Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 415

was at odds with the critical tradition which, after all, he embodied.’^15
The same thing applied to Adorno, who at the time adopted the same
‘us and them’ attitudes that Horkheimer displayed for public consump-
tion, such as when he observed to Adorno that ‘it was almost self-
evident that pluralist societies were not equal to the challenge of the
savage barbarism of the East with all its pomp and circumstance.’^16
Adorno and Horkheimer were in agreement in their assessment of the
so-called Eastern bloc, i.e., the Soviet Union, but also communist China.
Thus they objected to Khrushchev on the grounds of the cult of person-
ality, his destruction of human beings, and his treachery. Against this
background, they constantly emphasized their fundamental disagree-
ment with the ‘dialectical materialism’ of the Eastern bloc parties. As
critics of society, ‘they would long since have been killed’, they remark
in a letter to Herbert Marcuse, who had referred to them as ‘the task-
masters of the East’. ‘Whereas’, they continue, ‘in the West there is at
the moment a freedom of thought which in comparison can only be
described as paradisal. That this has material grounds is no news to us.
It is well known that freedom of every kind depends on them.’^17
This fundamental attitude also determined Adorno’s cautious reac-
tion when Alfred Sohn-Rethel wrote to him after a gap of fourteen
years, announcing his return to Frankfurt and proposing a meeting. He
intended to combine this trip with a visit to East Berlin, where he had
been invited to give a lecture at the Humboldt University. For Adorno,
this latter fact was enough to prevent him from issuing an invitation to
Sohn-Rethel to speak at the institute. He warned him that his lecture
would be used by the GDR ‘for propaganda purposes’, ‘while every
idea that you wish to express will be condemned to total impotence in
the face of the ineffably servile vulgar materialism of the secretarial
mind that prevails there. Here, for the time being, one can tell a great
deal of the truth, at least in individual work of one’s own. Over there,
that is quite impossible.’^18
Even if Adorno was generally reluctant to become involved inpolitical
pronouncements and demonstrations, he continued to follow political
developments in Germany and the world very attentively. As he wrote
to Horkheimer, who between 1954 and 1959 had a guest professorship
at the University of Chicago and hence lived there for longer periods,
‘It is frightening to see how everything is becoming gloomier. I expect
you will have picked up something of what is going on here. The fact
that we predicted it does not make it any better. Moreover, these new
developments are not just a matter of domestic German politics, but
very much what the new German term calls “global”; and I have the
feeling that it really does not matter any more where one happens to
be, so that at least one has a good rationalization to hand to justify
staying wherever one feels most at home.’^19 The news that wassupposed
to have reached Horkheimer concerned the growing tensions between
the opposing military blocs following the crushing of the uprising in