538 Notes to pp. 220–224
to Sohn-Rethel: ‘It is difficult to imagine today just how hard it was to
overcome Benjamin’s mistrust of and resistance to other people’s ideas.
Adorno warned me when we first met in Paris to discuss ideas with
Benjamin that “you have to force-feed him with them; it is worse than
feeding a Strasbourg goose.” Benjamin could only gradually be induced
to abandon his resistance and be brought round to a more sympathetic
response’ (Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform: Aufsätze,
p. 87f.).
41 Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, p. 10f.
42 Ibid., pp. 21 and 24. Cf. also Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche
Arbeit: Zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte, p. 131ff.
43 Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, p. 32.
44 Ibid., p. 23. See also Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 225.
45 Ibid., p. 226.
46 Ibid., p. 227.
47 Ibid.
48 Horkheimer to Sohn-Rethel, 25 November 1936. Horkheimer, Briefwechsel,
GS, vol. 15, p. 746.
49 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 249.
50 Ibid.
51 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 235.
52 Sohn-Rethel regarded Adorno, along with George Thompson and John
D. Bernal, as a great supporter of his claim that the transcendental subject
was to be discovered in the commodity form. In an interview, he said that
‘Adorno’s death was a terrible blow for me since he was my main sup-
porter in Germany. When he died [on 6 August 1969] I flew to Frankfurt
and was present at the funeral’ (Sohn-Rethel, ‘Einige Unterbrechungen
waren wirklich unnötig’, pp. 280ff. and 283ff.). Adorno noted in his mag-
num opus: ‘Not only the pure I is ontically transmitted by the empirical
I, the unmistakably pellucid model of the first version of the deduction of
purely rational concepts; the transcendental principle itself, the supposed
“first principle” of philosophy as against existing reality, is so transmitted.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to point out that hidden in this principle,
in the general and necessary activity of the mind, lies work of an
inalienably social nature’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 177; translation
altered).
53 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 272; cf. also pp. 327f. and
357f.
54 See Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, p. 37 and p. 67f.
55 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 222.
56 Martin Jay, ‘Massenkultur und deutsche intellektuelle Emigration: Der
Fall Max Horkheimer und Siegfried Kracauer’, p. 230.
57 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, pp. 185 and 294.
58 See Marbacher Magazin, 47, 1988, p. 85; cf. Momme Brodersen, Siegfried
Kracauer, p. 98ff.
59 Kracauer to Adorno, 20 August 1938. Kracauer’s Literary Estate,
Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach.
60 Wiener Zeitung, 18 May 1937.
61 Kracauer to Adorno, 25 May 1937. Kracauer’s Literary Estate, Deutsches
Literaturarchiv, Marbach.