Notes to pp. 142–150 519seminars in 1932 as well as the notes he had taken on the lectures Adorno
had given during his years in Frankfurt.
41 Wilhelm Emrich, ‘Ladenhüter’, p. 213.
42 E. E. Noth, Erinnerungen eines Deutschen, p. 194.
43 See Notker Hammerstein, Die Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, p. 37ff.
44 See Karl Korn, Lange Lehrzeit: Ein deutsches Leben, p. 142.
45 Adorno, ‘Erinnerungen an Paul Tillich’, p. 29.
46 Peter von Haselberg, ‘Wiesengrund-Adorno’, p. 13.
47 See Max Horkheimer, GS, vol. 12, p. 351ff.
48 Ibid., p. 346.
49 See ‘Adornos Seminar vom Sommersemester 1932’, Frankfurter Adorno
Blätter, IV, 1995, p. 52ff.
50 W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 29f.
51 Ibid., p. 30.
52 Ibid., p. 36.
53 Ibid., p. 28ff.
54 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 185ff.
55 Ibid., pp. 127 and 365.
56 ‘Adornos Seminar vom Sommersemester 1932’, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter,
IV, 1995, p. 74.
57 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. IV, pp. 128 and 156f.
58 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 9f.
59 After reading the Kierkegaard book, Benjamin’s closest friend, Gershom
Scholem, told Benjamin frankly that it was ‘a sublime piece of plagiarism
of your writings, written with unusual chuzpah’. ‘At many points I could
not help thinking utinam Walter ipse scripsisset!’ (Benjamin and Scholem,
Briefwechsel 1933–1940, p. 109).
60 When he republished this essay in 1958 in the Neue Deutsche Hefte, he
added the dedication ‘In memory of my mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno’.
She had died in New York in 1952, at the age of eighty-seven. [This essay,
‘The Natural History of the Theatre’, can be found in English in Quasi
una Fantasia, pp. 65–78; trans.]
61 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 15.
62 Adorno, ‘Die Idee der Naturgeschichte’, GS, vol. 1, p. 345.
63 Ibid., p. 364.
64 Ibid., p. 365. This idea might well have served as motto for a book that
Adorno was to write more than a decade later with Max Horkheimer.
This was the Philosophical Fragments, which were published in 1947 with
the title Dialectic of Enlightenment. Some of the ideas about the complex
intertwining of history and myth in this pioneering study were already
to be found in this early essay. In later years, Adorno gave his own view
of this anticipation of his subsequent philosophical ideas. ‘Much of what
I wrote in my youth reads like a dreamlike anticipation, and it was only
with a certain moment of shock, one that coincided with the emergence
of the Hitlerian Reich, that I began properly to do what I have done.’
Letter to Bloch, 26 July 1962, Frankfurt Adorno Archive; see also Rolf
Tiedemann, ‘Editorische Nachbemerkung’, GS, vol. 1, p. 384.
65 There is now a bibliophile version of the Berlin Childhood, with an
Afterword by Rolf Tiedemann: W. Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um
Neunzehnhundert.