New works about Theodor Adorno and a selected bibliography:

Lorenz Jäger, Adorno. Eine politische Biographie. (Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2003)

Lorenz Jäger, who is an editor of the humanities section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, attempts to introduce Adorno to a wider public. Such a difficult task, however, requires from the author an expertise far above the academic level in order that the procedures of learned exposition can be bypassed without the risk of falling into incoherency. Jäger apparently does not dispose of such expertise, but prefers to solve this problem by introducing a surfeit of theses and associations which in most cases stay undeveloped, or, due to a dogged anti-intellectualism, prove to be beside the point.

Such obscurity can be traced back in the idea of the curious book itself. While its more fruitful side concerns the understanding of Adorno's philosophy as a working up of the constellation of the philosopher's birth, determined at the beginning of the twentieth century by the entering of modernity in all layers of culture and society, a mystifying counterpart is added, supposing that Adorno’s late writings anticipated the constellation of the philosopher’s death 1969. According to Jäger’s imperious judgement this constellation was determined by the ending of the period of modernity. The defeatist overtones of Jäger’s supposition have little in common with Adorno’s genuine, enlightened concept of ‘late style’, and chime with the conservatism for which the biographer steps into the breach. It shows itself when he defends the bond-sociology of Arnold Gehlen, or when, in particularly unappetizing passages, he agitates against Adorno’s empirical survey of German political consciousness in the 1950's (Schuld und Abwehr), the unfavourable conclusions of which Jäger simply cannot stand.

Jäger reproaches Adorno as being too severe about German complaints about the consequences of the Versailles treaty 1918 or the allied bombardments during the Second World War or the treatment of prisoners. He also bluntly accuses Adorno and his assistants of adjusting their conclusions to correspond to the policy of the Americans who funded the survey (a concept stressed by the author at the Adorno Conference in July 2003, shortly before the publication of his book as well). This reaction seems to correspond to a general trend which has been observed quite recently.

Here, as at many other places, the attempted popularisation boils down to gallantly quoting debunking comments from memoirs and letters of bystanders. It is a method Jäger continuously practices, with the consequence that whole chapters are corrupted by bad psychological reasoning or childish ad hominem procedures. Unburdening himself of his proper task to explain, Jäger is eager to ally with anyone who once threw a stone at Adorno, regardless of the origin of the critic in question. If Brecht jeers at Adorno, the conservative Jäger sides with Brecht. If Adorno’s students rebel against their teacher, the political biographer blames Adorno for having them teached ‘hypermoral’.

Although it is incontestable that Jäger is motivated by a fascination for Adorno, his polished style cannot hide an attitude which is both possessive and resentful. The result is a book that manipulates its subject rather than introduces it.

 

Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein letztes Genie. (Fischer Verlag, 2003)

Political and social points of view concerning Adorno have been effectuated with infinitely more honesty, expertise and finesse in the biography written by Detlev Claussen. The author was a student of Adorno during the years before the philosopher’s early death and now teaches as a Professor of Sociology in Hannover. He wrote books about antisemitism, racism and culture industry, and contributed with an article on Adorno to the collection of essays, "Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz", edited by the historian Dan Diner [2] .

Experienced and conscious, he proves to be one of the very few authors who are capable of explaining and sharpening passages cited instead of blunting them or just making them incomprehensible. His concentrated, sensible reading of Adorno’s texts results in a biography that constitutes a true interpretative treasure chamber.

Claussen’s central notion is the "palimpsest of life," an idea by which the biographical genre is transformed into an interpretation of Adorno’s reflection upon what he himself called damaged life: the collapse of the bourgeois culture of enlightenment and its illusion that the world would be structured according to reason. The catastrophes of the twentieth century, the shocks of world wars and mass terror are traced back in the ganglions of Adorno's writings, which indefatigably try to rescue enlightenment from its own destruction.

Particularly impressive are the passages dealing with the Frankfurt childhood and intellectual youth with Kracauer's tutorship; very convincing also are those demonstrating the impact of the First World War on the genesis of Critical Theory. As to other biographical characteristics a subtle emphasis is made on the rich variety of Adorno’s intellectual friendships, and the continuous need for ‘symphilosophein’.

Another highlight is the picture that Claussen gives of Adorno’s life during his American exile, as determined not only by the famous cooperation with Horkheimer but also by quarrelsome relations to Brecht and Eisler, the less known friendship with Fritz Lang (proving Adorno’s acquaintance with culture industry from within), and the connections to Thomas Mann. Highly sensible sociological reflections are given here.

The book is not a cursory introduction into the so called "main themes." On the contrary, Claussen concentrates on a few carefully chosen citations repeated over several chapters in order to reveal their different aspects or to unfold their implications. Such experimental method of exposition makes the reader familiar with the atmosphere, the climate as Adorno would have called it, of the open dialectical thinking the latter strived for. A disadvantage of applying this method could be that the beginning student maybe misses a more tangible treatment of the different writings. And due to the main accent on the sociological parts of the oeuvre other themes are underrepresented. Incompleteness, however, is compensated by a continuous perspicacity of the exposition itself, so that the risk is certainly worth while.

 

Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie, (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003)

Just like Claussen, Müller-Doohm was a student of Adorno, and is now a Professor of Sociology. I have not studied this voluminous tome, but merely looked it through, and skimmed a few parts. My impression is that it gives a large collection of facts about life and work, organized in a purely chronological way. The presentation comes rather from the outside and is non-interpretative, whereas Claussen tries to interconnect diverse, unexpected aspects in order to line out Adorno’s central theme of reflection: the European catastrophe and its origins in man’s mere domination of nature.

Certainly Müller-Doohm’s aims not so much at interpretation, but rather to the extensive description of the materials, and indeed the effort is enormous here. For this reason the two biographies indeed supply each other and a choice is difficult to make. I guess, however, that there will be much more to learn from Claussen’s book, which articulates thinking, and is, to put it in a Hegelian way, in contact with the movement and inner life of Adorno's philosophy and concept.

Of course, there are less recent introductions to the philosophy of Adorno (apart from works about The Frankfurt School in general):

In German:

* Hauke Brunkhorst, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Moderne. München: Piper 1990

* Hartmut Scheible, Theodor W. Adorno (Bildmonographie). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1989

* Rolf Wiggershaus, Theodor W. Adorno, C.H. Beck 1998

In English:

* Martin Jay, Adorno. Harvard University Press 1984

* Simon Jarvis, Adorno. A Critical Introduction. Polity Press 1998

The best introductory work is undoubtedly Gerhard Schweppenhäuser’s Theodor W. Adorno zur Einführung, (Junius Verlag 1996) The author has a good feeling for the moral implications of Adorno’s writings. His exposition is clear, concise and reliable, with knowledge of the German philosophical tradition to which Adornian dialectic belong and from which it so uncompromisingly repels. Maybe some late traces of the very neomarxism that Critical Theory of Adorno and Horkheimer left behind are perceivable, but in this intelligent presentation they do not annoy at all.

I do not know whether any Serbian translation exists of Adorno's writings, but a true introduction into Adorno would of course be the famous collection of aphorisms, written during the American exile:

Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. (first edition Suhrkamp 1951, many reprints. Collected Works: Volume 4). From a reliable source I know that an excellent annotated English version exists, translation by E.F.N. Jephcott: Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, Verso, 1974)

This collection is the best introduction not only because the reader gets familiar with the different parts of Adorno’s oeuvre, such as dialectics, aesthetics, and, of course, moral philosophy itself, but also because every piece throws the reader in medias res, and forces him to reflect. It is the Adornian uncommon concentrated style of philosophizing the reader gets acquainted with in a most direct manner. (I just saw, however, that a translation is published by nakladnik Ik Z. Stojanovica in Novi Sad, 2001.)

Another possibility would be the first collection of essays which was published by Adorno in the mid-fifties: Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp 1955, many reprints.) The English version of Samuel and Shierry Weber was the first serious translation of Adorno into that language. Besides a theoretical introduction (with the well known, but usually only partly cited passage on the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz) it contains essays on Mannheim, Spengler, Veblen, Huxley, jazz, Bach, Schönberg, Valéry & Proust, George und Hofmannsthal, Benjamin, Kafka. They are as puzzling and sparkling as the titles of some of them, for example "The Conscience of the Sociology of Knowledge", "Spengler after the Decline" or "Bach defended against his Admirers".

The editor of the Collected Works, Rolf Tiedemann, has composed two anthologies, each of which he provided with an excellent introduction. The last to be published was Theodor W. Adorno, "Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse". Ein philosphisches Lesebuch. (Suhrkamp Verlag 1997) (In English, it appeared as: "Can one live after Auschwitz". A philosophical reader).

Tiedemann is the author of a large collection of the most precise, inspiring and faithful comments on texts and lectures of Adorno. They were published in the eight volumes of the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter (Edition Text & Kritik, München 1992-2003), and in the apparatus of several tomes of the Posthumous Writings edition. Tiedemann is not afraid to engage himself in a controversy with those who try to take the sting out of Adorno's criticism.

 

Copyright © Karel Markus & Alexandria Press, 2003