Adorno’s Years in California 281In addition, Adorno had undertaken the task of finding a publisher
for Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.^41 This manuscript,
Walter Benjamin’s last, had been in his hands since the summer of 1941.
Benjamin’s death had made speedy publication a duty. Since the
Zeitschrift had been suspended for financial reasons (the last issue of
the Studies in Philosophy and Social Science appeared belatedly in spring
1942),^42 it could not be published there. Adorno decided on a kind of
special issue of the journal, which actually appeared in the spring of
1942 in a small mimeographed edition in Los Angeles. It contained the
first publication of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, as
well as a ‘Bibliographical Note’ on his writings.
In one of his last letters to Gretel Adorno, a few months before his
death, Benjamin referred to the fact that he had now written down the
‘Theses’. He drew her attention, and Adorno’s, specifically to the
seventeenth thesis, saying that ‘it is this thesis that reveals the hidden
but conclusive link between these reflections and my previous work,
since it contains a concise statement of the method employed in the
latter.’^43 The method of materialist historiography delineated there
contained ideas that Adorno shared unreservedly. This was true above
all of its postulate that ‘the lifework is preserved in the work... ; in the
life work, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history’, as well
as the idea about ‘blasting a specific era out of the era’.^44 The belief that
history is a history of catastrophes, that the gaze that the ‘angel of
history’ casts on the ruins of the past (as in the ninth thesis) is a gaze
full of horror, was an unconventional view of the age^45 which Adorno
hoped to be able to utilize for his own disillusioned balance sheet of
a failed epoch.
Alongside Benjamin’s posthumous ‘Theses’, Adorno published in
the memorial volume two essays by Horkheimer, ‘Reason and Self-
Preservation’ and ‘The Authoritarian State’, as well as an essay of his
own that Benjamin greatly admired, the essay in which he examined the
personal and literary relations between Hugo von Hofmannsthal and
Stefan George. Adorno approached the two poets through their corres-
pondence in an attempt to uncover the secret of their lives. In the case
of George, he unmasked the stance of the artist hero as the obverse of an
underlying coarseness, while the worldly, aristocratic Hofmannsthal is
deemed to have failed because he was unable to harmonize his privileged
social position with that of the free-floating intellectual. He drew particular
attention to the question of the decline of language that is the subject
of the so-called Chandos letter. He wrote that the two poets’ defiance
‘of society includes defiance of its language. Others share the language
of men. They are “social”. The aesthetes are as far ahead of them as
they are asocial. Their works measure themselves against the recogni-
tion that the language of men is the language of their degradation.’^46
Although Adorno and Horkheimer were unable to give the book
the continuous attention they would have wished, the Philosophical