in defiant self-assertion, is threadbare. The fact that this

situation is not new does not give us the right to perpetuate it if it

is no longer necessary; and the idea that the best will always come

out on top is no more than a pious gingerbread motto.^27

The realization that civic culture needs the support of the municipal
authorities derives from Adorno’s experience of Frankfurt before 1933.
Once the city had involved itself in cultural matters, building projects
were undertaken under the influence of architects such as Ernst May
and Martin Elsässer, who were both associated with the Bauhaus. The
supporters of cultural modernity had gathered round the journal Das
neue Frankfurt, and they opposed the traditionalists of the Altstadtbund
who wished to preserve the past in general and a civic culture specific to
Frankfurt in particular. The radical modernizers aimed to do away with
historicism and the worn-out styles of Late Wilhelminian society. One
representative of modernity was Franz Wichert, who had been director
of the School for the Applied Arts since 1923. He had similar interests