Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 325The Explosive Power
of Saying No
An indestructible element of the resistance to the world of barter where
everything is interchangeable is the resistance of the eye that does not
want the colours of the world to fade.^1Adorno spent the last twenty years of his life mostly in Germany –
he died a few weeks before his sixty-sixth birthday. There he not
only enjoyed an incomparably influential life as an academic, but also
helped to shape the direction of the Federal Republic in its efforts
to discover its own cultural and political identity and to help the post-
war generation in its attempts at self-clarification. As a representative
of the ‘Frankfurt School’, he made a significant contribution to ‘the
intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic’^2 which formed the
kernel of the political and cultural self-image of the nation twenty
years after the establishment of the institutions of the German state.
It may be said, therefore, that he helped to bring about the consist-
ent policy of integration in the West, the process of democratization
and, above all, the beginning of a political debate about the German
past. Adorno was among those who shaped the political culture of
Germany.
As a university teacher, the acclaim he won from his students can
be seen in a characteristic photograph of 1964. He is shown standing
at the podium of the largest lecture hall in Frankfurt University, sur-
rounded by countless students whom he is facing in an open, attentive
manner (see plate 28). That is how he remains in the collective memory:
a well-known and admired personality who for all his presence had
something of the aura of the isolated intellectual in the midst of frenetic
cultural activity. What was admired about his frequent appearances
on radio and television and other cultural venues was his instinctive
insistence on thinking. On his return to Germany, Adorno was initially
by no means free of the anxiety that the horrors of the past might be
repeated. Nevertheless, four years after the end of hostilities, he took
the decision to return to the land of the ‘Horsts’ and the ‘Jürgens’, the
‘Bergenroths’ and ‘Bojungas’.^3