540 Notes to pp. 229–232
79 In 1936 Oscar Wiesengrund resigned from his post as manager of the
Daehne company in Leipzig; two years later he sold his property in
Seeheim, as can be seen from the documents of the Municipal Archives of
Seeheim/Jugenheim.
80 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 272.
81 Ibid., p. 292f.
82 Ibid., p. 292.
83 Ibid., p. 308.
84 Home Office File No. SPSL 44/2, 190–224, No. 219.
85 Opie was an economist and had translated Joseph Schumpeter’s The Theory
of Economic Development into English. He was among the Englishmen
with whom Adorno had managed to develop a closer relationship in
Oxford. As so often, the foundation of their friendship was music, which
Opie, who taught at Magdalen, tried to promote in the university.
86 See Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 324ff.
87 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 180.
88 In a letter to Horkheimer, Adorno argued that ‘the fundamental error in
my view lies in his inexperience in the things in question; he [Löwenthal]
applies ready-made categories to them, instead of entering into a genuine
interaction with the subject in hand. At any rate, I would recommend the
greatest possible caution in dealing with such an enormously difficult case as
Hamsun. It is childishly easy to show that Hamsun is a fascist, but just as
hard to make this insight productive, and what is hardest of all is to save
Hamsun from himself’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 346).
89 He summed up his objections to Marcuse’s concept of culture as follows:
‘The image of art appears in all essentials to be that of Weimar classicism;
I would like to know how he would cope with the Liaisons dangereuses or
with Baudelaire, to say nothing of Kafka or Schoenberg. It appears to me
that art has an entire stratum – the crucial one, in fact – that he ignores
completely. That is the stratum of knowledge in the sense of what cannot
be acquired by bourgeois science. The roses strewn through life – that will
really only do for the sixth form; and the dialectical counter-motif that the
art of a bad reality provides a contrast to the ideal is much too tenuous to
approach the decisive products of art’ (ibid., p. 355).
90 Ibid., p. 344.
91 The reproaches of Hannah Arendt that Adorno and Horkheimer had
failed to give Benjamin adequate support in exile in Paris, and had
only ever exploited him for the purposes of the institute (cf. Elizabeth
Young-Brühl, Hannah Arendt, p. 241), are untenable in the light of the
correspondence published up to now. Jürgen Habermas rightly pointed
out after the publication of the Adorno–Benjamin letters that this cor-
respondence ‘provided a convincing refutation of the accusations advanced
by Hannah Arendt’ (Jürgen Habermas, ‘Das Falsche im Eigenen: Der
Briefwechsel zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Walter Benjamin’, p. 77).
92 Adorno and Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 367.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., p. 374.
95 See Horkheimer, ‘Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik’, ZfS, VI, 1,
p. 4ff, and ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, ZfS, VI, 2, p. 245ff., and
also GS, vol. 4, pp. 108ff. and 162ff.