Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 223towards him. This hostility presumably went back to 1932, when Kracauer
was editor of the arts section of the Frankfurter Zeitung and had refused
to accede to Horkheimer’s request to defend the institute against the
accusation that it was in the hands of communists.^56 Kracauer for his
part may well have envied Horkheimer, who as director of the institute
was able to pursue his sociological interests in conditions of material
security, but who – as Kracauer suspected – was abandoning his original
Marxist research objectives.
A further factor was that Kracauer wished as far as possible to avoid
becoming a recipient of patronage from Adorno, who was in fact
responsible for coordinating part of the European research and publica-
tion programme of the institute. Relations between the old friends were
now rarely free of disputes, and their friendship had reached something
of a low point at this time. In general Kracauer was unwilling to make
use of Adorno’s – by no means always impartial – services in mediating
between Horkheimer and himself. As he explicitly stated, he wanted
to be approached by the institute and not to have to come to them cap
in hand. And he found it intolerable to see Adorno enjoying the role
of munificent benefactor. It may be the case that unconsciously he
could only see Adorno as the former pupil whose eyes he had attempted
to open to the mysteries of Kant’s philosophy. In fact their roles had
long since undergone a reversal. Adorno may not have felt himself
to be intellectually superior to the older man, but he felt growing
doubts about his writing activities. In his eyes, Kracauer was increas-
ingly becoming a marginal figure. This went so far that Adorno could
even intrigue against Kracauer, writing to Horkheimer that he and
Benjamin had agreed that Kracauer ought to be ‘declared incapable’ in
order to save him from himself. Even so, he continued, ‘his gifts were
so considerable... that we ought to be able to do something with
him.’^57 He proposed that Kracauer could be asked to write a literary
and sociological analysis of the detective novel, as part of a collection
of essays which would include Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproducibility’, a study on architecture to be commissioned
from Sigfried Giedion, and Adorno’s jazz essay. The book, which
would contain an introduction by Horkheimer, would be entitled ‘The
Art of Mass Consumption’.
Neither this volume nor the essay that Kracauer was supposed to
write for it ever saw the light of day. However, Kracauer did write an
article on ‘Propaganda and the Masses’ that the institute both com-
missioned and paid for. This was a draft text in which Kracauer outlined
how he would go about analysing ‘the combination of terrorism and
intellectual influence’, which in his view had become the true core of
fascist politics. This study was to form part of a larger future project. His
aim was to perform a comparative study of the different forms of pro-
paganda and their different functions in the fascist, soviet and democratic
systems.^58 Kracauer produced a 170-page study based on his outline,