Are the fathers of the Frankfurt School of intellectuals profoundly intelligent and important, or self-important upper-middle class trust fund babies all bloated with turgid and meaningless self-masturbatory road sand for brains?
ADORNO & BENJAMIN: The Complete Correspondence 1928 -1940 proves both are true.
It’s best to start in 1969, after Theordor Adorno called the cops on German student protesters during one of his classes. Shortly thereafter, female students protested Adorno’s protest of the protests by storming his podium, showering him with roses, and then exposing their breasts to him, claiming if Adorno kept teaching then capitalism would never be reformed.
Adorno ran home in shock. He died a few months later of a heart attack.
Aside from not understanding how being showered with bare breasts could be an attack, I have trouble getting the logic here. But people smarter than me tell me that although he spent his life criticizing all aspects of capitalism from a Marxist standpoint, the call to the police and a failure on his part to provide actionable ways to implement leftist reforms were reason to pummel him with breasts.
The letter book from the 1930’s ends when Walter Benjamin, he of massive procrastination, killed himself when he was denied – or at least thought he was being denied – safe passage from France to Spain to Portugal.
The correspondence was a tussle back and forth between two extremely difficult and abstruse personalities, Adorno the Fathead and Walter the Mystical. It was also an intellectual exchange of epic proportions, or else a complete waste of time between two borderline pathologies.
I read it mainly to suss out the historical conditions flying in the background: the fall of the nominally democratic German Weimar Republic, the unleashing of hordes of intellectual refugees upon first France and then England and the United States, and how the allegedly intellectual astute artists and writers and thinkers and musicians felt about it.
The problem is that these were Marxist Light critical theorists. They were mainly of upper-middle class origins. They had money, they had trust funds, and they were more bourgeois and in love with stasis and orderly lives than they were chaos, disorder, war, and, God forbid, revolution.
Thus, they bitched their whole lives about inane capitalist fetishes such as pop music, advertisements, and astrology, but were never ever interested in “solving” these “problems” “for the masses”.
A cute internet myth is the one which claims that Adorno was the real composer of the early Beatles’ songs. Adorno’s “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “All Your Lovin'” were done to parody the stupidity of capitalism and its lightweight amusements for imbeciles.
It certainly fits – making money off kids with water on the brain is certainly what capitalism does. But if Adorno was the talent behind the Beatles, it would have made him a hell of a lot more effective in real life than he ever was. And made his estate a hell of a lot richer.
So I recommend ADORNO & BENJAMIN for a sideways glance at the intellectual atmosphere of a very disturbing decade, but good luck trying to figure out their philosophies, because it was designed to be abstruse, on purpose, to keep everybody but these daydreamers out of their private code.
The women who bared their breasts had the right idea. Shock this fathead out of his useless daze by primal means.
It was the thing he was least able to cope with: something real, something right in front of him, something he didn’t have time to overthink and theorize about.
Adorno’s basic impotence in the face of breasts is not too surprising. He and his wife Gretel, who mothered him, loved the kitschy American TV program “Daktari”. He loved Clarence the One-Eyed Lion. He collected stuffed animals and placed them around his work desks.
By 1969, his students had him well figured out. No revolutionary, him.
