Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 359Just as Adorno had referred to his own experience of a car accident
in 1928 by way of illustrating the grotesque in Kafka, so here he recalled
an episode from childhood: playing in no man’s land. The absence of a
‘position’ in Beckett’s drama, as well as its ambivalence towards the
historical demise of the subject, its reduction to itself, is a sort of ‘fun’,
‘the way it might have been fun to hang around the border markers
between Baden and Bavaria in old Germany as though they encom-
passed the realm of freedom. Endgame takes place in a neutral zone
between the inner and the outer, between the materials without which
no subjectivity could express itself or even exist.’^173 Adorno’s interest
in Beckett went well beyond his plays, as can be seen from his half-
implemented decision to write about The Unnameable, the novel that is
concerned with the dissolution of the identity of a man who lives in a
flowerpot, reduced to his own language: ‘That’s... all words, there’s
nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop,
I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the
silence, for a moment, a good few moments.’^174 In a letter of May 1952
to the poet Werner Kraft, a friend of Benjamin’s in his youth,^175 he
wrote that he ‘had read the novel almost feverishly.... I sketched out
an interpretation while I was still reading it... You absolutely must
read it, although you need good nerves for it – in comparison, Kafka’s
Penal Colony reads like The Indian Summer.’^176 He evidently possessed
good nerves himself, since he noted down his own impressions and
ideas on the seven preliminary leaves of the German edition of 1959.^177
On page 3, for example, he noted that ‘criticism of Beckett amounts to
the statement that that’s really terrible, things can’t be like that. Reply:
It is terrible.’ Or, ‘“drop out”. It would be important to know when the
word first appeared; an index of Beckett’s historical significance. What
Beckett does is to compose variations on this word [auskomponieren].’^178
An important contribution to the debate on Beckett in Germany was
provided by the television discussion of the film version of a French
production of two of his plays – Comédie and Film – with Buster Keaton
and directed by Alan Schneider. Shortly before it, Adorno had met
Beckett in Paris and went from there on 17 January 1968 to the studio
in Cologne. In the course of this extremely lively live discussion Adorno
was able to articulate some of the elements of his view that had already
appeared in print:
These human stumps, that is to say, these people who have actu-
ally lost their selves, really are the products of the world we live
in. It is not Beckett who has reduced them to what they are
for speculative reasons of his own, but he is, to put it pointedly,
realistic in the sense that, in these figures who are both just stumps
and also something universal, he is the accurate interpreter of
what individual people are capable of as the mere functions of
a universal social totality. He is the photographer of a society in