With his Back to the Wall 455After Adorno refused to abandon the talk he had planned in favour
of a discussion of his attitude to this situation, a number of those present
left the hall under protest. The talk that he next gave contained state-
ments that may well have been meant as criticism of the behaviour of
the protesters. He refers there to ‘the dark secret of a revolution and an
allegedly emancipated consciousness’ and also to the fact that ‘human-
ity can become repression’, thus preventing the emergence of ‘full
humanness’.^27 In this sense, Peter Szondi, who in his welcoming speech
had described himself as a pupil of Adorno, was right in claiming that
Adorno would have less of a ‘classical’ nature to say about Goethe’s
Iphigenie than ‘those people wished to hear who go around quoting
Mao’s sayings in much the same way that their grandfathers quoted the
sayings of the Weimar “Greats”. But if I could choose a saying from
Adorno’s Minima Moralia it would be this one: “You can’t scare me.
And that’s how things should remain.”’^28
It was then widely reported in the media how, at the end of the
lecture, a student in a green mini-skirt tried to present Adorno with
a red teddy bear. This happening was one of the topics of conversation
in the house of the philosopher Wilhelm Weischedel, who had invited
Adorno and some other colleagues after the lecture. Adorno later
described what he called this ‘abusive behaviour’ as ‘exhausting’.^29
Nevertheless, outwardly at least, he tried to react calmly to the affront.
‘I have survived the entire nuisance without coming to any harm.
Au fond, it was not so bad as is claimed by the reactionaries who hope
to draw me over into their camp.’^30
Shortly after this incident, there was a meeting with representatives
of the Berlin SDS in the Republican Club, the centre of the APO in
Berlin. Adorno reported that the discussion was productive and the
atmosphere friendly.^31 A few weeks later there was a discussion
between Adorno and Szondi on ‘Student Unrest’ in the studio of West
German Radio. Here he explained that there were good reasons for the
protest movement as an international phenomenon extending from
Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Rome and Prague to San Francisco. He
‘accepted the student movement’s criticism of our university system’. It
was rightly claimed that the strict separation of individual disciplines
led to the neglect of specific subjects, for example, ‘the way in which the
basic structures of the economy and their dynamics determine the basic
structures of society.’ With regard to the students’ proposals for reform,
he suspected that often they just wanted to make studying easier. Such
a desire could not form a basis for reform. He himself would gladly
‘help anything that contributed to strengthening the intellectual energy
of the university’. He took the view that, on the one hand, ‘certain
archaic practices should be done away with,.. .on the other hand, other
archaic practices should be defended as refuges of the humane, of what
could not be fully absorbed by the machine.... I believe that there is
no possibility of using the university as a base from which to change