378 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
König just as he did with Arnold Gehlen in the 1960s. He took part in a
radio discussion with Elias Canetti, and also with Karl Kerényi, Lotte
Lenya, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Hellmut Becker. The people he
invited to give lectures at the institute included Wolfgang Abendroth,
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Herbert Marcuse.
With all these efforts, whose tactical side he despised, Adorno was
nevertheless quite unwilling to compromise his own views. This can be
seen from his attitude to the proposed appointment of Arnold Gehlen,
the right-wing intellectual, to a chair in Heidelberg. In 1958, when this
was on the agenda, Adorno and Horkheimer both objected to the ap-
pointment of Gehlen, who had been a Nazi sympathizer. In April of
that year, they wrote a report^51 in which they pointed out that, even
though Gehlen was no doubt extraordinarily talented, there was a cer-
tain continuity in his thinking. On the one hand, they objected to the
way in which he deduced the necessity of an authoritarian society from
human nature, from certain anthropological constants. On the other
hand, he endorsed a conception of power that closely resembled the
interpretation of Nietzsche favoured by the Nazis. Gehlen was unaware
of the existence of this report so that as far as he was concerned there
was no obstacle to the personal relationship between him and Adorno
that did not begin until the early 1960s. Although Adorno found Gehlen’s
conservative theory of institutions unacceptable, and although he made
no secret of that fact, he valued him as a debating partner and made
efforts to keep on good terms with him personally. The position was
very different with Golo Mann, who had applied for a chair in political
science at Frankfurt in 1963. Horkheimer had objected to a lecture that
Mann had given to the Rhein-Ruhr-Klub in summer 1960 and sub-
sequently published. In it he warned Germans not simply to exchange
anti-Semitism for philo-Semitism. He went so far as to inquire into the
historical truth of anti-Semitic cliches. Furthermore, he gave it as his
view that the hostility of Weimar intellectuals towards politics had been
a contributory factor in the demise of the republic and Hitler’s victory.^52
For his part, Adorno had been aware since his time in Pacific Palisades
that Golo Mann had been critical of him: Mann disliked his style of
writing and rejected Minima Moralia because of what he saw as its
clever-clever manner. This made it easy for Adorno to endorse
Horkheimer’s opposition to Mann. In the crucial faculty meeting he
voted against Mann, who was the favourite for the post, and this helped
to ensure that instead of the famous historian the position would be
offered to Iring Fetscher, the young political scientist who enjoyed the
support of both Adorno and Horkheimer.^53 Adorno’s sympathies were
never determined simply by the extent of his political or ideological
agreement with someone, even though he never failed to make a pre-
cise assessment of the people with whom he chose to become more
closely acquainted. His relations with Arnold Gehlen were significant
in this respect. Gehlen had first been invited by Horkheimer to give a