76 Part II: A Change of Scenerecords. Cornelius had learnt about the debacle and, ‘when I had to
produce a seminar paper for one of his classes, he said to me “Do you
have a manuscript copy?” I said I did whereupon he said, “Give it to me
and come to my room in a bit”. I waited for around an hour and went
to his room. My manuscript was lying there with some marginal com-
ments. Very many, in fact. And Cornelius said to me, “If you follow my
instructions, that will be your dissertation”. I did as he suggested and
obtained my doctorate in 1922. What he did was quite wonderful.. .and
in general he had a decisive influence on my life.’^25 But this influence
did not prevent Horkheimer from going his own way. He had success-
fully shown in his disagreements with his father that he knew how to
challenge authority and defend his own interests. He not only resisted
his father’s express wish that he should adopt a career in business, he
even went against his family in the choice of his marriage partner. In
1926 he married Rosa Christin Riekher, whom he had met in 1915 in
the family firm in Stuttgart, where she worked as a secretary. She was
unacceptable to his parents both as a Christian and as the daughter of a
bankrupted businessman. Moreover, she was eight years older than their
only son. Despite quarrels with his parents that went on for years, Max’s
love for her never faltered, as can be seen from the warm, affectionate
letters that he wrote to ‘his Maidon’ his whole life long.
Like Adorno, Horkheimer evidently maintained a split between his
personal political convictions, his view of life and his mental attitude, on
the one hand, and his formal career as an academic, on the other. There
is an obvious discrepancy between the sympathy he felt in his youth for
the revolutionary communist Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by
Freikorps officers in January 1919, for democracy and socialism, for the
philosophy of historical materialism, on the one hand, and the academ-
ically approved topic of his dissertation and indeed of his thesis for the
Habilitation, on the other. His doctoral dissertation, which led to his
being the first person to qualify at Frankfurt University with philosophy
as his major subject, treated the antinomy of teleological judgement.
Anyone who imagines that he was concerned there with conflicts
between idealism and materialism would be sadly disappointed. Instead,
he dutifully focused on distinctions between mechanistic and non-
mechanistic explanatory models; he discussed the relationship between
the whole and its parts in the world of phenomena. In an attempt to
delimit Kant’s equation of scientific and mechanical explanations, he
pleaded for the concept of gestalt qualities – quite in tune with his own
academic teachers, who were decisively influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey’s
notion of structure.^26
Thus Horkheimer’s early writing formed part of the official align-
ment with the dominant philosophy of Cornelius that was characteristic
of those early years at Frankfurt University. According to Horkheimer,
the mark of that philosophy was that ‘it bore the marks of its origins in
the epistemological problems that arise from a preoccupation with the