80 Part II: A Change of Scene
But this knowledge did not follow from any personal threat to his own
well-being. He thought of the crisis of the age as a general disintegra-
tion of bourgeois traditions, as a collapse that he confronted in the
context of avant-garde art, literature and philosophy. Supporting the
achievements of cultural modernity had already become second nature
to him. Collectivist ideologies did not have the slightest attraction for
him. His generally critical view of the bourgeois world went hand in
hand with an anti-capitalist attitude, as well as a tendency to embrace
radical socialist ideas.^37 By the middle of the 1920s it was clear to him
that the categories with which he had interpreted the world up to then
had become unusable. Influenced by the intellectuals with whom he
associated, he now went in search of a viable philosophy of history and
political theory. This brought him closer to socialist and communist
ideas and their philosophical underpinnings. He now believed that the
catastrophes of the age were the product of the conflict-ridden dynamic
of the capitalist economy and that the existing social order was doomed.
This was linked with an interest in the philosophy of historical material-
ism, the critique of political economy and Karl Marx’s theory of revolu-
tion, all of which were very much in tune with the times. In this respect
he was influenced by ideas that Georg Lukács had introduced around
1920, the ideas of ‘transcendental homelessness’, the ‘contingent world’
and the ‘problematic individual’. Of equal importance was Walter
Benjamin’s diagnosis of the age:
Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing
to fall into a bottomless abyss... .For never has experience been
contradicted more thoroughly even than strategic experience by
positional warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experi-
ence by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar
now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing
remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in
a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny,
fragile human body.^38Adorno felt impelled to inquire how the sense of crisis of the age
was reflected in its intellectual products, and how it could find proper
expression in art. Art had to be nonconformist, it must signify the aboli-
tion of bad traditions and remind us of the possibility of something
better. Confronted with a world stripped of meaning and with history
in a turmoil, art must pose existential questions, and above all the
question ‘of the existence of the spiritual as such’.^39 Art that aspired to
truth – and only radical modern art could do that – could articulate the
contradictions of the age as these were expressed in the clash between
oppositional and restorationist ideas. But such art could not be the
mere impression of a chance experience, or the expressionist scream of