Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 409information about the modern film, Kluge was the man he consulted. He
explained his own idea of a good film, vague though it was, with reference
to the colourful images of the landscape that the inner eye of a sleeper
might glimpse in a state of relaxation: ‘images of an interior monologue’
that come to resemble writing when they stop moving. ‘As the objectify-
ing re-creation of this type of experience, film may become art.’^226
Although in general Adorno despised film as a medium and dis-
missed it as phantasmagoria, Kluge could not help but be impressed by
Adorno’s criticism, though not to the point where he stopped making
films. Nevertheless, he was less impressed by Adorno’s theses on the
aesthetics of film than by his interpretation of Bizet’s opera Carmen,
the ‘Fantasia sopra Carmen’ which he published in the Neue Rundschau
with a dedication to Thomas Mann. In that essay, Adorno described
Carmen as the prototype of ‘those operas of exogamy which begin with
La Juive and L’Africaine and proceed via Aida, Lakmé, and Butterfly to
Berg’s Lulu. All of them celebrate eruptions from civilization into the
unknown.’^227 And the exotic woman who turns men’s heads must die of
such love, a lethal conclusion on which opera insists – that is how Kluge
saw the genre in his ‘Imaginary Guide to Opera’.^228 This project of an
‘imaginary guide to opera’ is undoubtedly one that could have counted
on Adorno’s sympathy since opera was one of his own private passions,
one ‘he surrendered to unconditionally’.^229
Another friendship was with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the writer,
whom Adorno had known since the 1950s. He had met him through
Alfred Andersch in the Evening Studio of South-West German Radio.
In a letter of July 1962, Adorno acknowledged that they shared ‘similar
intellectual temperaments’ and, years before, he had not only sent
Enzensberger little commentaries on his own philosophical writings, but
also made no secret of his horror at the state of postwar German philo-
sophy. Remarkably, he felt it necessary to justify his own willingness
to work for the radio: ‘It would just be pig-headed, and a piece of the
cultural conservatism that only benefits the culture industry, to reject
the mass media in favour of handmade paper.... if anywhere, it is here
that the Brechtian concept of “changing functions” [Umfunktionieren]
has its place.... I think of myself as anything but defeatist.’^230 The
contact between them increased when Enzensberger came to live in
Frankfurt for a time, working as an editor for Suhrkamp along with
Karl Markus Michel and Walter Boehlich. In fact, he lived opposite
Adorno and could see over to the latter’s apartment from his kitchen
balcony. One day, when Kluge was visiting him, Adorno told him that
Enzensberger was living opposite, adding that ‘he was the only one able
to write poetry. He did not think that any of the other poets in the
Gruppe 47 were worthy of mention.’^231 Adorno particularly liked the
two volumes of verse Verteidigung der Wölfe (In Defence of the Wolves)
(1957) and Landessprache (The Language of the Country) (1960), as
well as the anthology of modern poetry Museum der modernen Poesie