590 Notes to pp. 406– 407
209 Letter from Carla Henius to Adorno, 18 May 1961, Theodor W. Adorno
Archive, Frankfurt am Main (Br 592/36).
210 Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1936–1966, vol. 1,
p. 843f.
211 See Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, p. 473.
212 See Scholem, Briefe, vol. III, pp. 85 and 335; also vol. II, p. 156; cf. Sigrid
Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann, p. 6ff.
213 See Adorno and Lenk, Briefwechsel, p. 12ff.
214 On 29 March 1956, Adorno wrote to Alfred Andersch that after his return
from America he felt overwhelmed by Paris, and in particular ‘by the way
in which when you return home late at night in Paris you hear the echo
of your own steps on the pavement – a sound that is quite inconceiv-
able in America. And this led me to the reflection that the difference
between New York and Paris was far greater than between Paris and
Amorbach.... This was an observation I made when returning home very
late at night from the home of my friend René Leibowitz on the quai
Voltaire, to the Hotel Lutétia on boulevard Raspail’ (Adorno to Andersch,
29 March 1956, Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main [Br 24/
46]). Adorno later worked this experience into his essay on Amorbach.;
cf. ‘Amorbach’, GS, vol. 10.1, p. 304.
215 Adorno started work on the German-language version of the lectures at
the end of 1960. At that time, he completed the lecture on ‘Ontological
Need’ and also the second one on ‘Being and Existence’. The notes on the
third lecture, on Negative Dialectics, were probably finished by the time
he was due to travel on 13 March 1961. The French-language versions
were produced by Gabrielle Wittkop-Ménardeau, and were given the
titles: ‘Le besoin ontologique’, ‘Être et existence’ and ‘Vers une dialectique
négative’.
216 See Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Editorische Nachbemerkung’, Adorno, Ontologie
und Dialektik, NaS, vol. 7, p. 426. After the lectures at the Collège de
France, the Adornos flew on to Rome, where he lectured on questions of
the aesthetics of music and, at the request of Franco Lombardi, repeated
two of the Paris lectures.
217 See Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, and ‘Musik zwischen
Geschäft und Unwahrheit’.
218 See Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’, ‘Can One Live After Auschwitz?’, p. 370;
see also Christine Eichel, Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung
der Künste.
219 Helms’s ‘FA: M’AHNIESGWOW’ is a very difficult, more or less
untranslatable piece of hermetic prose in the tradition of experimental
modernism. Both Adorno and Stefan Müller-Doohm refer to it in the
same context as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, by which it was no doubt
influenced [trans.].
220 Eichel comments that Adorno’s examination of Helms ‘leads among
other things to his abandoning the old concept of the avant-garde and
this crucially influenced Adorno’s attitude towards the newer forms of
modernism’ (Eichel, Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung der
Künste, p. 141); cf. Peter Bürger, Das Altern der Moderne, and Theorie der
Avantgarde.
221 Adorno, ‘Presuppositions’, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 97.