BIOGRAPHY:A densely textured biography of German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist and composer Theodor Adorno, writes Brian Dillon.
AT THE TIME of his sudden death at the mountain resort of Zermatt in 1969, Theodor Adorno had attained an uncertain vantage, both philosophical and personal, over the culture and cataclysms of his century. His insights into literature, music, popular culture and political power had been hard-won along the harshest of historical trails, though Adorno himself avoided the crevasses that swallowed friends and colleagues. Having diagnosed, in the 1920s, the last crisis of the German bourgeoisie into which he had been born, and described at the end of the second World War, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the malignant rationalism that caused the violent collapse of European civilisation in the following decades, he had at length returned to his native Frankfurt from exile in the US.
His reception in Germany, like that of many left-wing Jewish intellectuals who had fled the Nazis, was ambiguous at best. The thorough sociological critique of the "authoritarian personality" that he had elaborated in exile was not exactly welcome in the newly democratised and amnesiac nation. He lived and wrote, Adorno said, under the constant shadow of an old dictum: in the house of the hangman one does not mention the noose. Belatedly appointed to an academic chair, he had begun work on his Aesthetic Theory, a book dedicated in part to Samuel Beckett, whom he saw as the writer best equipped to express the spiritual shrinkage of the world in the wake of Auschwitz. At the same time, after all that he had witnessed and tried to account for, Adorno was shocked to discover that to the revolutionary students of 1968 he seemed a relic of detached, academic pseudo-radicalism.
As Detlev Claussen's densely textured biography proves time and again, the conflicts and rapprochements between generations were as essential to Adorno's personal and intellectual development as was his persistent sense of exile. He was born in 1903 to Oscar Wiesengrund, a Frankfurt wine trader, and Maria Calvelli-Adorno, the daughter of a Corsican fencing master. As a young man, he disavowed his mercantile background and hinted instead at an aristocratic Italian heritage: a bit of retrospective aggrandisement that was to considerably complicate his position among the Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s, and cause petty resentments among colleagues for decades. Something of the young Adorno's admirable (or irritating) loftiness is to be read too in his approach to Alban Berg, with whom he studied in 1925: "I can tell you precisely what help I require from you", he calmly informed the composer.
Adorno later understood that in his youth he had been - as he puts it in his most personal book, Minima Moralia - a kind of "hothouse plant". One consequence of his prodigious childhood seems to have been a keen awareness of the dynamics of intellectual competition: a sensitivity that worked to his advantage and detriment among the artists, agitators and critics of the Weimar period. His relations with older writers such as Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer seem to have been especially vexed by Adorno's obvious ambition, while the literary critic Georg Lukács, champion of rigidly realist Soviet aesthetics, accused the young Modernist and temperamental pessimist of having taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss". (Adorno would later trump this quip when he referred to Socialist Realism as "boy-meets-tractor literature".)
THE SENSE OF a radical and writerly milieu ripening under glass could only be heightened by its exile. When the time came for Adorno to leave, in 1933, recalled the sociologist Leo Löwenthal after the war, "we had to drag him almost physically" from Germany. He began a brief, uncongenial sojourn at Merton College, Oxford - AJ Ayer recalled him as a marginal figure, a mere "dandy" - where the weird, archaic strictures of the college dining hall seemed to him "an extension of the Third Reich". Adorno quickly fled to New York, and onwards to Los Angeles. Installed in Hollywood ("expelled into paradise", says Claussen), the Jewish thinkers gathered around the displaced Institute for Social Research: a body dedicated, as war began, to a frank analysis of the cultural and political forces that had brought them, and the world, to that dismal pass.
It's here that Claussen's account properly takes off, in an involuted story of intellectual rivalry, personal vanity and economic desperation, all enacted anxiously beneath the Californian sun. It was widely held among the exiles - some of whom were reduced to menial jobs as dishwashers, all of whom felt the precariousness of their position at the edge of America - that Adorno possessed private means and was immune to financial fears. In fact, his life in LA was scarcely less fragile than those of the others. In the opening pages of Minima Moralia, though, he reflects on the toxic effect of such disparities, however small, among intellectuals: the way that thought has become a career, with all that implies in the way of jealousy, panic and shame. Everything is compromised; life is reduced to hustling and suspicion.
THE KEY TERM that recurs in Claussen's account of this life is in fact "life" itself. While the literalist likes of Brecht (for whom pretending to be stupid was a kind of political credo) intimated that when he used this word Adorno was merely nostalgic for his privileged childhood - for an irredeemably bourgeois "art of living" - the truth is that he saw in the utopia of his own past an image of all that his generation had lost in a far more fundamental sense. "Life", he wrote in 1944, "has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspersed with empty, paralysed intervals." The idea that anything remotely resembling normal life might be rebuilt after the war was not only foolish, but actually barbaric: the very idea of a reconstructed Germany was proof that nothing was left - Adorno's had become a posthumous generation.
In 1942, Adorno wrote to Löwenthal: "the ideological function of biographies consists in demonstrating to people that something like life still exists". It is tempting to conclude that Claussen's biography of him proves that Adorno lived, if not "to the full" (the book is notably short on intimate detail), something we might call a life in the sense that his writings long for. But that would be to put an optimistic gloss on a body of work that never ceases to warn us about the kitsch fantasy of self-fulfilment and the "jargon of authenticity". Adorno neither relished nor despaired at his own bereft and conflicted history. It's testament to his rigorously dialectal idea of what it means to be an intellectual that, even as he called the cops on the unruly generation of 1968, he realised they were on the side of life, and refused to distance himself from their demands.
Brian Dillon's memoir, In the Dark Room, was published in 2005. He is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. He is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published next year
Theodor W Adorno: One Last Genius By Detlev Claussen, translated by Rodney Livingstone Harvard University Press, 440pp. €26.50
