44 Part I: Origins
roots, to the core of his own nature.’^61 The fundamental disagreements
between Kracauer and Adorno were primarily aesthetic. At issue was
the question whether or not the gulf between mass culture and authen-
tic works of art could be bridged. In the middle of the 1920s, when
Adorno first broached this question in connection with music, the two
men quarrelled for the first time, since it brought into focus the real
divergences of opinion about their respective critical or sociological
approaches to everyday cultural phenomena.
As is well known, Kracauer and Adorno met regularly in the 1920s
to work through philosophical texts together. They began with Kant’s
Critiques, but these were followed by Hegel and Kierkegaard. Adorno
was very much the learner in this situation. As he later said, Kracauer
made philosophy ‘come alive for me’. Under Kracauer’s guidance,
philosophy became a set of ‘coded texts from which the historical situ-
ation of mind could be read.’^62 The key idea in their discussions was to
interpret the different philosophies as force fields: ‘Without being able
to account for it fully, through Kracauer I perceived for the first time the
expressive moment in philosophy: putting into words the thoughts that
come into one’s head.’^63 This involved a process that Kracauer described
as ‘seminal dialogue’. In an essay written for the Frankfurter Zeitung in
March 1923, Kracauer gave a slightly precious account of his ideas. He
maintained that the ‘truth is to be sought in a struggle between different
figures’, a process that results in ‘acts of spiritual procreation’.
None of the participants in the discussions emerges from them
exactly as he entered them.... The fruits of discussion have been
engendered by the talking process, by the existential attachment
between the interlocutors.... The creation of dialogue becomes
a form of living together, and both partners advance in their own
existence by each acting as midwife to the other.^64One of Kracauer’s friends at the time was Leo Löwenthal, who met
Adorno through him just as Adorno was finishing his school-leaving
examinations.^65 Löwenthal describes Adorno from memory as ‘the clas-
sical image of a poet, with a delicate way of moving and talking.’^66
Löwenthal himself had been born in Frankfurt in November 1900. He
came from a background rather like that of Adorno, who was three
years his junior. His father was a doctor, but Löwenthal, having passed
the wartime school-leaving examination in 1918, ignored his father’s
wishes and studied almost anything but medicine in Frankfurt,
Heidelberg and Gießen. His socialist views did not prevent him from
working at the Free Jewish Lehrhaus in Frankfurt while he was still a
student. The Lehrhaus was a kind of ‘Jewish centre for adult education;
its spiritual fathers were Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber’.^67 In
1923 he took his doctorate at Frankfurt University with a dissertation
on the social philosophy of Franz von Baader.