224 Part III: Emigration Years
with the title ‘The Totalitarian Propaganda of Germany and Italy’. When
Adorno was asked by Horkheimer to review it, he not only shortened
it radically, but he also rewrote it so extensively that Kracauer decided
to forbid its publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. He
informed Adorno of his decision in a letter dated 20 August 1938, and
made it clear that the text as totally revised by Adorno was no longer
his. His original intention, he said, had been to explain the growth of
fascism and its relation to capitalism. Contrary to this, in the version
Adorno had produced, this relationship was ‘fixed once and for all... the
two things were 100 per cent identical. You identify it [fascism] with
counter-revolution from the outset, claim that its interests are diamet-
rically opposed to those of the majority and simply brush aside the
ambiguities in its relations with capitalism.... I must confess that in the
whole of my literary career I have never encountered a revision that so
contradicts every legitimate practice; not to mention that I myself would
never have dreamt of treating someone else’s text in like manner.’^59
Even before this very serious disagreement, Adorno’s criticism of
Jacques Offenbach and his Age had led to a considerable cooling of
relations between the two friends. This book, which Kracauer had spent
two years writing, was published in April 1937, and Kracauer hoped
that it would help to alleviate his financial situation. Now, Adorno tore
it to shreds in a review for the Zeitschrift. What aroused his disapproval?
Basically, he thought it a mistake to portray the life of a composer
against the background of French history during the Second Empire
without properly taking account of his music. Krenek called it ‘the
biography of a musician without his music’.^60 That was the crucial
point, and it was one that Adorno saw too. In addition, he criticized the
exclusion of social theory and also the purely descriptive narrative. Lastly,
he objected to the way in which music was given a social explanation. It
was not good enough for a ‘social biography’ to be based on ‘analogies
and vague parallels’ between Offenbach’s music and the social con-
ditions of the age. Kracauer understood perfectly well that he was being
accused of superficiality in his analysis of society because of his failure
to make use of materialist categories. He replied by return of post. He
told Adorno that his prejudices prevented him from seeing what he
(Kracauer) had really been doing in the Offenbach book. This was to
describe the collapse of the empire and the subsequent rise of the
bourgeois republic in France. This historical analysis showed ‘that the
Second Empire was a farce that had come about as a result of panic
and flight’. The idea that he approved of a society whose problematic
development he had exposed was absurd.^61
Adorno was unmoved by Kracauer’s defence. He repeated his
criticisms in his review of the book in the last issue of the Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung for 1937: ‘Distanced from Offenbach’s material,
Kracauer’s account approaches those found in individualizing biograph-
ical novels.’ Adorno believed that Kracauer had omitted to explore the