Notes to pp. 457– 458 607Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften in 1961 and Angelus Novus in
1966.
41 See alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, October–
December 1967.
42 Arendt published her strictures in a three-part essay in three successive
issues of Merkur. They were entitled: ‘The Hunchback’, ‘Dark Times’ and
‘The Pearlfisher’.
43 See Heißenbüttel, ‘Vom Zeugnis des Fortlebens in Briefen’, and ‘Zu Walter
Benjamins Spätwerk’. Adorno wrote directly to Heißenbüttel on 14 March:
‘You seem to suspect that I wished, for whatever reason, to dilute
Benjamin’s Marxist intentions. My motive in the controversy was far more
complex. While on the one hand I wanted to defend Benjamin’s
metaphysical impulses against himself, I wished also to defend dialectical
materialism against him, since he seemed to me to have a mistaken idea
of it. And this misunderstanding was not just his alone, but was shared
by Brecht. I fancy that I have a very precise knowledge of Marx, as indeed
you implicitly concede. This means that I could not fail to see that, while
Benjamin felt committed to Marxism, he had missed the point of the
essential contents of Marxist theory. God knows how highly I think of
Brecht, but his ignorance of Marxism... was indescribable. Neither had
made a serious study of Marx, but... they had swallowed him like a pill.
This was what struck me as being so dubious; their view of Marx was
heteronomous and irrational, in contrast to materialist dialectics as a theory.
If Benjamin had understood this, it would have been a better fit with his
own ideas. But the fact is that he clung to his metaphysical ideas to the
last, and for the truth of this I would ask you to trust both my memory
and that of Gershom Scholem.’ Adorno to Heißenbüttel, 14 March 1968,
quoted in Ralf Bentz (ed.), Protest! Literatur um 1968, p. 132.
44 See Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung,
vol. 1, p. 292.
45 Adorno, ‘Interimsbescheid’, GS, vol. 20.1, p. 182ff.
46 Shortly before he took his own life, Benjamin had named Adorno as the
trustee of his intellectual legacy and left instructions that his papers should
be handed over to him.
47 Adorno, ‘Interimsbescheid’, GS, vol. 20.1, p. 185f.; cf. Rolf Tiedemann,
‘Zur “Beschlagnahme” Walter Benjamins’, p. 74ff.
48 Adorno, ‘Zur Interpretation Benjamins’, quoted by Rolf Tiedemann in
his notes to Über Walter Benjamin, p. 97ff.
49 Adorno to Hartung, 8 May 1968, ibid., p. 99.
50 Gershom Scholem, Briefe, vol. II, p. 309.
51 Ibid., p. 201.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 209f. Scholem had written to Paeschke as early as 7 March 1968,
to say that Hannah Arendt’s criticisms arose from her own ‘inexactitudes’.
He had the feeling that ‘she felt a hatred of Adorno that must have its
source elsewhere. It must have been building up over years and she was
using this pretext to get it off her chest.’ Ibid., p. 313.
54 Ibid.
55 Adorno to Kaufmann, 27 February 1968, quoted in Otto Kolleritsch,
‘Adorno und Graz’, p. 158.