524 Notes to pp. 174–178
man, knew what had to be done’ (Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf,
p. 182f.).
4 Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches,
p. 52; cf. Wolfgang Bonß and Norbert Schindler, ‘Kritische Theorie als inter-
disziplinärer Materialismus’, p. 61; Bonß, Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks.
5 See Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte, p. 42, n. 56.
6 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 15, p. 97.
7 Indeed, Adorno later complained to Horkheimer that ‘in matters
specifically affecting the institute he had frequently been confronted by a
fait accompli... without any real involvement on his part.’ Adorno to
Horkheimer, 24 November 1934, ibid., p. 271.
8 Leo Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past, pp. 29–30.
9 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, pp. 253 and 263f.
10 Ibid., p. 75.
11 See Adorno, ‘Erinnerungen an Paul Tillich’, p. 31.
12 Kracauer to Adorno, 26 April 1933, Kracauer’s Literary Estate, Deutsches
Literaturarchiv, Marbach.
13 This rejection also characterized his response as a 23-year-old when nation-
alist and clerical groups protested publicly against the Prague production of
Berg’s Wozzeck. Adorno hated every kind of irrationalism and reactionary
thinking, and had a deep loathing for the mythologizing notions of the
Volk at the heart of Nazi ideology.
14 The Archive of the Dean’s Office of the Philosophical Faculty of the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Adorno’s personal file.
15 When Ludwig Landmann, Frankfurt’s left-liberal mayor, was forced to
resign in March 1933, the university lost one of its most important patrons
and protectors. Friedrich Krebs, his Nazi successor, together with the Berlin
state commissar, as well as August Wisser, the new registrar, and Ernst
Krieck, the rector, completed the purge of the university in a few months.
16 More than a hundred members of staff responsible for teaching and research,
i.e., over 30 per cent of the professors, were stripped of their chairs and
their livelihoods. ‘That was a significant loss of substance for the university
and moreover a breach with an important tradition of scholarly effort
unparalleled elsewhere in this way. The liberal, in some ways even left-
wing, open-minded Frankfurt approach to science, which had consciously
ventured on a number of innovations, could... no longer be sustained’
(Notker Hammerstein, Die Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, p. 221).
17 On 3 April 1933 Horkheimer wrote to Benjamin that ‘prospects are not
very favourable for Europe as a whole.’ ‘There is the risk of war, and in
addition apathy is spreading rapidly, as is the hostility towards independent
scientific research’ (Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 15, p. 99).
18 Adorno’s occasional naivety in his dealings with the Hitler dictatorship
went so far that, in two letters to Benjamin, who was in Paris, he advised
him that he too should apply for membership to the Reich Chamber of
Literature. Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–
1940 , pp. 37 and 43.
19 The document is in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main.
20 See Micha Brumlik, ‘Theologie und Messianismus im Denken Adornos’,
p. 36ff.; Joachim Perels, ‘Verteidigung der Erinnerung im Angesicht ihrer
Zerstörung – Theodor W. Adorno’, p. 271ff.