70 Part II: A Change of SceneSeven years before Adorno had embarked on his studies there, in
October 1914, teaching had begun in buildings in the Senckenberger
Anlage. In contrast to the state-funded universities, Frankfurt owed
its existence to the generosity of a number of wealthy citizens, Jewish
businessmen and bankers for the most part. They had been won over
for the project by the charismatic mayor, Franz Adickes.^1 Adickes was
able to rely on a broadly based civic culture that went back to the time
when Frankfurt was a free city and in which there was a strong tradition
of private sponsorship of public projects. Examples were the Senckenberg
Foundation, the Deutsche Hochstift, and the Jügel, Merton and Speyer
foundations. Wilhelm Merton, a businessman, had laid the groundwork
for the future university in 1896 when he set up the Institut für
Gemeinwohl in 1896. This was then absorbed into the Akademie für
Sozial- und Handelswissenschaften that Adickes founded in 1901. This
in turn became the nucleus of an unconventional project: the establish-
ment of a civic university based on private endowments. In the context
of the traditional Prussian university system this was entirely unpre-
cedented in Germany.^2
In the course of time this nonconformism served to attract a number
of scholars with socially critical views. They included Martin Buber, the
religious philosopher, Carl Grünberg, the Austro-Marxist economist,
Max Horkheimer, the social philosopher, the sociologists Karl Mannheim
and Franz Oppenheimer, philosophers such as Max Scheler and Paul
Tillich, and Hugo Sinzheimer, the sociologist of law. Under the leader-
ship of Walter Gerlach and Kurt Riezler during the Weimar Republic,
the university followed a culturally open-minded and democratic course
that was wholly in tune with the views of Ludwig Landmann, the mayor
who was in office from 1924: ‘As in the city in general at the time,
an invigorating, agile, alert spirit pervaded the university. Frankfurt’s
institutions flourished even though the town was sometimes reviled by
outsiders as liberal, democratic and “Jewish”.’^3 It was above all the
most recent disciplines, i.e., the social sciences, that benefited most from
this forward-looking climate. This meant that, from the very start of the
Weimar Republic, sociology ‘not only had full academic recognition,
but a reputation, and even an intellectual leadership that went beyond
the discipline itself.’^4
Against this background it was obvious that only an unconven-
tional university such as Frankfurt could have satisfied the academic
ambitions of a receptive and intellectually curious school-leaver like
Adorno. In the course of the 1920s it had developed into a forum for
intellectual discourse and a space in which culture, art and science
enjoyed enormous prestige.^5
Progressive as the university was during its early years in comparison
with others, it did not prevent Adorno from developing a lifelong aver-
sion to the division of labour in the organization of academic studies.
Perhaps he felt himself to be too much of an artist to be satisfied with