566 Notes to pp. 330–332
socialism. In the 1950s he worked for a time at the Institute of Social
Research, but in 1956 he went on to Westdeutscher Radio in Cologne,
where he was in charge of the Culture Section (Br 331/3/4/9/13). (Eugen
Kogon (1903–87) was a Catholic journalist and writer who had written on
fascism before the war. He was arrested in Austria after the Nazi takeover
and following sojourns in Gestapo prisons was sent to Buchenwald, where
he remained until 1945, one of the few people to have survived. His classic
book Der SS-Staat (1946) was the first attempt at a systematic account of
the world of concentration camps [trans.].)
11 This literary group was founded on the initiative of Hans Werner Richter
on 16 September 1947. It was an association of writers and publicists
who had belonged to the journal Der Ruf, which had been founded by
Richter together with Alfred Andersch and had been closed down by
the US military government. The Gruppe 47 was the most representative
grouping of critical contemporary literature in Germany, having brought
together writers such as Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, Günter Eich, Ilse
Aichinger, Jürgen Becker, Martin Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans
Magnus Enzensberger. See Karl Brieglieb, Mißachtung und Tabu.
12 He wrote to Thomas Mann about Ernst Jünger that Jünger ‘was acting
out the role of a miserable kitschy writer in the process of transforming
himself from an unpleasant man of steel into what is if possible an
even more unpleasant second-hand Stefan George with bronze foliage,
coloured scales and concrete descriptions that miss the point’ (Adorno
and Mann, Briefwechsel, p. 47f.).
13 Adorno, ‘Peter Suhrkamp’, GS, vol. 20.2, p. 491.
14 Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Orte, p. 519; cf. Dagmar von Gersdorff, Marie
Luise Kaschnitz: Eine Biographie, p. 174.
15 Ibid., p. 189.
16 The contents of this lecture course have been preserved thanks to the
notes taken by Kraft Bretschneider. They show that Adorno had already
started to develop the core themes of his philosophy in a programmatic
way. For example, there was his critique of Martin Heidegger, which
was not fully worked out until the middle 1960s, and also his conception
of philosophical hermeneutics and dialectics. See Frankfurter Adorno
Blätter, II, 1993, p. 11ff.
17 Adorno, ‘Die auferstandene Kultur’, GS, vol. 20.2, p. 456. At the same
time as Adorno, Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and the author of
The Origins of Totalitarianism, also returned to Germany for the first time
since her emigration. She had come under the auspices of the Jewish
Cultural Reconstruction, an organization which had been set up in 1948
(see Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 270ff.). She gave detailed
descriptions of her experiences (including meetings with Karl Jaspers
and Martin Heidegger, among others) in letters to Hilde Fränkel and to
her own husband, Heinrich Blücher, and she published an article in Com-
mentary on her impressions of Germany with the title ‘The Aftermath of
Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’. In a striking parallel to Adorno, she
came to the conclusion that the frenetic activity of the Germans served to
blot out the reality of the past. A general apathy was the dominant mood,
and totalitarianism continued to have an afterlife even in the democratic
state. She thought that the de-Nazification process introduced by the