326 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
His decision to return ‘was hardly motivated simply by a subjective
need, or homesickness, though I do not deny having had such senti-
ments. An objective factor also made itself felt. It was the language.’^4
As he often pointed out, he was dependent on the German language as
a writer because ‘it has a special affinity with philosophy’ and in particu-
lar with its ability ‘to express something in the phenomena that is not
exhausted in their mere thus-ness, their positivity and givenness.’^5
A mere year and a half after his return Adorno was already a well-
known figure. The reason why he was able to make a name for himself
so quickly in the newly founded Federal Republic was the publication
of Minima Moralia, the completed manuscript of which he had brought
with him in his luggage. To his own surprise, the book was an extraordin-
ary success. Difficult as it was to explain this success, Adorno attrib-
uted it to the fact that intellectual circles in Germany were gradually
tiring of the Heidegger fashion (Heideggerei). This assessment was quite
accurate. Because Adorno was one of the few alternatives to the neo-
conservative climate that he associated with Heidegger, he was able in
due course to emerge as the most important figure on the laborious
road to intellectual recovery. A crucial turning point was reached with
the sentence he wrote in the year after his return and published a little
later: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’^6 With this sentence,
which he stood by despite his knowledge of the poetry of Nelly Sachs
and Paul Celan, he had taken a stand that would make it more or less
impossible for him to retreat into an ivory tower of pure scholarship.
Nevertheless, he had moved to Frankfurt primarily as a scholar. His
intention was to take up again the post of Privatdozent which had been
taken away from him in 1933 and to become a philosophy teacher at his
former home university from which he had been expelled. In this he not
only succeeded, he also became the representative of another discipline,
sociology, which was held to be very advanced in postwar Germany and
was therefore treated with some mistrust both inside the university and,
more especially, outside it. During his years of exile in America, he had
undoubtedly acquired the necessary qualifications for such a post, and
he had a number of publications to prove it. It was as a sociologist that
he became a key figure in resurrecting the Institute of Social Research.
With Horkheimer’s withdrawal to Montagnola in Switzerland in 1958
on the grounds of age, Adorno became sole director of the institute. In
practice the main burden of directing the institute had rested on his
shoulders from its inception.
During his first few years in Germany, Adorno was able to harvest
the fruits of his labours on American soil. He had long since completed
his first books in draft form – The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949),
Minima Moralia (1951), In Search of Wagner (1952) and, finally, the
collection of essays in Prisms (1955) and Against Epistemology: A
Metacritique (1956). Some of these books had been partly written in
Oxford, but the majority were the products of his stay on the East and