150 Part II: A Change of Scene
define the world of things as a history that had ossified into nature.
What he wanted was to interpret these reified objects philosophically as
the ciphers of an ossified natural history. This programme had already
surfaced in the inaugural lecture, and once again it was Benjamin’s
concept of allegory that supplied him with its underpinning. In allegory
the ossified phenomena of nature join together with their distorted mean-
ings to form a constellation in which nature and history are intertwined.
Adorno took over Benjamin’s programme of brushing history against
the grain, and added it to his own dialectical way of thinking. This made
it possible to avoid the ontological hypostatization of history or of
historical epochs. The point of this way of thinking about nature and
history was to see history as an embattled totality of primal myth and
the historical new. ‘History is at its most mythical where it is at its
most historical.’^63 The relation between history and myth does not mean
simply that myth keeps repeating itself, but that the latest history trans-
forms itself into myth by a natural process. Adorno had this process of
reversal in mind when he wrote ‘The dialectic of history does not mean
simply taking up prehistorical events and reinterpreting them; it means
that historical events are transformed into myth and nature.’^64
Benjamin’s influence on Adorno as seen in this talk also had a
linguistic dimension. Adorno’s own style was already highly individual.
Nevertheless, his prose and his approach to essay-writing is highly re-
miniscent of his model. When Benjamin first gave a reading from his
Berlin Childhood around 1900 in Ernst Schoen’s house in Frankfurt,
Adorno was spellbound by the vividness of his style and the way in which
Benjamin had described his childhood memories of his middle-class
family home in the metropolis.^65
The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and
Adorno’s ideological critique of musicThe new direction of the Institute of Social Research taken by the
institute director was revealed by, among other things, the replacement
of Grünberg’s Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus by Horkheimer’s
new journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. From 1932 on, this
was the journal that published the studies on social theory and social
research produced by the members of the institute. The journal also
had an unusually large review section, which provided space not just for
the chief members of the institute but also for many young scholars, as
well as well-known figures from Frankfurt University more generally.
Leo Löwenthal acted as editor-in-chief. All manuscripts submitted were
scrutinized carefully by institute members before publication, and were
often referred back to their authors for revision.^66 Löwenthal has
described the journal as the ‘collective denominator’ of the critical pro-
grammes that were carried out over a period of years by the institute.