Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 225‘ephemeral meretriciousness and the stereotypical rigidity’ of the operetta
and hence its true character as ‘the source of kitsch’.^62 In fact, Kracauer
had concentrated on portraying the social and cultural manifestations
of the Second Empire and Offenbach as the typical artist of the period.
His argument was that, because Paris society during the reign of
Napoleon III was itself ‘operetta-like’, it could find its apt expression in
Offenbach’s music.
This attempt to provide a kind of model of an entire epoch by
describing such phenomena as the boulevard, the newspaper, the world
exhibitions, etc., seemed quite close to Benjamin’s own Arcades Project,
especially the study he planned on Charles Baudelaire. Did Benjamin
agree with Adorno in rejecting Kracauer’s book because it provided
competition for his own? Benjamin knew what Kracauer was planning
from conversations with him in Paris, and was mistrustful from the
outset. His doubts found a ready audience in Adorno, who wrote to
Benjamin, who himself needed no convincing: ‘No, if Kracauer really
does identify with this book, then he has definitely erased himself from
the list of writers to be taken at all seriously. And I am myself seriously
considering whether or not I should break off relations with him.’^63
Benjamin for his part justified his negative judgement by pointing out
that the book was a kind of apologia: ‘It is especially flagrant in those
passages which touch upon Offenbach’s Jewish origins. For Kracauer
the Jewish element remains purely a matter of origins. It does not occur
to him to recognize it in the work itself.’ The theory of operetta was
likewise thought to be an apologia: ‘The concept of rapture [Rausch]
which is supposed to support this theory, at least as it appears here, is
nothing but a messy box of chocolates.’^64
For Adorno and Benjamin to agree among themselves to discuss
Kracauer’s book in such disparaging terms may be understandable as
a way of enabling each to have his own negative view confirmed by the
other. But greater circumspection than Adorno was able to muster would
have been advisable when dealing with Horkheimer. For he also wrote
to the latter, damning the book as conformist and regressive. He even
went so far as to raise the question whether in the long run a relation-
ship with Kracauer was still possible.^65
The inability to judge the book of a common friend in a dispassionate
way was not just a symptom of the distortions that began to colour
communications between the émigrés. After all, this was a book that
finally appeared in the United States in 1938 with the title Orpheus in
Paris, and enjoyed some success. In addition, the tendency grew for
what seemed to be minor deviations from a very diffuse group con-
sensus to result in threats of exclusion. Had the conditions under which
they laboured in emigration made people forget how to distinguish
between personal relations and attitudes on theoretical issues? Whatever
the case, the unifying factor of a common hatred of Hitler did not suffice
to prevent intellectual disagreements from spilling over into personal