40 Part I: Origins
itself truthful. This glorified individual was said to confront a world
which he rejected as degenerate, alien and depraved. The expres-
sionist gesture that viewed individual experience as a reflection of the
whole world was false. ‘The symptom of the ultimate untruthfulness of
expressionism is the disintegration of realities – the world robbed of
its reality becomes a plaything in the hands of one who takes it up only
for the sake of duality and not to explore its meaning through this
duality.’^51 What Adorno articulates here, albeit in a fairly rudimentary
way, is the idea that art is not confined either to the realm of the
beautiful or to the expression of an artist’s personality. Instead, it claims
to express the truth, and this is the source of its ethical power. Whether
or not a work of art satisfies this claim to truth is to be measured in
the first instance not by the contents or the political message of, for
example, a play, or by the world-views of its protagonists, but by what is
expressed through the artistic form of the work. This aesthetic form has
to be embedded in the historical state of development of the artistic
material. Only by such means can an artist overcome the limitations of
his own self and give artistic shape to typical realities lying beyond the
individual.
Adorno sharply criticized the literary forms of late expressionism
as typified by such works as Reinhard Sorge’s play Der Bettler (The
Beggar) because here too the literary subject matter was derived from
the suffering individual and his personal ideological conflicts. At the
same time, he objected to Fritz von Unruh, a writer who enjoyed great
esteem in Frankfurt, because in his play Platz he had failed to portray
his characters’ individuality as rooted in their historical context. On the
contrary, they simply embodied abstract ideas, something scarcely com-
patible with the erotic obsessions that Unruh had foregrounded.
Because the author is too weak to turn the hero into the bearer of
a historical event on the basis of his own egotistic erotic fixation,
because he necessarily fears that the pettiness of his content may
cause him to appear trivial and commonplace against the sharply
chiselled forms of a background historically articulated in any way,
he lets his drama drift in a mist of an irony distant from reality.... Hence the drama lacks any possibility of crystallization; no
artistically convincing form emerges from it.^52
In tune with this opinion, and with striking self-confidence, Adorno
ends up on this note: ‘One will have to ask oneself whether Fritz von
Unruh is to continue being taken seriously as an artist.’^53
This uncompromising sentence may explain why Adorno’s review
was not published at the time, unlike his essay on expressionism. After
all, following the production of the pacifist play Ein Geschlecht (A
Generation) in the Frankfurt Theatre towards the end of the war,
Unruh had been regarded as the outstanding representative voice of the