Notes to pp. 328–330 5653 See Christoph Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung; Norbert Frei,
Vergangenheitspolitik; Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte.
4 The intellectual climate, the specific tone of the age that Adorno called
‘the Heidegger fashion’, has been ably captured, right down to and includ-
ing the aesthetics of everyday life, by Christoph Marthaler in his play
Stunde Null oder Die Kunst des Servierens: Ein Gedenktraining für
Führungskräfte (Zero Hour, or, The Art of Serving: Memory Training for
Managers). In this he makes use of Ernst Wiechert’s ‘Speech to German
Youth’, Hans Leip’s ‘Address to Young Poets’, the declarations of con-
cerned politicians of East and West, but also Thomas Mann’s radio talks
to Germany during the war. (Ernst Wiechert and Hans Leip were writers
who were in some ways close to National Socialism. Wiechert’s books
were recommended reading for young people, though Wiechert himself
served a term in Buchenwald concentration camp. Leip, a writer of popular
fiction and sentimental poems, is best known as the author of Lili Marleen
[trans.].)
5 Horkheimer travelled to Europe in spring 1948. He spent a few weeks
in Frankfurt in order to discuss with the university authorities the
re-establishment of the Institute of Social Research, which had been
destroyed in the war. In a letter to his wife, he described what he felt
when he first met his former colleagues: ‘I was respectfully welcomed by
the rector [Franz Böhm] and the two deans [Otto Vossler of the Arts
Faculty and Erich Gutenberg of Social Sciences] and others. They were all
as sweet as pie, smooth as eels and hypocritical. They are not sure whether
to regard me as a relatively influential American tourist or as the brother
of their victims who is bent on remembering the past. They will have to
choose the latter....I attended a faculty meeting yesterday and found it
too friendly by half and enough to make you want to throw up. All these
people sit there as they did before the Third Reich... just as if nothing had
happened....They are acting out a Ghost Sonata that leaves Strindberg
standing’ (Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 17, pp. 976 and 980).
6 Ibid., vol. 18, p. 35.
7 Adorno, ‘Im Flug erhascht’, GS, vol. 20.2, p. 548.
8 Adorno to Else Herzberger, 8 February 1950, Theodor W. Adorno Archive,
Frankfurt am Main (Br 613/4). Adorno tried to help his friend and former
co-author Carl Dreyfus, who was living in Buenos Aires, with both advice
and practical assistance on compensation issues. As late as October 1955,
Adorno wrote to Dreyfus to say that he (Adorno) had still not received
any money for what he had lost through his dismissal from the university.
Two years later, he wrote that he had still not received compensation for
the money his father had had to pay as a ‘Jew tax’ and the ‘tax on leaving
the Reich’ when he had emigrated from Germany in 1939. Adorno to
Dreyfus, 29 September 1957 and 12 January 1962, Theodor W. Adorno
Archive, Frankfurt am Main (Br 331/3/4/9/13).
9 The present author owes this information to Hartmut Wolf, who lived in
the house in Oberrad as a tenant for a long time after the war.
10 Walter Dirks (1901–91) was a politically active left-wing Catholic who
published the Frankfurter Hefte together with Eugen Kogon after the war.
The journal debated the question of how to come to terms with the past
and discussed pan-European politics in the spirit of a humanist, libertarian