Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 355- they have none – but because they try to get justice on their side.’^139
In July, when Adorno offered his Kafka essay to Rudolf Hirsch,^140
the editor of the Neue Rundschau, he wrote to him saying that he had
a special relationship with it. And later, in the letter accompanying the
finished text, he added: ‘To be honest, it is the first time in my life that
I have the feeling that I have written something that more or less corres-
ponds to what I must expect of myself.’^141 Even if some of Adorno’s
readers were familiar with his prose, they may have found it as hard to
read these ‘Notes on Kafka’ as some of his other contributions to the
magazine, notably his essay ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ of the same year
and the essay on Schoenberg written in 1952, shortly after the com-
poser’s death. Adorno admitted to Scholem in a letter in January 1954
that he did not exactly go out of his way to make his readers’ job easy.
He explained that, although his own basic position was made explicit in
the ‘Notes on Kafka’, he ‘had operated on the “Landjäger” principle’,
by which he meant that it was like a ‘Landjäger’ sausage, tightly stuffed
and hence very compact.^142 Kracauer seems not to have been disturbed
by the density of the prose. He wrote to Adorno at the end of August
1954, saying that it was one of his best pieces. He had greatly approved
of Adorno’s insisting on the need to take Kafka literally and, in particu-
lar, ‘Your leitmotif that Kafka understands the “system” from its own
waste... , his consistent intuition that power has to be allowed to declare
itself.’^143
His essay collection Prisms was published by Suhrkamp in 1955 in an
edition of 2000 copies. However, the particular importance of the Kafka
essay in his own eyes was obscured by the presence of the other essays.
As a whole, the book was given a predominantly positive reception
from a series of prominent critics such as Peter Merseburger, Thilo
Koch, Rudolf Hartung, Ivo Frenzel, Hans Kudszus and Walther
Friedländer.^144 Even if the volume did not arouse the same interest as
Minima Moralia, it was still a success. Eight years later, it was reissued
as one of the 200 initial volumes of the Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag,
but now in an edition of 40,000 copies. Adorno announced the publication
of Prisms to Baroness Dora von Bodenhausen, to whom he explained
the meaning of the title: Prisms ‘means that the world is perceived
through a medium, namely the various objectifications treated in it,
which are then brought to the point of transparency.’^145 Adorno was
now becoming known as ‘a thinker who helps to define the scope of
legitimate intellectual discourse’.^146 No less a figure than Thomas Mann
noted that Adorno had become established in Germany and had been
able to gain acceptance for ‘his critical style’. ‘I have not only read your
fantasy about Kafka... It is only now becoming clear that when you
were in America you were half-mute, and that Europe has vastly
increased your productivity by opening up quite different opportunities
for it. There really does seem to be something like a “motus animi
continuus” at work.’^147