Notes to pp. 184–185 527decision to ask Adorno publicly about his authorship, and to ask why he
had been silent at the time, was one I took entirely on my own early in
December 1962. On the other hand, it is true that I showed Cramer the
draft of my open letter, Adorno’s reply and my reply to his.’ Schroeder
indicated that a further reason for his public inquiry was his fear ‘that the
political right might have exploited the situation if Adorno had maintained
his silence.’ In retrospect, Schroeder thought it was obvious that he had
made mistakes. He knew too little about Adorno’s writings and had been
naive about the unintended effects of his public letter. Furthermore, there
were elements of projection in his attack on Adorno. The original letter
of 3 January 1963 which Adorno wrote to Schroeder contains a passage
that Adorno omitted from the published version after Schroeder in his
reply of 8 January 1963 had objected to Adorno’s ‘implicit criticism’ that
he had allowed himself ‘to be manipulated by reactionary circles’. The
original text of Adorno’s letter contained the lines: ‘Dear Herr Schroeder,
You say in your open letter that every effort must be made “to prevent
people who would not scruple to make use of this information for their
own disreputable purposes from getting hold of it”. You probably do not
know who has gone to the trouble of disinterring this business. As far as
I know, it was an arch-reactionary and mortal enemy of modern music who
wanted to “shoot me down”.... The campaign was further orchestrated
by another man who attributes the collapse of the Weimar Republic to
supposedly subversive intellectuals, among whom he includes me. It is per-
haps not unimportant to know this.’ In his letter on this subject to Schroeder
on 11 January 1963, Adorno wrote, ‘I have always taken care not to keep
reminding people of statements they made during the Hitler period, unless
they were guilty of any real nastiness. When I attacked them...I was
concerned about current tendencies, the potential for further damage.’
Concurrently with this debate, Diskus was conducting a campaign against
the Germanist Heinz Otto Burger, since incriminating documents about his
activities in the Nazi period had been discovered. Following their campaign
Burger resigned from his post as rector of the university.
47 Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung,
vol. 2, p. 166. See also Heinz Steinert, Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie,
p. 35ff.
48 Adorno, ‘Editorisches Nachwort’, GS, vol. 19, p. 638. Hannah Arendt, who
had a lifelong antipathy towards the representatives of critical theory, and
especially Horkheimer and Adorno, reacted very critically to Adorno’s
reply in Diskus in a letter she wrote to Karl Jaspers. ‘Before I forget, I owe
you a reply to your question about Adorno. His failed effort to fall into
line [Gleichschaltungsversuch] in 1933 has been discovered by the
Frankfurt student newspaper Diskus. He responded with an unspeakably
wretched letter which deeply impressed the Germans’ (Arendt and Jaspers,
Briefwechsel, 1993, p. 679). A cynical and defamatory reaction to Adorno’s
open letter also appeared in the radical right-wing Deutscher Studenten-
Anzeiger (4 May 1963).
49 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 192.
50 Adorno and Krenek, Briefwechsel, p. 44. Heinrich Gomperz, to whom
Adorno refers here, was the professor of philosophy at the University of