Towards a Theory of Aesthetics 129of the German Tragic Drama. He was evidently happy for Adorno to
make these borrowings, since he wrote: ‘Thus it is true that there is still
something like a shared work after all.’^38
Kracauer had already been sent a copy of the first chapter of the
book in manuscript as early as September 1930. He had barely read the
first few pages before telling Adorno of his favourable response. Since
Adorno was only a few days away from handing in the dissertation, this
was important encouragement.
The book version of the Kierkegaard thesis, published in March
1933 by Mohr-Siebeck, appeared ‘on the very day that Hitler seized
dictatorial powers’.^39 It was far from being identical with the 26-year
old Adorno’s dissertation which had persuaded Frankfurt University to
confer on him the venia legendi, the right to give philosophy lectures,
in February 1931. The original version was thoroughly revised for pub-
lication. As he explained to Krenek, all the building-blocks he had used
were still there, but they had been completely rearranged. Thus an
entirely new version had emerged, one that could truly be said to have
been ‘through-constructed’. In comparison, the original version could
be said to be no more than a plan for this one. He had very little time to
revise the book but had managed to complete it in barely two months in
autumn 1932, partly in Frankfurt, partly in Berlin.
Scarcely had the book appeared in spring 1933 than efforts were
made by both Benjamin and Kracauer, despite the autos-da-fé organ-
ized by the Nazis, to publish reviews that would show that the author
was a young philosopher whom the readership of the Vossischer Zeitung
and the Frankfurter Zeitung would be unable to ignore in future. How-
ever, the events following Hitler’s takeover of power rendered all
these efforts nugatory overnight. Even so, copies of the book were sold
during the dark years in Germany. By the time Benjamin’s review had
appeared, Benjamin himself had been forced to leave Nazi Germany.
Kracauer’s lengthy review was typeset by the Frankfurter Zeitung, and
the galleys had even been corrected, but the review never appeared.
As a left-wing Jewish intellectual, Kracauer had fled with his wife to
Paris immediately after the Reichstag fire on 28 February 1933. He did
so trusting to the promise that he would be given the post of a corres-
pondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a promise rescinded by Heinrich
Simon, the paper’s director, after only four weeks.^40 Adorno, who had
previously warned about the political direction taken by the newspaper,
was proved right. Even before 1933, every attempt was made to avoid
confrontation with the radical right. According to Ernst Bloch, when
the left-leaning economics editor, Arthur Feiler, was sacked, Adorno’s
only comment was the laconic statement that ‘the ships are leaving the
sinking rat’.^41
In his review Benjamin focused on the crucial aspect. The author’s
main achievement, he said, was that he placed Kierkegaard’s philo-
sophy in an intellectual and cultural context which transposed the