With his Back to the Wall 461ovations. He made straight for the microphone, and just as he reached
it, he ducked past and shot into the philosophy seminar. In short, once
again, on the threshold of practice, he retreated into theory.’^61 In the
course of further discussions, the student leaders complained because
Adorno had not joined in the march on Bonn to protest against the
emergency laws. He replied, inter alia, that ‘I do not know if elderly
gentlemen with a paunch are the right people to take part in a demon-
stration.’^62 Adorno found the whole event and its consequences some-
what depressing. He regretted the waste of time that he could have used
much more profitably in other activities. He felt, he wrote to Szondi, as
if he no longer had his feet on the ground, a ‘state of mind such as
occurs with normal people only under the influence of drugs. I am only
thankful that I have no need of them.’^63
The day following the discussion Günter Grass accused Adorno, first
in a talk and then in a letter, of being far too opportunistic. Grass
thought that Adorno was obviously afraid of the rebels even though
some of them were his own students.^64 Adorno sent Grass a polite
but firm letter in reply, denying that he lacked courage. He was firmly
resolved, he said, ‘not to let himself be browbeaten into what for years
now I have called the principle of unilateral solidarity.’ At the same
time, Adorno tried to clarify his political stance more precisely. It was
determined by the wish to avoid becoming a renegade. ‘To distance
myself publicly from the APO. ..would make me look like a renegade
even though everything I have written makes clear that I have nothing
in common with the students’ narrow-minded direct action strategies
which are already degenerating into an abominable irrationalism. In
truth, it is they who have changed their position rather than I mine.’ He
went on to tell Grass, whose own commitment was to the SPD, that he
hesitated to issue a statement attacking the SDS, which ‘had become
the victim of its own publicity’, because he did not wish to join ‘the
platform of the German reactionaries’ in their witch-hunt of the New
Left. His letter concluded, ‘I increasingly see it as my task simply to say
what I think without taking anyone else into consideration. This goes
together with a mounting aversion to practical politics of whatever kind,
an aversion in which my natural disposition and the objective futility of
practical action at this moment of history coincide.’^65
These very decided comments in his letter to Grass were not the
product of ideas that simply occurred to him on the spot. They were
based on detailed notes that served to help him give a principled
account of the relations of theory and practice.
His declared aim was ‘to produce a consciousness of theory and prac-
tice that neither divides the two such that theory becomes powerless
and practice becomes arbitrary’,^66 nor posits either as a ‘simple iden-
tity’. In particular, he opposed the student postulate of the unity of
theory and practice by postulating a dialectical interaction of theoretical
reflection and practical commitment. This seemed to him to beabsolutely