With his Back to the Wall 477that his writings ‘had ever supplied the model for any acts or political
actions whatever’. Nevertheless, it was indisputable that, ‘if you teach
and publish for twenty years with the intensity I have shown, something
will certainly enter into public consciousness.’^141 He noted that ‘the mis-
match between theory and practice today consists in the circumstance
that theory is subject to censorship exercised in the name of practice.
For example, people want to forbid me to say quite simple things that
would expose the illusory nature of many of the political aims of certain
students.’ Adorno emphasized that, despite all the necessary critical
debate with the catastrophic philosophy of direct action, a philosophy
to be ascribed to the ‘despair’ at the fact ‘that people feel how little
power they have’, the urgently needed university reform would never
have got off the ground but for the student protest. ‘I believe that the
general attention now being paid to the dumbing-down processes that
prevail in present-day society would never have emerged without the
student movement.’^142 On 12 June, some seven weeks after the happen-
ing, Adorno resumed his lectures. However, there were further disrup-
tions, and he decided to cancel his lectures for the rest of the semester
while persevering only with his philosophy seminar. He wrote to the
dean to say that his lectures had been disrupted by Hans Imhoff and
Arno Widmann, students familiar in the Frankfurt ‘scene’ at the time.
Given the situation, it had not been possible, he said, to discover from
the majority of students whether they wished the lectures to continue.^143
Adorno made no secret of the bitter disappointment he felt as aresult
of this new assault aimed at him personally. He also felt oppressed by
the additional burden of having to appear at the magistrates’ court as a
witness against Hans-Jürgen Krahl, one of his doctoral students. Adorno
stressed once again that he had perceived the group of students as
occupiers. This produced a scornful reaction on the part of many of the
students who followed the proceedings and he was well aware of this.
A few days after he decided to abandon his lectures he admitted in a
letter to Marcuse that he was ‘in a phase of extreme depression’. One of
the many reasons for this was that Marcuse made a point of refusing to
sit down and discuss the situation privately with his Frankfurt friends,
Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas.^144 In particular he blamed Adorno
for the fact that the institute as it was then was not the institute as it had
been. ‘You know as well as I the essential difference between the work
the institute did in the 1930s and the work it is doing in present-day
Germany. The qualitative difference is not one that arises from the
development of theory.. ..But our (old) theory had an inner political
content, an inner political dynamic that calls more urgently today than
ever before for a concrete political position.’^145 Adorno rejected this
criticism and rather helplessly attempted to show by drawing up a list of
successful research projects that the critical tradition was still alive and
well in the institute and that its concrete work was not being swayed by
the influence of its financial sponsors. ‘I believe that, if one is mindful of
the difficulties with which the institute has had to contend our wholelife