36 Part I: Origins
council in March 1919, of the ninety-six seats, the majority Social
Democratic Party received thirty-six, the USPD (Independent Socialists)
eight, the Democratic Party twenty-three, the Catholic Centre Party thir-
teen, the Deutsche Volkspartei nine, the German National Party five
and the Middle Class Alliance two.^40 The traditions of St Paul’s Church
in Frankfurt might be thought to have made it the ideal location for the
Constituent Assembly,^41 but in the event the government of the Reich
opted for the small town of Weimar in central Germany. Undaunted by
this affront, the citizens of Frankfurt decided to take advantage of their
favoured geographical position as a trade centre. A mere eleven months
after the end of the war, the city witnessed the opening of the Frankfurt
International Fair, and none other than the Reich president, Friedrich
Ebert, was welcomed at the opening ceremony by Ludwig Landmann, a
town councillor and subsequently mayor.
When the document authorizing the Weimar Constitution was finally
signed on 11 August 1919, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno was just four
weeks short of his sixteenth birthday. This was a time when he was
reading with fascination The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács.
This book, which had appeared only shortly before, was a philosophic-
ally orientated tract inspired by Hegel’s objective idealism. Lukács
was a Hungarian philosopher who became an orthodox Marxist soon
after the publication of the Theory of the Novel. He had a significant
influence on Adorno’s intellectual development, even though in later
years fundamental disagreements were to open up between them. Lukács
had begun by attempting to marry Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money
and Max Weber’s analysis of capitalism with the philosophy of Karl
Marx. Later on, he was concerned with the synthesis of Hegel and Marx
on the basis of a dialectical materialist philosophy of history. At the
heart of his influential book History and Class Consciousness of 1922
lay the proletariat, which was regarded as the identical subject-object of
world history, as well as such concepts as ‘reification’ and Marx’s notion
of ‘commodity fetishism’. According to Lukács, the solution to all the
problems of the development of society was to be found in the riddle of
the commodity form, which led to a reified structure of consciousness
for every member of society.^42
Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, a book that appeared in 1918, had
a similar value for the young Adorno, who described it later as the
author’s magnum opus. In this book Bloch explores the idea of yearn-
ing as the foundation of a messianic design of history. He called his
utopia ‘concrete’ because according to Marx’s history of philosophy the
proletariat was defined as the active agent of historical change. It was
concrete, moreover, because it undertook to explore the art, music and
painting of the West, as well as the works of popular culture, in search
of the image of a society free from domination.^43 The enthusiasm the
seventeen-year-old Adorno felt on reading Bloch comes through even
in retrospect: