He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its accomplishments, giving us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
The biography begins at the shining moment of the German bourgeoisie, in a world dominated by liberals willing to extend citizenship to refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Detlev Claussen follows Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) from his privileged life as a beloved prodigy to his intellectual coming of age in Weimar Germany and Vienna; from his exile during the Nazi years, first to England, then to the United States, to his emergence as the Adorno we know now in the perhaps not-so-unlikely setting of Los Angeles. There in 1943 with his collaborator Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed critical theory, whose key insight—that to be entertained is to give one’s consent—helped define the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century.
In capturing the man in his complex relationships with some of the century’s finest minds—including, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht—Claussen reveals how much we have yet to learn from Theodor Adorno, and how much his life can tell us about ourselves and our time.
Detlev Claussen is a journalist and Professor Emeritus of Social Theory, Culture, and Sociology at Leibniz Universität Hannover.
Rodney Livingstone is Professor Emeritus in German Studies at the University of Southampton. He is well known as a translator of books by Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, among others.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
How to Read This Book
1. Instead of an Overture: No Heirs
2. The House in Schoene Aussicht: A Frankfurt Childhood around 1910
3. From Teddie Wiesengrund to Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno
4. Adorno as "Non-identical" Man
5. Transitions
Bertolt Brecht: "To Those Who Come after Us"
Theodor W. Adorno: "Out of the Firing Line"
Hanns Eisler, the Non-identical Brother
Fritz Lang, the American Friend
6. Frankfurt Transfer
7. Adorno as "Identical" Man
8. The Palimpsest of Life
Appendix: Letters
Theodor W. Adorno to Ernst Bloch, 26 July 1962
Max Horkheimer to Theodor W. Adorno, 27 September 1958
Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 14 February 1965
Theodor W. Adorno to Claus Behncke, 21 February 1964
Max Horkheimer to Otto O. Herz, 1 September 1969
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
Writing as a sympathetic admirer rather than as an outsider or critic, Claussen moves the reader through his narrative the way a good novelist does. He has clearly mastered Adorno's difficult writings and is wonderfully in control of his subject's intellectual and personal milieu. His prose is lively and unburdened by technical jargon. Even for a veteran Adorno observer, this remarkable book contains many new findings and revisions of conventional wisdom.
Lydia Goehr
By examining Adorno's life through a circle of modernist companions who ended up dispersed all over the world, Detlev Claussen raises the question of whether biography can be written at all under the broken conditions of modernity. In his descriptions of German-Jewish lives, Claussen shows the complexities of living in the shadow of Auschwitz, and undermines the crude myths and interpretations that have sometimes plagued scholarship of Adorno and his milieu. — Lydia Goehr, Columbia University
Martin Jay
Writing as a sympathetic admirer rather than as an outsider or critic, Claussen moves the reader through his narrative the way a good novelist does. He has clearly mastered Adorno's difficult writings and is wonderfully in control of his subject's intellectual and personal milieu. His prose is lively and unburdened by technical jargon. Even for a veteran Adorno observer, this remarkable book contains many new findings and revisions of conventional wisdom. — Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
