Notes to pp. 415– 417 59318 Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, p. 120 and also p. 127. In the
event, Sohn-Rethel’s experience was quite different from what Adorno
had predicted. The select audience in East Berlin to whom he expounded
his efforts to derive the forms of thought from the commodity form
understood him perfectly. ‘I can best give you an idea of the nature of the
discussion if I tell you that criticism was directed not at my thesis but
simply focused on the exclusive nature of the true economic root. This is
because, depending on that, it will be possible to decide whether we will
be able to hope that the disappearance of a commodity economy will lead
to the elimination of the antagonism between intellectual and manual
labour. And unless that opposition does disappear, there can be no classless
society. In my opinion, it is the conditions of the liquidation of democracy
that are at stake’ (Sohn-Rethel to Adorno, 9 November 1958, ibid.,
p. 129f.). Relations between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel were broken off –
though, as Adorno emphasized, this breach was not politically motivated
- and were not resumed until the beginning of 1962, when they continued
until Adorno’s death.
19 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 387.
20 Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung:
Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail, vol. 1, p. 134ff.
21 Ibid., p. 139; see also Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Protestchronik 1949–1959,
vol. 3, p. 1889ff.
22 Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy?’, Critical Models, p. 6.
23 Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, vol. 1,
p. 110. Seven years later, Adorno gave the article as a talk on Hessen
Radio with the now definitive title of ‘Why Still Philosophy?’, and
published the text in the Merkur. See Adorno, ‘Why still Philosophy?’,
Critical Models, pp. 3–17.
24 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, pp. 441 and 444. What Horkheimer
objected to was that Habermas had lacked the minimal sense of respons-
ibility that could reasonably be expected even from a dissident. His
constantly reiterated commitment to revolution in his article ‘On the
Philosophical Debate about Marx and Marxism’ was not just a sign of
political blindness, but ‘promoted the affairs of the gentlemen in the East’
and thus ‘played into the hands of potential fascists at home’. Ibid.
25 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Eine Generation von Adorno getrennt’, p. 49.
26 Adorno to Horkheimer, 25 October 1957, Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS,
vol. 18, p. 399.
27 Ibid., p. 397.
28 Ibid., p. 448.
29 In the 1961 elections, the CDU/CSU suffered a loss of support. Adenauer
was forced to resign as federal chancellor in 1963 by pressure from within
his own party. He was succeeded by Ludwig Erhard, the previous minister
of economics, who was himself brought down by the first major recession
of the postwar period. To revive both the economy and the government, a
Grand Coalition was formed in December 1966, in which Georg Kiesinger,
who had previously been prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, became
federal chancellor, and Willy Brandt, who up until then had been chair-
man of the SPD and mayor of West Berlin, was made vice-chancellor and
foreign minister.