214 Part III: Emigration Years
13
Writing Letters as an Aid to
Philosophical Self-Clarification:
Debates with Benjamin,
Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer
While Adorno was complaining about the excessive burden of work
that admittedly he had largely brought upon himself, he did everything
in his power to help Walter Benjamin, who was in very difficult material
circumstances in exile in Paris. Since 1934 the person Adorno was
closest to intellectually had been just surviving at a minimal existence
level, forced to live in simple rooms in cheap hotels.^1 Adorno made
strenuous efforts to present the facts of Benjamin’s case to the director
of the Institute of Social Research with a view to ameliorating his material
situation. He also enlisted the support of close friends, such as Else
Herzberger, a wealthy businesswoman who had been friendly with the
Wiesengrund family for many years. She had shown an interest in helping
out émigré intellectuals and artists financially. Gretel Karplus, too, did
what she could from Berlin.
The regular payments made to Benjamin by the institute from 1934
on were tied to particular research and publication projects. This rela-
tionship soon developed into a definite collaboration. One such project,
a piece of work Benjamin kept postponing, was a study of Eduard
Fuchs, the historian of manners and morals. Of the greatest importance,
however, was his study of the Paris arcades,^2 which he had planned as
a prehistory of the nineteenth century. Paris was to be the place where
Benjamin – bowing to external constraints – intended to bring his
Arcades Project to completion.^3 One step in this direction was to produce
a detailed exposé of the contents of the study for the Institute of Social
Research. The early study that Benjamin had begun in the 1920s together
with the Berlin writer Franz Hessel had borne the working title ‘A
Dialectical Fairyland’. The more recent, sociologically based project
was entitled ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. When Adorno
learnt in a letter that Benjamin intended the new project on the arcades
to be carried out from a historical and sociological perspective, he
objected that much more was expected of him, namely a ‘philosophical
theory’ which ‘can only find its own dialectic in the polarity between