Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 413

On 14 February 1955, Max Horkheimer celebrated his seventieth
birthday. His position had become more or less impregnable by that
time since he was one of the most highly respected and best-known
scholars in the Federal Republic. This was an appropriate occasion for
his friend and co-director to publish an appreciation in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. This provided a kind of speeded-up overview of
Horkheimer’s contributions to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and
the Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, his activities as director
of the institute and his books, the Studies in Prejudice, the Critique of
Instrumental Reason and the Dialectic of Enlightenment. But what
Horkheimer actually stood for ‘went far beyond his objective works.
For he mistrusted such things as works at a historical moment in which
scarcely any idea has a right to exist unless its innermost meaning strives
to be put into effect.. ..He never abandoned his hope that things would
turn out well, and he acted responsibly in that conviction.’^6 This maxim
is one Adorno might have chosen for himself.
In the same year, 1955, Thomas Mann died at the age of eighty in
Kilchberg on Lake Zurich. Adorno heard the news in the Hotel
Waldhaus in Sils Maria, where he was spending the summer vacation.
He at once wrote to Mann’s widow: ‘I do not know what to say – the
blow is paralysing. Only this, which perhaps can only be said in such a
moment: I loved him very, very dearly.’^7
Adorno was an acute observer of current events, and he watched
them with great scepticism and reserve. His comments on German and
international politics are highly critical, in so far as they have been
recorded. For example, he was afraid that official West German politi-
cians were reluctant for the most part to take energetic measures to
prevent the spread of fascist groups.^8 Towards the end of 1956, when
France and Britain launched a military assault on Egypt and an article
in Der Spiegel attacked the way the United Nations had condemned
their invasion, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote to the writer Julius
Ebbinghaus, agreeing with Der Spiegel.^9

The fact that people have discovered humanity when faced by a

fascist chieftain like Nasser who conspires with Moscow; that, as

in Hitler’s time, they show greater concern about breaking treaties

than about the treaties themselves and their sanctity; and that no

one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have

been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon

Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there – all

this is a symptom of public consciousness that has to be taken very

seriously indeed. The hypocrisy.. .in almost every camp is proof

of a confusion of thought that bodes ill for the future.^10

Against the background of a widespread anti-communist climate in
West German society, the conservative CDU/CSU was highlysuccessful