332 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
characteristic method of improvising on the basis of a few handwritten
keywords. Even though he told both Horkheimer and Kracauer how
excited he was by the interest shown by students, the detailed letters he
wrote to Thomas Mann in December 1949 and June 1950 tell a story
about the other side of the need to catch up for lost time. This was the
students’ apolitical focus on the seemingly intact world of pure spirit.
Thus he declared over the radio (and published in the May issue of the
Frankfurter Hefte) his belief that ‘Cultural activity in postwar Germany
has something of the dangerous and ambiguous consolation of being
embedded in a provincial cocoon.’^17 This was reminiscent of Max Frisch’s
idea of ‘culture as an alibi’, as an alibi for the absence of political
consciousness.
These theses, which Adorno had derived from his own personal ex-
perience, were written down during the brief Christmas vacation of
1949–50. In his lengthy letters to both Horkheimer and Thomas Mann
he evidently wished to try his ideas out in discussion. For Horkheimer
likewise had formed a definite impression of Germany, and so had
Thomas Mann, a view that was critical in the extreme. Between May
and August 1949 Mann had been engaged on a lecture tour in Europe
and had spent twelve days in Germany in order to give the main lecture
for the Goethe bicentenary celebrations in both Frankfurt and Weimar.^18
The tenor of what Adorno had to say in his letters to Mann was as
negative and critical as the report Mann himself published in October.
What emerged with particular clarity from the Nuremberg Trials, Adorno
wrote, was that the ‘unspeakable guilt’ of the Germans was simply
‘evaporating’. Hardly any Nazis were to be found in defeated Germany.
Not only did no one own up to having been a Nazi, but in addition
the Germans were convinced that ‘none of them had been.... I have
noticed that all those who identify with Hitlerism or the newly tinted
nationalism claim steadfastly that they had known nothing of the worst
things during the entire war – whereas those who were consciously
opposed confirm what the meanest intelligence tells us, namely that
everything was common knowledge since 1943.’^19 In contrast, in the
same letter he praised the level of the students who debated the most
difficult philosophical questions with passionate intensity. ‘The com-
parison with a Talmud school suggests itself; sometimes I feel as if the
spirit of the murdered Jews had entered the German intellectuals.’^20
What Adorno had experienced in this first period after his return
invited literary treatment. As in reality, so too in fiction: e.g., in the
novel The Old Friend by Kurt Mautz, Professor Amorelli ‘returns to
Frankfurt from exile in America’. The hero of the novel learns about
this and soon goes to see the philosophy lecturer in his consulting hours.
Amorelli
is delighted to see him, greets him as one of the twelve faithful
members of his first seminar and invites him to take part in his