With his Back to the Wall 459He made similar complaints to Benjamin’s son, Stefan, who was living
in London and who at once identified with Adorno.^56
Adorno gave the matter a slightly different interpretation in a letter
to Gabriele Henkel, a member of the family of the Düsseldorf industri-
alist. He believed that the campaign against him expressed an ambival-
ence towards a father figure. People were disappointed by him as a
theoretician because he refused to involve himself in practical politics.^57
This comment referred of course to his disagreements with the student
movement, and on that front relations were going to deteriorate sharply.
In spring 1968, there had been an assassination attempt on the life of
Rudi Dutschke, the best known of the spokesmen of the SDS. This
attempt had been made the day after the end of the sociologists’ confer-
ence in Frankfurt. Dutschke, who had become a public figure thanks to
his appearances in the media, had been gunned down on the street in
broad daylight in Berlin and critically injured by Josef Bachmann, a
man who had fallen under the influence of neo-Nazi ideas. This led to a
large number of demonstrations in the Easter holidays in various West
German cities. These demonstrations were directed in particular against
the Springer Press because the APO claimed there was a link between
the attempt on Dutschke’s life and the witch-hunt of the Springer
newspapers against the politically active students. Mass demonstrations
tried to prevent the distribution of Springer papers, especially the main
tabloid paper Das Bild. In Munich there were sustained confrontations
between around 50,000 demonstrators and 21,000 police, some of
them mounted, who fought them for days on end with truncheons and
water cannon. These battles resulted in the deaths of one student and
a photographer. At a special session of the Bundestag the minister
of the interior described the SDS as an organization hostile to the
constitution.
A few days later, Adorno signed an open appeal that was published
in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and which called for an inquiry into
the social reasons underlying the attempted assassination of Dutschke,
and in particular the manipulation of public opinion by the Springer
Press. On the other hand, he was unwilling to join in the programme
of the anti-authoritarian movement to increase the politicization of
academic scholarship, and also refused to allow his two-hour weekly
sociology seminar to be used for a discussion about how to block the
emergency laws. He insisted on his right to academic freedom and to
use the teaching time available to him exclusively for the topics that had
been announced, in other words, social theory. At the same time, he
criticized the custom of disrupting teaching and in his own sociology
lectures, which always attracted a huge audience, he went so far as to
ask the activist students directly to put a stop to their violent struggle
for university reform and social change.^58 Adorno made this criticism at
the end of his last lecture in July 1968, quite unaware that this was the
last lecture course he was destined to complete without disruption.