Adorno

With his Back to the Wall 457

Patricide deferred

The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has the

virtue of being a surprise.^37

In the course of 1968, Adorno’s statements on student demands, as well
as the go-ins, teach-ins, happenings and provocations, tended to be-
come sharper in tone. ‘The only thing to say otherwise is that I am
gradually becoming sick and tired of student affairs. Especially here
because here – and the same thing holds good for Habermas and
Friedeburg – we are all coming to the conclusion that the students are
just manipulating us – it’s a case of patricide deferred.’^38 He wrote in a
similar vein to Elisabeth Lenk a few days later. The long-drawn-out
debates with the students had something paradoxical about them.
‘Habermas, Friedeburg, Mitscherlich and I, as well as one or two others,
constitute an increasingly small oppositional minority, but find ourselves
attacked by the students... with their calls for direct action. We have
nothing standing behind us, but on the other hand, this seems to be the
way it has to be.’^39
Patricide of a different sort was how Adorno regarded the initiative
launched principally by the magazine alternative. Adorno was far more
deeply hurt by this than by the spectacular events at the university. For,
very much to his surprise, he found himself accused of having subjected
Benjamin to pressure during his years in exile in Paris and of having
proceeded selectively in compiling the two-volume edition of Writings
in 1955 and the Letters in 1966^40 in order to suppress Benjamin’s turning
to Marxism.^41 After Hannah Arendt^42 and Helmut Heißenbüttel had
given a critical account of Adorno’s practice as editor and of his rela-
tions with Benjamin in the Merkur,^43 Wolfram Schütte publicized the
controversy once again in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 19 January. He
reiterated the criticism of Adorno and called for a response from the
editor of the Writings as well as from Suhrkamp Verlag. For it appeared
that Adorno’s personal integrity and his integrity as a scholar were now
in question.^44 Adorno made no attempt to avoid controversy but met it
head-on in alternative, not indeed as an open letter, but in the form
of an article, the fee for which he proposed to donate to the Berlin
Republican Club as a contribution to its legal fighting fund. In this
‘Interim Judgement’^45 he explained the criteria that had determined his
choice of texts for this anthology of Benjamin’s writings. Furthermore,
he rejected outright the assertion that he and Benjamin had ever been
at loggerheads, and he attempted to demonstrate that the letters showed
that the discussions they had had were always comradely. He also
rejected the allegation that he was monopolizing the Benjamin Archive,
which was located in the Institute of Social Research:^46 ‘I have done
nothing apart from making sure that the material was all kept together.’
He finished by saying that ‘The slanderous nature of the accusations