258 Part III: Emigration Years
Richard Wagner by approving of it in principle, while criticizing a number
of individual passages which in his view were distorted by an interpreta-
tion grounded in ideology critique. Adorno, in contrast, was extremely
severe in his judgement of this first version of Benjamin’s Baudelaire
essay. Benjamin must have rubbed his eyes in disbelief and re-read the
letter of 10 November 1938 over and over again. Unexpectedly, Adorno
noted that Benjamin operated with a Marxian terminology that seemed
artificial, with the consequence that his analysis, while dialectical in
intention, failed to achieve a proper mediation between Baudelaire’s
poetry and the constitution of society. ‘You show a prevailing tendency
to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire’s work directly and
immediately to adjacent features in the social history and, wherever
possible, the economic features of the time.’^81 Adorno disliked the way
in which Benjamin established causal links between culture and the
economy on the Marxist model of superstructure and base. ‘Even though
Baudelaire’s wine poems may have been occasioned by the wine duty
or the town gates, the recurrence of these motifs in his oeuvre can only
be explained by the overall social and economic tendencies of the age.’^82
Adorno even went so far as to reproach Benjamin with having done
violence to himself in order to express what he obviously regarded as
a necessary solidarity with the institute. This had led him ‘to pay the
kind of tributes to Marxism which are appropriate neither to Marxism
nor to yourself.’^83 In Benjamin’s ‘materialist excursions’, the reader is
overcome by the apprehension he feels ‘for a shivering swimmer who
plunges into cold water’.^84 Instead of such unpleasant leaps, Benjamin
should ‘surrender to his own specific insights and conclusions’.^85 Or else
he will have to acquiesce in his own regression to an earlier stage of
historical insight: ‘The theological motif of calling things by their names
tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one
wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is
located at the crossroads of magic and positivism.’^86
This was, of course, an annihilating judgement, excusable only by
its intention to defend Benjamin against himself, to remind him of his
own theoretical concerns. Benjamin evidently accepted the criticism
in precisely that spirit. For in his first reaction he observed, in a letter to
Scholem: ‘The reservations that can be urged against the manuscript
are in part quite reasonable.’^87 The flaws Adorno detected, Benjamin
went on, were connected with the isolation in which he was compelled
to live and work. Furthermore, in the portions of his manuscript that
had been objected to, the ‘key importance’ of the ‘Baudelaire’ did not
become sufficiently clear because there, i.e., in the third part of the
planned book, he had failed to lay the theoretical historical foundation
that Adorno had expected. In a letter covering many pages, Benjamin
defended himself by arguing that, when measured against the plan of
the book as a whole, the sections in question were ‘essentially composed
of philological material’.^88 And the recourse to dialectical materialism