Theodor W. Adorno

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Theodor W. Adorno (1964)

Theodor W. Adorno (born September 11, 1903 in Frankfurt am Main ; died August 6, 1969 in Visp , Switzerland ; actually Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund ) was a German philosopher , sociologist , music philosopher and composer . It counts with Max Horkheimer of the main representatives of the Critical Theory designated school of thought , which also known as the Frankfurt Schoolgot known. He had a close lifelong friendship and working community with Horkheimer, whom he had met during his studies.

Adorno grew up in an upper-class family in Frankfurt. As a child he received an intensive musical education, and as a schoolboy he was already occupied with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant . After studying philosophy, he devoted himself to teaching composition in the circle of the Second Vienna School around Arnold Schönberg and worked as a music critic . From 1931 he also taught as a private lecturer at the University of Frankfurt until he was banned from teaching by the National Socialists in 1933.

During the Nazi era he emigrated to the USA . There he became an employee of the Institute for Social Research , worked on a number of empirical research projects, including on the authoritarian character , and wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer . After his return he was one of the directors of the institute, which was reopened in Frankfurt. Like few representatives of the academic elite, he worked as a "public intellectual" with speeches, radio lectures and publications on the cultural and intellectual life of post-war Germany and contributed - with generally understandable lectures - willingly and indirectly to the democratic re- education of the German people.

Adorno's work as a philosopher and sociologist follows the tradition of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud . Because of the response that his relentless criticism of capitalist society found among students, supporters and critics alike made him one of the intellectual fathers of the German student movement . Although he shared the students' criticism of the restorative tendencies of late capitalist society, he was alienated and distanced from the work of the student movement because of its tendency towards blind actionism and because of its willingness to use violence.

Life

Origin and name

Adorno was born in 1903 in Frankfurt as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund. He was the only child of the wine wholesaler Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870-1946) and the singer Maria Calvelli-Adorno (1865-1952). The Catholic mother was the daughter of a Corsican officer who had settled in the Free City of Frankfurt around 1860 as a penniless fencing master . As a trained singer, she also appeared at the imperial court in Vienna , at the Vienna Opera and at the city ​​theaters in Cologne and Riga . The father, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, came from a Jewish family and was still a member of the Israelite religion at the time the son was born . He only later converted to Protestantism .

The addition of the mother's name to the father's surname made by Theodor is said to have been a wish of the mother, but it was only fulfilled later. While the first publications were still labeled “Wiesengrund”, he used the double name “Wiesengrund-Adorno” early on in his journalistic activities. A shortening to “W. Adorno ”he made in his publications in the American emigration. After being formally naturalized as a US citizen at the end of 1943, his official name was "Theodore Adorno". From then on he drew his publications with Theodor W. Adorno.

Early Frankfurt years (until 1924)

As a child, the boy was called "Teddie". He grew up in the Schöne Aussicht , house number 9, a street on the banks of the Main . His father ran a wine shop in the neighboring house, which owned a large winery in the Rheingau . In 1914 the family moved into a newly built house in the Oberrad district .

Adorno was Roman Catholic ge baptized and received First Communion . At the request of his devout mother, he also worked as an altar boy for a long time . In contrast to his childhood friends Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm , who were active in the Free Jewish Teaching House - which was influential in Frankfurt - he had no special relationship with the religion of his father's ancestors. He only gained a closer relationship with Judaism under the impression of the genocide of the Jews . The journalist Dorothea Razumovsky , who was a friend of the Adornos, put it in a nutshell: It was not his tolerant and assimilated father, but Hitler who made him a Jew.

The singer and pianist Agathe Calvelli-Adorno, an unmarried sister of his mother, whom Adorno referred to as his "second mother", also lived in the family household . Adorno's “extremely sheltered childhood” was primarily shaped by the two “mothers”. From them he learned to play the piano. Music formed the cultural center of the cosmopolitan , upper-class family. So his mother traveled through Europe with the part of the forest bird from Richard Wagner's opera Siegfried . Adorno was made familiar with chamber music and symphonic literature by playing four hands and was thus able to develop his musical competence at an early age. In addition to his school lessons, he took private lessons in composition from Bernhard Sekle's . The family spent the summers in the Odenwald idyll Amorbach ; since then he has considered Amorbach "as a utopia that has become reality [...] to be one with the world".

After he had skipped two classes, the “privileged highly gifted” passed his Abitur as the best of his year at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gymnasium (today Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule ) in Frankfurt at the age of 17 . As a primus, he experienced resentment and hostility that such a talent can attract. He suffered torments in high school for those who “couldn't get a sentence right, but found each of me too long” (GS 4: 219f).

He received philosophical training from his boyfriend Siegfried Kracauer , 14 years his senior , whom he met at a friend of his parents'. Kracauer was an important feature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung . In a letter to Leo Löwenthal, he confessed that he had “an unnatural passion” for his younger friend and that he considered himself “spiritually homosexual ”. Together they read Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason regularly on Saturday afternoons for years , an experience which, according to Adorno's self-testimony, was formative for him: "I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe this reading more than my academic teachers" (GS 11: 388). As a high school graduate, he was fascinated by the recently published books The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács and Spirit of Utopia by Ernst Bloch . In high school he learned the foreign languages Latin , Greek and French ; English was added later in the emigration .

From 1921 he studied philosophy , musicology , psychology and sociology at the University of Frankfurt ; at the same time he began working as a music critic. He heard philosophy from Hans Cornelius , sociology from Gottfried Salomon- Delatour and Franz Oppenheimer . At the university in 1922 he met Max Horkheimer in a seminar with whom he shared theoretical views and became friends. He also had a close and lasting friendship with Walter Benjamin , whom he had met as a student through Kracauer's mediation. The study he completed very quickly: in late 1924, he completed it with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology with summa cum laude from. The work, which he wrote in the spirit of his teacher Cornelius, contained pure school philosophy, which gave little indication of Adorno's later thinking.

The business relationship between the Frankfurter Weinhandlung Oscar Wiesengrund and the Berlin factory for leather processing Karplus & Herzberger developed into a friendly relationship between the owner families of both companies. A love relationship developed between the spirited young "Teddie" Wiesengrund and the Berliner Margarete (nickname: Gretel) Karplus , which should lead to a lifelong bond.

Stay in Vienna (1925–1926)

In March 1925 Adorno moved to Vienna, the birthplace of twelve-tone music , where he took a room in the pension "Luisenheim" in the 9th district . For Alban Berg , the student of Arnold Schoenberg, he began postgraduate studies in composition and Eduard Steuermann , he took piano lessons at the same time. Adorno met Alban Berg on the occasion of the world premiere of his Three Fragments for voice and orchestra from Wozzek in Frankfurt in 1924. The helmsman, originally from Poland, who had premiered most of Schönberg's piano works, was the main pianist of the Second Vienna School, with whose founder he also met. Adorno valued Schönberg as a “revolutionary changer of the traditional way of composing”. He later honored his twelve-tone compositions (1949) in the Philosophy of New Music . Personally, however, a "mutual antipathy " developed between the two. Schönberg considered Adorno's “writing style to be well- mannered , the music-theoretical concept formation too incomprehensible” and believed that this would harm New Music in terms of its public impact. Adorno's musical aesthetic appreciation and personal sympathy went primarily to Alban Berg, with whom he maintained a friendly relationship that was reflected in an intensive correspondence until his early death (1935). He later published the monograph Berg on him . The master of the smallest transition (1968).

In the first year of his stay in Vienna, he wrote essays on works by Berg and Schönberg. He thus continued the music critical activity he had already started as a student, which he was able to establish in 1928 when he joined the editorial team of the musical avant-garde magazine Anbruch . Adorno's endeavor to use the magazine as a music-political instrument of power to implement advanced music , however, met resistance in the editorial team, from which he officially resigned in 1931.

Adorno's years of his stay in Vienna were the most intensive compositionally. Among his compositions, a series of piano song cycles make up the largest and most important part. In addition, he wrote orchestral pieces, chamber music for strings and a cappella choir and arranged French folk songs .

Together with Berg he attended readings by Karl Kraus . His spectacular presentation initially gave him the impression of a “half priestly and half clown comedian”, only later, through reading, did he begin to appreciate him. One of the numerous acquaintances he made in Vienna was that of Georg Lukács, who lived here as an emigrant under difficult living conditions. He admitted to Berg that Lukács had "influenced him spiritually [...] more deeply than anyone else". His theory of the novel had already inspired him as a high school graduate, and his work History and Class Consciousness , completed in Vienna in 1922, was eminently important for his reception of Marx (as well as for that of his close friends). During this time he also had a close friendship with the Prague writer and musician Hermann Grab . The intellectual and artistic milieu of Viennese Modernism at the turn of the century had a lasting impact not only on Adorno's music theory, but also on his conception of art.

With Berg and his wife Helene , he not only attended concerts and operas; the Bergs also took him to excellent restaurants. In general, he enjoyed the sensual joie de vivre of the Danube metropolis, including “carefully tried out love affairs”.

During the Vienna period, Siegfried Kracauer spent almost three weeks on the Gulf of Naples (September 1925), where they met Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel for a fruitful exchange of ideas. Martin Mittelmeier interprets this stay as a turning point in Adorno's intellectual biography. Here, under the influence of Benjamin, he found the most significant form of representation for his texts, the “constellation”.

Middle Frankfurt years (1926–1934)

Back from Vienna, he devoted himself to music journalism and composing. In addition, Adorno began working on a habilitation thesis . He processed the results of a detailed study of psychoanalysis in a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise entitled Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Doctrine of the Soul , which he presented to his doctoral supervisor, Cornelius. After he had expressed concerns, which his assistant Horkheimer joined, Adorno withdrew the habilitation application in 1928 . Cornelius had criticized that the work was not original enough and that it paraphrased his own 'Cornelius' thinking .

The years 1928–1930 were years of professional uncertainty for Adorno. He tried in vain for a permanent job as a music critic with Ullstein in Berlin. Numerous compositions and music-critical contributions from this period, however, testify to the unflagging productivity. He didn't need to worry about his financial situation, his father had promised him further support. During these years, Adorno stayed several times in Berlin with Gretel Karplus, who is now engaged to be a PhD chemist and entrepreneur. He also went on several trips with her, including a. to Amorbach , Italy and France. During his stays in Berlin he met many contemporary authors and artists, including a. with Ernst Bloch, Kurt Weill , Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht .

Adorno also concentrated on writing a second habilitation thesis. He had accepted the offer of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich , who had been newly appointed to a professorship in philosophy in 1929, to do his habilitation with him. After he had written down the work on the Danish existential philosopher and Hegel critic Kierkegaard within a year , he submitted it under the title Kierkegaard - Construction of the Aesthetic and was thus habilitated at Frankfurt University in February 1931. The heavily revised book edition (1933) bore the dedication: "To my friend Siegfried Kracauer".

He maintained contact with left-wing Frankfurt intellectuals in a circle called “Kränzchen”, which met in a relaxed cycle in Café Laumer for discussion. To him belonged Horkheimer, Tillich, Friedrich Pollock , the economist Adolf Löwe and the newly appointed sociologist Karl Mannheim . Although still without a habilitation, Adorno enjoyed “the privilege” of being invited to that “little circle”.

After Adorno had been awarded the Venia legendi , he held his inaugural lecture as a private lecturer in philosophy in May 1931 ; its title: The Topicality of Philosophy , which contained many thoughts that went into his later complete works.

On behalf of Tillich, Adorno had organized seminars at Frankfurt University even before the inaugural lecture. Like the colleges that were run independently after being appointed private lecturer, they were dedicated to aesthetics. After his license to teach, he had four semesters left at Frankfurt University. The courses offered included - in addition to "Kierkegaard" and "Epistemological Exercises (Husserl)" - "Problems of Philosophy of Art", an event in which he dealt with Benjamin's book The Origin of German Tragedy , which Benjamin wrote as a post-doctoral thesis in Frankfurt as early as 1925 Philosophical Faculty had submitted and had been rejected by them.

Before emigrating to the United States Adorno was not yet part of the official staff of the Institute for Social Research (such as Horkheimer, Pollock, Fromm and Lowenthal), but published in the first issue of the edited by Horkheimer since 1932 Journal of Social Research essay On the social situation of the Music . In it he critically examined the production and consumption of music in contemporary capitalist society.

Adorno's teaching activity ended in the winter semester of 1933. In autumn the National Socialist regime withdrew his authorization to teach academically because of his father's Jewish descent. Like many other intellectuals of his time, he did not expect the new regime to last long and, in retrospect, admitted that he had completely misjudged the political situation in 1933. At first he even hoped for the post of music critic with the Vossische Zeitung . In the magazine Europäische Revue he commented on the ban on “ Negro jazz ” enforced by the National Socialists, saying that the decree subsequently confirmed what had already happened musically. In 1934 he also praised male choirs that sang poems by Hitler's youth leader Baldur von Schirach . Confronted with these publications by the Frankfurt student newspaper Diskus in the winter semester 1962/63 , he regretted his "stupid tactical statements" in an open letter, which were due to the folly of "who made the decision to emigrate infinitely difficult". How naively he judged the initial situation after the National Socialist seizure of power is shown by a letter of April 15, 1933 to Siegfried Kracauer, who was in exile in Paris, in which he advised him to return to Germany because: “There is complete peace and order, I believe , the situation will consolidate. [...] a hasty and expensive move [to Paris] would also seem questionable to me ”. Leo Löwenthal noted: "We almost physically had to force him to finally leave Germany".

Stopover in Oxford (1934–1937)

As a " half-Jew " defined by National Socialist racial legislation , Adorno initially had room to maneuver in Nazi Germany. While maintaining his officially registered residence in Frankfurt, he went to Great Britain , where, although he was already a German lecturer in philosophy , he was only accepted as an advanced student in philosophy at Merton College in Oxford . With a thesis on Edmund Husserl's philosophy, he planned to obtain the Ph.D. to acquire. His tutor was Gilbert Ryle , a competent expert on German philosophy, especially Husserls and Heideggers , and later famous author of The Concept of Mind . He was also in contact with the historian Isaiah Berlin . As he told friends, he worked “in an indescribable calm and under very pleasant external working conditions” (letter to Ernst Krenek ), although he was forced to lead “the life of a medieval student in a cap and gown”, as he wrote to Walter Benjamin .

Adorno used the Oxford years not only for his Husserl studies. He wrote a critical treatise on Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and articles on music theory for the avant-garde Viennese music magazine 23 as well as the essay on jazz. , which appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1936 under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler and caused the most violent reactions until after Adorno's death.

Since the foreign exchange regulations at that time only allowed small amounts of money to be exported, Adorno regularly returned to Germany after the semesters for longer stays in order to finance his life in Oxford - to a country that had become "hell" for him, as he did Horkheimer who emigrated to the USA wrote. There he met friends, his parents and his fiancée, for whom, as a Jew, life in Germany became increasingly precarious and who therefore moved to London in August 1937, where they both married on September 8, 1937 in the registry office of the Paddington district. One of the witnesses was Horkheimer, who at that time, coming from the USA, was touring the branches of the Institute for Social Research in Europe (Geneva, Paris, London). Adorno insisted on a traditional division of labor with his wife: "He did not even think about taking part in the organization and running of the household".

During this time Adorno maintained an intensive correspondence with Max Horkheimer, who was already living in American exile, whom he had met in Paris in December 1935 and visited in New York for two weeks in June 1937. Horkheimer finally made him the offer to take up a livelihood scientific job in the USA and to become an official employee in his institute for social research.

In mid-December 1937 the Adornos spent another vacation on the Ligurian coast, where they met Walter Benjamin; and in Brussels Adorno said goodbye to his parents, who were to follow later.

Emigrant in the USA (1938–1953)

45 Christopher Street, 1938 temporary residence of the Adornos

Following Horkheimer's invitation, Adorno and his wife moved to the USA in February 1938, thereby emigrating from Nazi Germany. His parents, who had been mistreated and arrested during the anti-Jewish riots during “ Kristallnacht ”, managed to leave for Havana the following year. After the Adornos had moved into a makeshift apartment in Greenwich Village ( New York City ) in the first few weeks , they rented an apartment not far from Columbia University , which is making a building available to the Institute for Social Research (now under the name Institute of Social Research ) would have. The couple set up here with the furniture they had shipped from Germany and had no shortage of private contacts and relationships from the start.

Immediately after his arrival, Adorno joined the Princeton Radio Research Project , a major research project led by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld . Adorno was entrusted with the implementation of a sub-project in the field of music, which meant a completely unfamiliar and stressful activity for him. While half of his work was devoted to the empirical project, the other half was now an official employee at Horkheimer's Institute of Social Research (GS 10/2: 705) and, alongside Leo Löwenthal, was responsible for the editorial work on the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung . He also took part in the seminars, lectures and internal discussions on the character of National Socialism.

Since Adorno insisted on his critical attitude towards administrative research , there was a “persistent dispute between the music theorist and the social researcher”, which finally led to Lazarsfeld's termination of the collaboration after two years.

Horkheimer, who had promised Adorno a full post at the institute after leaving the radio project, sought closer cooperation with him during this time. He had planned him as a collaborator on the long-planned book on "dialectical logic", which should have the self-destruction of reason as its topic. From autumn 1939 conversations took place between the two of them, some of which Gretel Adorno recorded. For a time Herbert Marcuse , the "full-time philosopher of the institute" with whom Horkheimer worked in New York on a materialistic critique of idealism, was also earmarked for collaboration. Since Horkheimer had by no means ruled out with the utmost clarity that he would participate in the dialectic book , Adorno was "not free from jealousy, [...] everything was important to exclusively write the book with Horkheimer". As early as May 1935, Adorno had written to Horkheimer about Marcuse from Oxford, saying it saddened him that “philosophically you are working directly with a man whom I ultimately consider to be a fascist prevented by Judaism ”.

Horkheimer and his wife Maidon moved to Los Angeles in 1940, mainly for health reasons - Maidon in particular suffered from the New York climate - and moved into a bungalow specially built for them in Pacific Palisades . The Adornos followed suit in November 1941 and moved into a rented house there. Both lived in the immediate vicinity and also in the vicinity of a colony of German and Austrian emigrants, such as Berthold and Salka Viertel , Thomas and Katja Mann , Hanns Eisler , Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel , Max Reinhardt , Arnold Schönberg and many others. Most of them had come for Hollywood because they were hoping for jobs from the film industry.

In early 1942, Adorno and Horkheimer began work on the book that would later be called Dialectic of Enlightenment . With the help of Adorno's wife Gretel, the main work of critical theory was created with him as a joint work of both, which was first published in 1944 in the production process of mimeography under the title Philosophical Fragments with the dedication " Friedrich Pollock on the 50th birthday" in the publishing house of the New York Institute of Social Research appeared and was published in its final form in 1947 by Querido Verlag , Amsterdam .

In view of the mass murder committed against the Jews and other population groups, the two authors presented a philosophy of history of the society after Auschwitz that represented a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment , whose optimism for progress had become obsolete. Programmatically, it says right on the first page that it is about "the recognition of why humanity, instead of entering a truly human condition, sinks into a new kind of barbarism" (GS 3: 11). To explain this, the book began with the dialectical thesis of an entanglement of reason and myth, of nature and rationality. The criticism of reason came from a catastrophic perspective.

About the end of the Nazi regime and Hitler's death, Adorno expressed himself in private letters to his parents (May 1, 1945) and to Horkheimer (May 9, 1945) with a mixture of feelings of joy, sadness and sarcasm.

Hartmut Scheible describes the years in California as the most fruitful of Adorno's life. Here, in addition to the dialectic of the Enlightenment, the Minima Moralia and the philosophy of new music emerged . For Rolf Wiggershaus , the Minima Moralia represented "something like the aphoristic continuation" of the dialectic of the Enlightenment .

During these years he also worked with Thomas Mann, who drew numerous suggestions for his novel Doctor Faustus from Adorno's manuscript on the philosophy of new music , especially from the first part on Schönberg. In September 1943, Thomas Mann invited Adorno to his house on San Remo Drive and read from Chapter 8. Adorno's objections and additional suggestions, which he made "initially spontaneously, then in writing, were largely taken into account by the author for the first chapters of his novel [...]". As an intimate connoisseur of the music avant-garde, he owed Adorno important information on questions of music philosophy and composition. Thomas Mann benefited down to the smallest musical detail, both in conversations on the occasion of several reciprocal invitations from both families as well as through correspondence from the expertise of an "amazing connoisseur" (Mann about Adorno). Mann thanked for this collaboration with an allusion to Adorno in the novel. There the “dgg -” theme of the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata op. 111 (Arietta) a. a. with the word "Wiesengrund" underlaid. The resemblance of the devil as a music critic to Adorno, claimed by Hans Mayer , is what Thomas Mann calls “completely absurd”.

Hanns Eisler, with whom Adorno had been friends since 1925 and who lived only a few streets away, approached Adorno in December 1942 with the idea of writing a book on film music together . The book, which was completed in German in 1944, was only published in English in 1949 under the title Composing for the Films , with Eisler as sole author. Adorno, who claimed to have written 90 percent of the text in a letter to his mother, had resigned as co-author because Eisler, a supporter of Soviet Marxism , had been cited before the Committee of Un-American Activities and Adorno had not been “ martyr a thing "wanted to be", "which was not mine and is not mine" (GS 15: 144), as he justified in retrospect in the afterword to the first printing of the original version in 1969.

After the manuscript of the Dialectic Book - initially titled Philosophical Fragments - had been completed in early 1944 , Adorno joined the large-scale research project on the subject of anti-Semitism, jointly operated by the University of Berkeley and the Institute of Social Research .

His last position in the USA began in October 1952 as research director of the Hacker Psychiatric Foundation and dealt with content-analytical research on newspaper horoscopes and television series . After he got into conflicting arguments with the aggression researcher Friedrich Hacker , he resigned from his position and returned to Germany in August 1953.

As critical as the émigré Adorno saw the conformist conformity observed in the USA, which judged the consequent “drawing in of cultural products into the commodity sphere”, and saw the horror of a possible convergence of “European fascism and the American entertainment industry”, he kept it as “existential Obligation to thank ”in memory that he owed the USA its“ salvation from National Socialist persecution ”.

Late Frankfurt years (1949–1969)

Institute for Social Research and " Adorno-Ampel " at the Senckenberganlage in Frankfurt am Main. Since 1962, Adorno had campaigned for the construction of a traffic light on the busy street between the institute and the university campus in Frankfurt-Bockenheim; however, the traffic light was not installed until 1987.

In October 1949 Adorno returned to Germany for the first time since emigrating. The immediate reason was Horkheimer's representation at Frankfurt University, whom Horkheimer had appointed full professor again in 1949, this time for philosophy and sociology. After alternating stays in Germany and the USA, Adorno finally returned to Germany in August 1953, where the Frankfurt University appointed him from extraordinary (1950) to regular associate professor (1953) and finally to full professor of philosophy and sociology in 1956.

Adorno's motivation to return to Germany was, according to his own admission, subjectively driven by homesickness and objectively by language. He was dependent on the German language, which for him had a “special relationship to philosophy”. His thinking "could not be detached from the German language". He had come back as a scientist in order to take up the private lectureship for philosophy that had been withdrawn from him in 1933 at his home university. But he soon became known as a representative of another discipline, sociology, for which he had acquired a variety of qualifications during his emigration years. On the one hand, he expressed himself very critically about the early experiences that Adorno had in defeated Germany: You hardly meet any Nazis, nobody wanted to have been and you knew nothing about everything, on the other hand he praised the students for “passionate participation ". He made friends with the poet Marie Luise Kaschnitz ; a close cooperation was established with the two editors of the Frankfurter Hefte , Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon .

Of the old institute employees, besides Horkheimer and Adorno, only Friedrich Pollock had returned to Frankfurt; Fromm, Löwenthal, Marcuse, Franz Neumann and Karl August Wittfogel preferred to pursue their academic careers in the USA. For the Institute for Social Research, which reopened in the new building on November 14, 1951, Adorno was jointly responsible as deputy director from the start. The institute was the first academic institution that made it possible to study sociology in post-war Germany .

After Horkheimer's withdrawal to Montagnola in Switzerland, most of the work actually rested on Adorno's shoulders. In 1958 he officially took over the management of the institute. In his wife Margarete he found an “essential support of his work” and an active collaborator. She entered the institute with him in the morning and left with him in the evening. In her own office, she meticulously edited all of Adorno's texts before they went to press. She rarely missed one of his lectures. She stood by the students as a “confessor” and mediator to the “overfather”. The fact that their marriage remained childless was a conscious decision made by both of them, which they attributed to the uncertain circumstances of the time and future prospects.

The scientific productivity that Adorno had developed in the USA in the field of social research contributed to his being recognized in Germany as one of the most important representatives of German sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. After Ludwig von Friedeburg was hired as the new department head of the institute responsible for the empirical research projects, Adorno gradually withdrew from empirical research, although he continued to speak out about the relationship between theoretical reflection and empirical research. His skepticism increased towards polarization in the so-called positivism controversy , which began in 1961 with a lecture by Karl Popper and Adorno's co- lecture on the "Logic of the Social Sciences" at a Tübingen working conference of the German Sociological Society, and Ralf Dahrendorf and Jürgen Habermas joined in the further course of this and Hans Albert involved.

From 1962 to 1969 Adorno had an affair with Arlette Pielmann from Munich , who visited him regularly in Frankfurt. Adorno's wife Gretel knew about this and tolerated it without approving it.

From 1963 to 1967 Adorno was chairman of the German Society for Sociology and was responsible for the 16th German Sociologists' Day, which was held in Frankfurt am Main in 1968 under the title Late Capitalism or Industrial Society . The time coincided with the height of the student movement. The speakers and discussants on the podium mostly reacted calmly to repeated disturbances, interruptions and other rule violations by the students.

In addition to his work as a university teacher and director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Adorno wrote important philosophical writings. The extended collection of aphorisms he had brought with him from emigration and dedicated to Max Horkheimer had already appeared in 1951 : Minima Moralia . The book, which has sold more than 100,000 times, contains the famous sentence “ There is no right life in the wrong one ” (GS 4: 43). The work on Husserl, Zur Metakritik der Epnistheorie , published in 1956 , went back in part to the Oxford studies. His main philosophical work was the negative dialectic , which Adorno himself characterized as an "anti-system" (GS 6: 10) (first published in 1966).

Adorno took part in West German musical life in the post-war period through his music-philosophical and music-sociological publications, such as the Philosophy of New Music (1949), the monographs on Richard Wagner (1952), Gustav Mahler (1960) and Alban Berg (1968) ) as well as the introduction to the sociology of music (1962), but also as a music teacher in the context of the international summer courses for new music in Darmstadt, which took place annually until the late 1960s , in which he participated almost regularly as a speaker and course instructor between 1950 and 1966 .

Besides music, it was literature that inspired Adorno's aesthetic thinking; He laid down his philosophical views on this genre in numerous essays, which are summarized in the four volumes of Notes on Literature (GS 11). He maintained friendly relationships with writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann , Alexander Kluge and Hans Magnus Enzensberger . He developed an astonishing media presence that made him a sought-after expert and discussant not only in the fields of philosophy and sociology, but also in music theory and literary criticism . In the last years of his life he worked on his posthumously published aesthetic .

Adorno was a valued university professor. Since the late 1950s, students from all disciplines have flocked to his lectures, which took place in the largest lecture hall. His lecture, which was based on a few notes and freely formulated in nuanced diction, cast a spell over many.

Adorno's last years were dominated by conflicts with his students. When the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) against the government formed by the grand coalition of CDU / CSU and SPD and its planned emergency laws , as well as against the Vietnam War, formed a new kind of student movement with the SDS at its head, tensions intensified. While Adorno joined the staunch critics of these laws and took a public position with them at an event of the Action Committee Democracy in Emergency on May 28, 1968, he kept his distance from student activism.

It was Adorno's pupils who represented the spirit of revolt and tried to draw “practical conclusions” from critical theory . When the police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras shot and killed the student Benno Ohnesorg during the demonstration against the Shah on June 2, 1967 in West Berlin , the APO began to radicalize. Immediately after Ohnesorg's death, before the start of his aesthetics lecture, Adorno expressed his “sympathy for the student”, “whose fate [...] is in no relation to his participation in a political demonstration”. The heads of the Frankfurt School had sympathy with the student critics and their protests against restorative tendencies and “ technocratic university reform ”, but were not prepared to support their actionist approach; Adorno described it as "pseudo-activity" and "impatience towards theory" in his 1969 radio lecture Resignation (GS 10/2 756 f.).

In a lengthy interview with Spiegel in May 1969 , Adorno commented on the relationship between theory and practice : “I recently said in a television interview that I had set up a theoretical model, but I had no idea that people would realize it with Molotov cocktails want. [...] Since the first circus against me in Berlin in 1967, certain groups of students have tried again and again to force me to show solidarity and demand practical action from me. I refused. "

The students increasingly acted against their former role models, even insulting them in a leaflet as “ bailiffs of the authoritarian state”. Adorno's lectures were repeatedly blown up by student activists, one particularly spectacular was an action ( stylized as a so-called breast attack in the media ) in April 1969 when Hannah Weitemeier and two other students pressed Adorno with bared breasts on the podium and sprinkled him with rose and tulip blossoms . “The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary has something surprising,” Adorno wrote to Samuel Beckett . On the other hand, Adorno and Horkheimer were exposed to allegations by the political right that they were the intellectual authors of student violence.

In 1969 Adorno was forced to stop his lectures. When students broke into the Institute for Social Research on January 31, 1969 in order to categorically push through an immediate discussion about the political situation, the institute directors - Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg - called the police and reported the occupiers. Adorno, who had always been an opponent of the police and surveillance state , suffered from this break in his self-image. He had to testify as a witness before the Frankfurt district court against Hans-Jürgen Krahl , one of his most talented students. Adorno commented on this in a letter to Alexander Kluge: "I don't see why I should make myself a martyr of Herr Krahl, who I thought would put a knife to my throat to cut it, and replied to my mild protest: But Professor, you mustn't personalize that ”.

Adorno's grave (2007)

From February 1969 until Adorno's death, Adorno and Herbert Marcuse carried out a dissent in an intensive correspondence, which Adorno already feared in a letter to Horkheimer, that it could lead to a “break between him and us”. Marcuse criticized Adorno's abstinence from practice as well as Habermas' accusation of " left fascism " against the rebelling students and the police eviction of the occupied institute. Adorno defended Habermas' accusation. He, too, now saw tendencies that “converge directly with fascism” and, as he wrote Marcuse, “took the danger of the student movement turning into fascism much more seriously than you”.

The day after the court hearing against Krahl, he and his wife went on their usual summer vacation in the Swiss mountains. Instead of the usual vacation in Sils Maria , they drove to Zermatt for the first time (1,600 m above sea level). Insufficiently acclimatized, he took a cable car to almost 3000 m. ü. M. and then hiked to the Gandegghütte (3030 m above sea level ). Because he had problems with his mountain boots, he then went to Visp (660 m above sea level) to see a shoemaker. When he developed heart problems, he was taken to the St. Maria Hospital in Visp. There he died of a heart attack on the morning of August 6, 1969 .

Adorno's grave is in the Frankfurt main cemetery .

Intellectual influences

As with most theorists of the Frankfurt School, Adorno's thinking is influenced by Hegel , Marx and Freud . Their “grand theories” held great fascination for many left-wing intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. In his "political biography" Lorenz Jäger speaks with a critical undertone of Adorno's " Achilles heel ", that is, his "almost unlimited [m] trust in finished teachings, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, the teachings of the Second Viennese School". Adorno, however, trusted Marxism as little unchanged as he did in Hegel's dialectic . The Second Vienna School of course remained the guiding light in his work as a music critic and composer.

Hegel

Adorno's appropriation of Hegel's philosophy can be traced back to his inaugural lecture in 1931; in it he postulated: “Only dialectically, philosophical interpretation seems possible to me” (GS 1: 338). Hegel refused to separate method and content, since thinking is always thinking of something, so that for him dialectic is "the movement of the object itself". According to Gerhard Schweppenhäuser , Adorno made this claim his own, primarily by basing his way of thinking on one of Hegel's basic categories, the definite negation , according to which something is not abstractly denied and dissolved into zero, but rather by opposing something in a new, richer one Term is repealed .

Adorno understood his Drei Studien zu Hegel as "preparing a changed concept of dialectics"; they stop there “where one would have to begin” (GS 5: 249 f.). Adorno devoted himself to this task in one of his later major works, Negative Dialectics (1966). The title expresses “tradition and rebellion in equal measure”. Using Hegel's motifs, Adorno unfolds his, the “negative” dialectic of the “non-identical” against his speculative dialectic (see below).

Karl Marx

The Marxian critique of political economy is part of the background understanding of Adorno's thought, of course - according to Jürgen Habermas - as "secret orthodoxy whose categories [...] are [betrayed] themselves in the culture-critical application without being identified as such". His reception of Marx was first conveyed through Georg Lukács' influential work History and Class Consciousness ; from him Adorno took over the Marxist categories of commodity fetish and reification . They are closely related to the concept of exchange , which in turn is at the center of Adorno's philosophy and epistemologically points far beyond economics. It is not difficult to decipher the developed “barter society” with its “insatiable and destructive expansion principle” (GS 5: 274) as the capitalist one. In addition to the exchange value, Marx's concept of ideology occupies a prominent position in his entire work.

The concept of class , which Adorno rarely used, also has its origins in Marx's theory. Two texts Adorno explicitly refer to the concept of class: one is the subchapter classes and strata from the introduction to the sociology of music , the other an unpublished essay of 1942 entitled Reflections on class theory , the first time posthumously in the collected works was published (GS 8: 373-391).

Sigmund Freud

The psychoanalysis is a constitutive element of the Critical Theory. Adorno, in contrast to Horkheimer, never subjected himself to the practical experience of psychoanalysis, but received Sigmund Freud's work early on . His Freud reading dates back to the time of his work on the first (withdrawn) habilitation thesis - The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Spiritual Teaching - from 1927. In it Adorno advocated the thesis "that the healing of all neuroses is synonymous with the patient's complete knowledge of the meaning of their symptoms " (GS 1: 236). In the essay on the relationship between sociology and psychology (1955), he justified the necessity of “ supplementing the theory of society with psychology, especially analytically oriented social psychology ,” “in view of fascism ”. In order to be able to explain the cohesion of the repressive society, which is directed against the interests of human beings, research into the instinctual structures that predominate in the masses is necessary (GS 8: 42).

Adorno always remained a follower and defender of the orthodox Freudian doctrine, "psychoanalysis in its strict form". From this position he attacked Erich Fromm and later Karen Horney early on for their revisionism (GS 8: 20 ff.). He expressed reservations both against a sociologization of psychoanalysis and against its reduction to a therapeutic procedure. Adorno owed central analytical terms such as narcissism , ego weakness , pleasure and reality principle to Freud's reception . Freud's writings The Uneasiness in Culture and Mass Psychology and I-Analysis were important sources of reference for him. He wished the “ingenious and far too little-known late work about discomfort in culture ” (GS 20/1: 144) “to be widely distributed, especially in connection with Auschwitz”; they show that with the permanent refusal imposed by civilization, "barbarism is inherent in the principle of civilization itself" (GS 10/2: 674).

plant

Jan Philipp Reemtsma has categorized Adorno's publications on the various subject areas according to the quantitative proportions of his Gesammelte Schriften : Accordingly, philosophical questions in the broadest sense account for 2,600 pages, for sociological topics for 1,500 pages, for literary theory and criticism around 800 pages for musical writings however, more than 4,000 pages.

Language and forms of representation

Adorno is considered a particularly difficult to read or understand author. Henning Ritter considers the accusation that his language is incomprehensible to be a legend. It is explained on the one hand by the accumulation of foreign words, but even more on a simplicity that is surprising in a philosophical context: "Colloquial words are treated equally as terms". By using words from different language dimensions, he adds associations and motifs of a certain material to them, "whether it is 'tough baby' or 'ecriture' or ' dejavu '". Adorno uses everyday words as banal sprinkles "in order to then say things that are beyond banality - just as art is made from things found somewhere".

Connoisseurs and analysts of Adorno's work have pointed out that they are related to literary texts, musical compositions and the “porous” mental images of Walter Benjamin. According to Albrecht Wellmer, his texts resemble “complex pieces of music that have been heard through in every nuance”. The composer and musicologist Dieter Schnebel points to Adorno's “Composition in Language”. While the usual form of speech advances from sentence to sentence, compositions resemble relationship models that refer to the future and remind us of what was in the past, and work with variations and contrasts, shortenings and extensions. The paradoxes he frequently set resemble syncopations , which at the same time stop and accelerate the text. Ruth Sonderegger speaks of a " rhizome-like structure" of the texts.

Adorno's way of writing is unthinkable without Benjamin's example; Adorno owes him the reference to the close relationship between content and design. Since his early writings, Adorno has emphasized a complementary relationship between the form and content of philosophical texts. In particular the “small forms” of philosophical presentation preferred by Adorno - the essay , the treatise , the aphorism , the fragment - are prime examples of his linguistic attempts to break out of traditional systematic philosophical thinking.

Adorno's aversion to definitions and the paratactic structure of his texts also contribute to this, i.e. statements are placed side by side, avoiding a hierarchical order of subsumption because in this - as Habermas interprets Adorno - "the generality of the logical form does the individual injustice" . In the Minima Moralia he demands: “In a philosophical text all sentences should be equally close to the center” (GS 4: 78). He describes the underlying design principle, which Adorno relies on again and again, with constellation or configuration. Martin Mittelmeier notes that the characteristics of this process are the “most differentiated fragmentation of the phenomena, the removal from their traditional contexts and the recomposition into unfamiliar combinations”. The paradoxical project of “organizing a linear text according to a spatial pattern” aims at the mutual illumination of the terms, in which the dominance of a single concept is broken by the juxtaposition with others. For a philosophical text such as the Aesthetic Theory , Adorno regards a step-by-step argumentation from the general to the particular or vice versa and the “indispensable consequence of the first-after” as inadequate.

The programmatic character of Adorno's writing is ascribed to his essay The Essay as Form . It is one of the few texts in which Adorno provides “insights into his workshop” and provides metatheoretical information about the forms of representation in philosophy. In its anti-systematic, paratactic form, cut through by montages, its “methodologically non-methodical” procedure (GS 11: 21), the essay forms “the macrostructure of what is called constellation and configuration on a micro level”. As a form of representation, the essay wants to "burst open with concepts what does not go into concepts"; he does not allow himself to be locked up in the world of “organized science” nor to be absorbed by a philosophy which “makes do with the empty and abstract remainder that science has not yet occupied”; their "innermost law of form [...] is heresy " (GS 11: 32 f.). According to Britta Scholze, the great works - Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory - were also written according to the essayistic mode of presentation and, to a certain extent, represent “essayistic mosaics ”.

philosophy

Today four very different works are considered to be Adorno's main philosophical works. The dialectic of the Enlightenment , written together with Max Horkheimer during the emigration . Philosophical Fragments (1947) is seen as the central text of the Frankfurt School and coined the term culture industry . The Minima Moralia were also created during emigration . Reflections from the damaged life (1951), an aphoristic “diagnosis of a globally organized immaturity”. Adorno himself regarded the Negative Dialectic (1966) as his main work, a philosophical critique of "identifying thinking"; the title for him was synonymous with the concept of critical theory. Posthumously in 1970 Adorno's Aesthetic Theory , which represents his philosophy of art, appeared.

Albrecht Wellmer refers to the high degree of continuity in Adorno's philosophical thought from his early Frankfurt inaugural lecture The Actuality of Philosophy (1931), in which he established his concept of philosophy as a "science of interpretation" (GS 1: 334), to his later works. At the age of 28 he had already developed “all the decisive motives for his thinking, as it were its basic constellations”. His later rich production, including that in music philosophy and music sociology , is based on the development of these basic constellations. In contrast to Horkheimer, who a few months earlier in his programmatic inaugural address when he took over the directorate of the Institute for Social Research saw the goal of a "theory of contemporary society as a whole" being achievable solely in the interdisciplinary interaction of the individual sciences, Adorno dismissed in "dialectical communication" Sociology and philosophy assign the task of supplying empirical material to philosophy, generating the patterns of interpretation; He summarized the latter in the picture: "To construct keys, in front of which reality pops up" (GS 1: 340). For the first time in the inaugural lecture the concept of totality was questioned, which thinking is unable to grasp; Philosophy must learn to forego the question of totality. He denied that contemporary philosophical directions such as phenomenology and Heidegger's theory of being would answer “the cardinal philosophical questions”. The thesis that these questions are in principle unanswerable, as represented by the positivism of the Vienna Circle , which proposes to dissolve philosophy into science, would be tantamount to liquidating philosophy . Adorno countered this: “The idea of ​​science is research, that of philosophy is interpretation” (GS 1: 334).

The philosophical content of Adorno's texts is seldom easy to understand. Philosophy is "sister to music"; what is floating is "hardly [...] to be properly put into words" (GS 6: 115). His categories are Janus-faced : depending on the context, he uses them with positive or negative connotation . Most of the time, Adorno is committed to the analysis of the concrete, at the center of which is the individual in contemporary society. He opposes philosophical systems such as classical epistemology , which mutilated the individual and the non-identical instead of understanding them, with his negative dialectic as an “anti-system”. Nevertheless, Adorno stuck to philosophy, even metaphysics in the sense of speculation that transcends the given . According to his doctrine, one can only think beyond the existing as a certain negation of the factual. If one does not want to fall behind Kant and Hegel, philosophy criticism must be: voice criticism , social criticism , art criticism , which also uses the exaggeration as knowledge method.

In Kierkegaard, Adorno valued his criticism of Hegel's disdain for the individual who disappears behind the objective spirit . It sharpened Adorno's view of Hegel's dialectic and had a lasting influence. Many of Adorno's philosophical motifs that were later formulated can already be found in the Kierkegaard script. Horkheimer characterized it as "incredibly difficult".

Adorno's exploration of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was reflected in the text On the Metakritik der Epnistheorie . Adorno had worked on the manuscript in Oxford from 1934 to the autumn of 1937 without completing it. After individual chapters had been published in the following years, the work was only published in 1956 as a monograph with the dedication “For Max”. The book is regarded as a "solitaire", which did not find any great resonance in the philosophical literature, although Adorno in 1968 described the work as the most important of his books to him next to the Negative Dialectic (GS 5: 386).

As the antipode of Heidegger, the leading representative of fundamental ontology , he subjected its terminology to an "ideology-critical linguistic analysis" in the jargon of the authenticity . But he knew how to differentiate between the substantial philosophy of Heidegger and the clumsiness of the "imitators of the existential-philosophical speech gesture". The proximity of Adorno's thought, its overlap with Heidegger's philosophy, was often referred to.

→ Main article : Jargon of authenticity

Philosophy of the non-identical

In his introduction to Adorno's thinking, Rolf Wiggershaus , the chronicler of the Frankfurt School, describes his “philosophy of the non-identical” as the horizon of his critical social theory. As non-identical, Adorno understands the “conceptless, individual and particular”, for which Hegel expressed his disinterest and on which he stuck “the label of lazy existence” (GS 6: 20). For the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer , too , Adorno is an “advocate for the non-identical”. As a critic of “identifying thinking”, Adorno distrusts thinking in general terms. Dialectical thinking raises the objection that the general term represents a state of affairs as something fixed, unchangeable and constant (GS 6: 156). Adorno's postulate to philosophy is "to get beyond the concept through the concept" (GS 6: 27).

The philosophy of the nonidentical turns against both original philosophy (which presupposes a first thing - spirit or matter -) and subject philosophy (which thinks the object is subordinate to or subordinate to the subject). At Adorno, “ object ” has different meanings: other subjects, nature, things, reified things . For Adorno, the subject, as a conscious being, is at the same time part of the natural context opposite to it, which it has in its own consciousness but recognizes as something else. By referring to what is not identical with the subject, Adorno pleads for a different relationship to one's own and external nature, which is no longer determined by disposition and domination, but by reconciliation and adaptation. For the latter, Adorno often uses the term mimesis .

The concept of “reconciliation” is central to Adorno's philosophy. It can be roughly translated with the "non-violent integration of the divergent" (GS 7: 283). In the horizon of Adorno's thought, reconciliation can mean as diverse as: reconciliation of spirit and nature, of subject and object, of general and particular, of individual and society, of morality and nature. Primarily the oppressed nature, the threatened individual and the uncontrolled isolated stand in an unreconciled relationship to its counterpart. Reconciliation "would release the non-identical, [...] only opened the multiplicity of the different" (GS 6: 18).

→ Main article : Negative dialectic

Critique of Epistemology

Philosophical epistemology is not at the center of Adorno's philosophical lectures and writings, but the early reading of Kant through Kracauer and his dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology brought him into contact with this philosophical discipline in the early phases of his intellectual development. He is an epistemologist insofar as he discusses the relationship between thought and reality as the touchstone and precondition for reliable knowledge.

Like almost all philosophical questions, Adorno also treated epistemology from the perspective of criticism. He has titled his studies of Husserl's phenomenology with the metacriticism of epistemology . In the poorly received work, he discusses the relationship between the knowing subject and the object to be known. Husserl's idea of ​​the objectivity of truth and the idea of ​​the thinking realization of true knowledge were also close to Adorno's heart. But Husserl's idea of ​​having a prejudice-free philosophy that refers to “the things themselves” using the method of “phenomenological reduction”, he criticizes as “logical nonsense” that is incompatible with Hegel's “doctrine of mediation” (GS 5: 13). With this Adorno shares the skepticism towards an "absolutely first as the undoubtedly certain starting point of philosophy" (GS 5: 13) and insists on the "mediation of every immediate" (GS 5: 160). Even when Adorno often speaks of the “primacy of the object” (GS 6: 186) in a materialistic way of thinking and insists on an “alterity [= otherness, otherness] confronting the subject”, this does not happen without the conviction that “the properties of the objects of knowledge can only be had through the reflective subject ”.

Since Adorno's “utopia of knowledge” aims at the unabridged experience of the nonidentical, he expects art “as a genuinely different medium of knowledge [...] support”. Rüdiger Bubner sees a "convergence of knowledge and art" here, while Habermas even speaks of the "transfer of knowledge skills to art".

Negative moral philosophy

The well-known saying from the Minima Moralia - "There is no right life in the wrong one" (GS 4: 43) - was often interpreted in secondary literature as Adorno's rejection of moral philosophy. Contrary to this view, Gerhard Schweppenhäuser has worked out Adorno's underlying moral philosophy and described it as a “negative moral philosophy”, an “ ethics after Auschwitz”, with Auschwitz as a cipher for the Holocaust . Against this is the fact that Adorno gave at least two lectures on moral philosophy (winter semester 1956/57, summer semester 1963) and his Minima Moralia constantly revolve around the topic of wrong versus right life. Adorno himself described the Minima Moralia as "a book about the right or rather the wrong life".

But similar to metaphysics, Adorno has an ambivalent relationship to moral philosophy. He criticizes the fact that Christian-occidental morality demands that individuals take responsibility for their actions and thereby assume a freedom of action which they as social beings do not have at all. At the same time, however, he sees morality as the “representative of a coming freedom”. Morality is contradicting itself; she means "freedom and oppression at the same time". As a philosopher one should therefore neither steer towards an affirmative counter-morality nor towards an abstract negation of all morality. Instead of abstractly negating morality, as Nietzsche did, its definite negation must contain an indication of what is better.

Adorno's starting point is Kant's moral philosophy, which defines moral action as self-determination in freedom. But as long as the overall social context falls behind the standard of a just life, it is not at all possible for people to act morally right. Ethical considerations therefore need to be supplemented by social analysis and criticism. To separate the moral principle from the social and to relocate it to the private disposition means to renounce "the realization of the humane condition set in the moral principle" (GS 4: 103).

Adorno answers the question of what constitutes “real life” in a consistently negative way, as a certain negation. “It starts with what shouldn't be”, or with life in its “wrong” or “alienated form”. ”According to Albrecht Wellmer, Adorno's doctrine of real life can be found “ as if in mirror writing ”in his Minima Moralia .

Adorno refuses to specify the content and goal of an emancipated society. He only mentions “that no one should go hungry” (GS 4: 176) as a minimum condition; elsewhere it says: “There should be no torture” (GS 6: 281). Martin Seel sees Adorno's core idea of ​​a good human life in respect for the individual . At the end of his lectures on moral philosophy, Adorno repeatedly circled the subject of the possibility and impossibility of behaving correctly in the wrong life. His answer is: "The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the right life today is in the form of resistance to the critically resolved forms of a false life seen through by the most advanced consciousness". Resistance is "the real substance of the moral". Ethics must become political philosophy, the question of the right life must pass into the question of the right politics, he says at the end of his moral-philosophical lecture.

Metaphysics and metaphysics criticism

Adorno's relationship to metaphysics is ambivalent. His criticism applies to both classical metaphysics and metaphysics criticism . Reflections on metaphysics run through his entire work. He worked it out particularly in the Negative Dialectic , the central intention of which he calls Gershom Scholem “the salvation of metaphysics”.

Adorno's understanding of metaphysics is closely related to his understanding of Western rationality. For him this is a project of self and nature control (GS 3: 19). The aim of this project is that people try to free themselves from the contingency of natural occurrences by means of themselves in order to gain control over themselves and their surroundings. Within this project, metaphysics plays an important role as the “doctrine of the unalterable without history” (GS 2: 261). By opposing the contingencies of empirical life with a system of conceptual contexts that are understood as immutable, metaphysics introduces a “thinking of identity”. The identifying thinking is directed not only against what the subject encounters externally, but also against his own bodily nature. It too should be manageable and overcome through identification, which Adorno calls “adaptation to the dead” (GS 3: 79, 206). Metaphysical thinking is directed against its actual goal, the rational self-determination and freedom of the human being. The identities that are supposed to overcome the contingent dominate the one for whose freedom they were sought. Adorno regards this as the scandal of metaphysics, but also of rationality and enlightenment (GS 6: 361).

The critique of metaphysics, whose basic program is actually the liberation of the subject from metaphysics, ultimately only leads to Adorno's lack of freedom. He mainly deals with the philosophy of Kant and positivism. Adorno interprets Kant's philosophy as an attempt to argue for human freedom from the critique of metaphysics. For Kant, man is a being who can only come to knowledge with the involvement of his senses and his intellect. If the knowledge is always under the fixed forms of intuition and understanding, then for Adorno the lack of freedom of the subject is sealed: Human consciousness is "condemned to eternal imprisonment in the forms of knowledge given to it" (GS 3: 378) . The human being is thus understood in his possibilities of knowledge as a completely fixed and unfree being. According to Adorno, this commitment to the actual finds its continuation in positivism.

Against traditional metaphysics and metaphysics criticism, Adorno wants to rehabilitate a metaphysics of transcendence . Metaphysics is a thinking of the absolute, a thinking of that which transcends the given: "Thinking beyond oneself, into the open, that is exactly what metaphysics". It is essential for the thinking of the absolute that it is beyond the control of a subject. It must not be characterized with the concept of the unchangeable, but must be thought of as the non-identical: “The absolute, however, as metaphysics envisions it, would be the non-identical that would only emerge after the compulsion to identify” (GS 6: 398).

Since knowledge is always directed towards the identical, there can be no knowledge of the absolute as non-identical. The non-identical can, however, appear to the subjects as “metaphysical experience” (GS 6: 364). It is the experience of unavailability, Adorno also speaks of “unreliability” (GS 6: 364). The metaphysical experience is also an experience of negativity. The subject experiences its own powerlessness to grasp the object of experience.

For Adorno, metaphysical experiences are possible above all in art. He speaks explicitly of the “metaphysical content of art” (GS 7: 122). Works of art indicate the non-identical by compelling their recipients to behave in a certain way. Since a work of art cannot easily be deciphered, recipients are forced to let themselves be guided by the structure of the work of art. They are thereby pushed into a practice of assimilation that Adorno calls mimesis . The experience thus opened up by the works of art indicates something that cannot be grasped identically.

In Minima Moralia No. 151, on the other hand, he judges occultism as a relapse behind the rationality of modernity , not overcoming it by speaking of a “metaphysics of stupid fellows”. Occultism is on the one hand a reaction to reification: "When objective reality appears deaf to the living like never before, they try to elicit meaning from it with abracadabra." perennial vivisection . "Mind and meaning are asserted as fact, as immediate experience, the mediation through enlightening thinking ignored.

Criticism of positivism

Adorno insisted that in a contradicting world thinking must also be contradicting itself and thus the postulate of consistency as well as the "false ideal" of system formation, by which the "great philosophy" is oriented, should be rejected. “The whole is the untrue” is a central sentence in the Minima Moralia (GS 4: 55). He dealt with the individual sciences, but at the same time exercised immanent criticism of the division of labor, which has separated more and more individual scientific disciplines from philosophy and turned them into separate subjects in the scientific community. Reflection on the social conditions of the scientific division of labor made him a critic of positivism , which he took wider than is generally customary. In addition to the logical positivism of the “Vienna Circle” and the analytical philosophy , he also included authors such as Karl Popper and Hans Albert , who saw themselves as critics of positivism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein , the “most reflective positivist” (GS 8: 282). His basic thesis in the Tractatus , “The world is everything that is the case”, is for Adorno a thought that seals the bondage of man and obliges him to exist.

Adorno was one of the protagonists in the so-called positivism dispute between the critical rationalists Popper and Albert on the one hand and representatives of the Frankfurt School on the other, which was conducted in the 1960s over methods and value judgments in the social sciences. He gave birth to the term positivism dispute , which was initially rejected by the adversaries, but finally prevailed.

sociology

Social criticism

Adorno's criticism of social conditions and its ideology is directed against the “ administered world ” (a synonym for post-liberal late capitalism ) and the “ culture industry ”. Both have a tendency towards the liquidation of the individual and everything deviating, in other words: the elimination or submission of the non-identical and the unavailable. In the context of the prescribed consumption and the organized filling of the non-working time "through the culture industry, enthusiasm for technology and sport", a "complete recording of people right down to their inner life" takes place. Adorno's negative reference to existing social conditions is consistently evident. Thomas Mann waited in vain for a positive word in 1952. He criticized the negativity of Adorno's thinking: “If there were only one positive word from you, dearest friend, that would allow even an approximate vision of the true society to be postulated! The reflections from the damaged life left it, only that, also missing. What is, what would be right? "

Adorno's sociological and social psychological work is in the tradition of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim , Max Weber , Georg Lukács and Sigmund Freud. He owed them insights that he often followed up on. The commodity character and the reification of all human relationships, generally the exchange, form the sounding board of his Marxist-influenced social analyzes, which Lukács' history and class consciousness owe to central stimuli. He and Horkheimer found the theme of instrumental reason to be exemplified in Max Weber's concept of “functional rationality”. The term “managed world” remains related to Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy with its tendency to expand and become independent; he repeatedly refers to this in his lectures on Culture and Administration from 1960 (GS 8: 124) and Individual and Organization from 1954 (GS 8: 442).

Like Durkheim, he understands the objectivity of social facts ( faits sociaux ) , "the thesis of the independence of social tendencies in relation to individual-psychological ones" (GS 8: 246) as a fundamental sociological insight, which he calls the "primacy of the object" in his terminology. summarizes (exemplarily in the Negative Dialectic , GS 6: 184 ff.). It is true that he speaks out against a sudden merging of findings from psychology and sociology - as in his essay On the relationship between psychology and sociology (GS 8: 42–92) - because in view of "the current impotence of the individual" economics and sociology are more important could contribute to the explanation of social processes and tendencies. Nevertheless, psychology, especially psychoanalysis, is an adequate medium for explaining the irrational behavior of individuals and groups (GS 8: 86). He repeatedly referred to Freud's work on mass psychology and analysis of the ego to explain the instinctual dynamics of the authoritarian character and the mass following of fascist leaders.

With his lecture Late Capitalism or Industrial Society, Adorno opened the 16th German Sociologists ' Day in 1968 , which was dominated by the student movement and the 150th birthday of Karl Marx. Building on the Marxist orthodoxy answering the title question to the effect that the present society industrial society "according to the state of their productive forces ", but "capitalism in its production ratios " (GS 8: 361) was.

Empirical Social Research

It was only during his emigration to the USA that Adorno gained experience in empirical social research . Through Horkheimer's mediation, he became a member of the Princeton Radio Research Project , a major research project headed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld entitled The Essential Value of Radio to all Types of Listeners . Adorno was entrusted with the implementation of a sub-project for the musical area.

In his review of scientific experiences in America , he reported that the radio project left “little room for critical social research” (GS 10/2: 707). To him, the technology that test subjects voted on whether they liked or disliked pieces of music at the push of a button seemed "highly inadequate compared to the complexity of what was to be recognized" (GS 10/2: 708). Since the investigations were carried out within the framework of the established commercial radio system and “usable information” was expected (GS 10/2: 709), hardly anything could be determined in this way for the sociology of music . His first essay written in the USA - On the fetish character of music and the regression of hearing - which appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1938 , was, according to the author, the "first expression" of his work on the Radio Research Project (GS 14: 9).

Adorno rated his experience as instructive exploration of the meaning and methods of social research as well as radio music and radio listeners. This activity finally resulted in an extensive study in English: the studies summarized under the title Current of Music , which Robert Hullot-Kentor has reconstructed and published. Viewed as a whole, Adorno found access to empirical social research in the New Yorker and later Californian emigration years through practical experience and discussions (GS 10/2: 703–738).

After he had completed the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer in 1944 , he became a collaborator on the large-scale research project on the subject of anti-Semitism jointly worked on by the Institute of Social Research and the University of Berkeley . Then issued in 1950 sociological study is The Authoritarian Personality ( The Authoritarian Personality ) back, the structures of prejudice and the relationship between authoritarianism and fascism investigated. In a letter of July 19, 1947 to Horkheimer, Lazarsfeld expressed his enthusiasm for the successful combination of critical and empirical social research. The parts written by Adorno as well as the introduction jointly written by him and the authors involved, as well as the chapter on the F-scale (English version in GS 9/1: 143–508) he had from Milli Weinbrenner, an employee of the institute, translate; Only posthumously did these texts appear in German in the Federal Republic of Germany under the title Studies on Authoritarian Character (1973).

Adorno's experiences in the USA with sociology and social research, especially his co-authorship of the Authoritarian Personality , formed the basis for his being recognized in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the most important representatives of German sociology has been. Have contributed to his contributions to the important empirical postwar project of the Institute for Social Research: the to the questions of the Authoritarian Personality anknüpfende group experiment . Adorno wrote the chapter Guilt and Defense for the final research report and, together with Horkheimer, the foreword (GS 9/2: 121–324).

Regardless of this, he did not hold back from critical discussions of empirical social research. In 1952 he gave the speech on the current position of empirical social research in Germany , in which he emphasized its importance in a modified form for critical theory (GS 8: 478-531), and in the lecture Sociology and Empirical Research , first published in 1957 , Adorno presented his Criticism of contemporary sociology and empirical social research (GS 8: 196–216). He initially voted for the expansion of empirical social research in Germany and the connection of quantitative with qualitative methods (such as content analysis and group discussion ) , including methods from the USA . While he had emphasized the possibility of linking empiricism with theory, he later expressed himself increasingly skeptical about such a mediation. He openly articulated this skepticism in the so-called positivism dispute .

Aesthetics and cultural criticism

Adorno's writings on aesthetics and cultural criticism are strongly influenced by the writings of Walter Benjamin , with whom he was in lively exchange. From the origin of the German tragedy (1928) to the Passagen work , they served Adorno as important sources of inspiration. From the epistemological prelude to the tragedy script, Adorno took the suggestion to develop a specific form of philosophical handling of art: not conceptually-deductive nor inductive, but configurative by arranging the phenomena in constellations. However , Adorno reacted critically and angrily to Benjamin's famous work The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility . Benjamin had described film and cinema as avant-garde media and was enthusiastic about them, while Adorno saw them as excesses of the culture industry .

The starting point of Adorno's art-philosophical considerations is the assumption of a “fundamental difference between art and social reality”. He reconstructs the history and being of art “under the sign of negativity”. It is “the concrete negative of the general negative”. For him there can be no supra-historical definition of art; all ideas and theorems of art philosophy are radically historicized. Since the work of art is not yet fully integrated into the social totality, it forms the Archimedean point from which historical knowledge becomes possible.

Aesthetic theory

→ Main article : Aesthetic theory

The philosopher Günter Figal sees Adorno's main work and legacy in the posthumous aesthetic theory, which was not completed by the author himself . It is the attempt to draw attention to the experience of the unavailable “individual and non-identical in art”. More consistently than in his other writings, Adorno uses his guiding concepts as a multitude of centers around which his reflections are formed and which only come together in a constellation. The Germanist Gerhard Kaiser understands Adorno's Critical Theory essentially as an “aesthetic theory”: In it “all the motives of his thinking are narrowed down”.

For Günter Figal, the central thesis of the work is that art is the “result of a rational construction” that coherently combines the diverse “material” (sounds, words, colors, wood, metal, etc.) into one unit. In the work of art, “the material is set free in its individuality” and the “non-identical” is saved. Although appropriately designed, the result of the work of art appears as if it were created naturally, because the able design itself belongs to “nature in the subject” (Immanuel Kant) - be it as pre-spiritual sensuality or as a creatural reflex. Adorno does not understand art as an imitation of nature, but of natural beauty , which has something overwhelming for people, but in its “not made” at the same time eludes human understanding.

In the introductory section of Aesthetic Theory , Adorno already speaks of the “dual character of art as autonomous and as fait social ” (GS 7: 16). The concept of fait social , adopted by Émile Durkheim , denotes a socially generated fact. Works of art are tied into the prevailing relations of production and, as products of social labor (GS 7: 337), also salable goods. Their autonomy is socially determined (GS 7: 313); it was "laboriously forced out of society" (GS 7: 353). The work of art embodies autonomy in the fact that it obeys its own law of form alone. From their autonomy it follows that works of art have no function: "As far as a social function can be predicted by works of art, it is their inoperability" (GS 7: 337). In its irreconcilable counter-position to society, art asserts its autonomy: "By crystallizing itself as its own, instead of complying with existing social norms and qualifying as 'socially useful', it criticizes society through its mere existence" (GS 7: 337).

As a utopia , art represents the “not yet existing”, the “imaginary reparation for the catastrophe of world history” (GS 7: 204). Adorno's sentence - "In every genuine work of art something appears that does not exist" (GS 7: 127) - refers to a promise of happiness ( Stendhals promesse du bonheur ), which can be read as "total negation of given reality". Happiness only exists “as an appearance that eschatologically awaits fulfillment”.

Literature: interpretation and criticism

Adorno's essays summarized under the title Notes on Literature are dedicated to the philosophical deciphering of poetry (GS 11). In addition to the programmatic for the writing and design way Adorno's opening essay The essay as a form they contain recorded in the professional world with great resonance essays on Eichendorff and Hölderlin as well as Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris and Samuel Beckett's Endgame . In the two essays, which are dedicated to a single work, Adorno, according to Jan Philipp Reemtsma , succeeds in “synthesizing the interpretation of something strange and the explication of one's own intentions”. In a polemical discussion of Georg Lukács' theory of literary realism (extorted reconciliation) and with an essay based on Jean-Paul Sartre's work What is literature? takes as an occasion for the critical handling of committed literature, he explicates his own normative literary theory in certain negation. According to this, literary works of art should not resist the course of the world either by critically reflecting objective reality or by showing alternatives to it, but “by means of nothing other than their shape” (GS 11: 413). Alone the ruthlessly autonomous literature "which has terminated any commitment to the world [...]" (GS 11: 425), Adorno thinks, next to the advanced music, as a "last place for the 'pre-appearance' of the utopian as one possible others ”. He also declares the “artist who carries the work of art” to be the “governor of the overall social subject” (GS 11: 126).

Writings critical of culture

The culture-critical writings of Adorno comprise two extensive volumes (GS 10/1 and 10/2), beginning with the early collection of essays Prisms. Cultural criticism and society , which brings together published works from the years 1950 to 1953 and which appeared for the first time in 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag. They contain the essays Characteristics of Benjamin and Notes on Kafka . Another polemical confrontation with jazz : timeless fashion. Regarding jazz , he repeats the pejorative judgments of the early essay On Jazz from 1936, which he devalues ​​as a component of commercial popular music and as the "false liquidation of art" (GS 10/1: 127).

In the essay Cultural Criticism and Society , Adorno formulated one of his most controversial statements: “ Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric ”. The apodictically formulated verdict became more well known than any other statement on contemporary literature that it was discussed controversially for decades and motivated Adorno to make multiple declarations and modifications without taking back the central message about the shameful failure of culture in the face of Auschwitz . "Their disproportion to the horror that has happened and threatening condemns them to cynicism ", it says in the aesthetic theory of the "culture that rose after the catastrophe" (GS 7: 348).

In addition to essays critical of ideology on Karl Mannheim , Oswald Spengler , Thorstein Veblen and Aldous Huxley , the volumes contain contributions that, identified as critical models , show a hitherto unusual interest in practical intervention in social and political processes for Adorno's texts. In addition to his lectures, which have been taken up well beyond the circles of critical pedagogy, these include What means: Coming to terms with the past (1959) and education after Auschwitz (1966), questions about sexual taboos today, television consumption, teacher training, etc., but also the decided rejection of the Solidarity with their protest actions demanded by rebelling students ( marginalia on theory and practice as well as resignation in GS 10/2)

Culture industry

→ Main article : Culture industry - Enlightenment as mass fraud

The culture industry chapter in the Dialectic of Enlightenment reveals Adorno's handwriting more clearly than other parts of the book. His theme is “aesthetic barbarism today” (GS 3: 152). In contrast to authentic art, which at least brings the contradictions of the social system to speak and maintains an awareness of radical change, the products of the culture industry would drive out people's desire for self-knowledge and self-determination. Cinema, radio, television, jazz, magazines and organized sport are named as the media that ensure an increasing “uniformity of individual actions, thoughts and feelings”. Detlev Clausen contradicts the thesis that Adorno basically despised film as an art form by referring to Adorno's appreciation of Chaplin and Fritz Lang , with whom he had a long friendship. The term "industry" refers to the standardization of products and the rationalization of dissemination techniques (GS 10/1: 339).

Democratic education

Jürgen Habermas drew attention to another side of the social critic Adorno in a lecture on Jewish remigrants. In numerous public appearances and speeches, the supposedly pessimistic social philosopher and resigned intellectuals have shown a "reformist, social democratic downright [...] People's teacher" of the program of the American occupation forces for democratic re-education ( re-education ) took the Germans seriously. In spite of all of the negativism represented in academic teaching and all of the theoretical criticism of the Enlightenment, Adorno practiced “a Kantian education to come of age” in public. Emil Walter-Busch argues that, realizing the impossibility of revolutionary practice in the present, Adorno tried with modest means to counteract social disaster. He did this in particular with three generally understandable lectures: What does it mean to come to terms with the past (1959; GS 10/2: 555-575), To combat anti-Semitism today (1962; GS 20/1: 360-383) and, as one of his most famous educational texts, education after Auschwitz (1966; GS 10/2: 674–690).

The cultural scientist Volker Heins has for the first review of the Suhrkamp Verlag to their publication publications Adorno with "improvised lectures" (2 volumes) and "talks, discussions and interviews" (3 volumes) with him an "enlightened premise of the ability to understand and educability of Audience ”, which revealed clear tensions“ between his critical theory and the rhetoric of his public lectures ”.

The planned two-volume publication did not materialize. From this fund comes the single publication Aspects of New Right-Wing Radicalism , which contains a lecture given in April 1967 at the invitation of the Association of Austrian Socialist Students at the University of Vienna. In it, Adorno dealt with the rise of the NPD at the time . In autumn 2019 an anthology was published by Michael Schwarz with lectures reconstructed from tape recordings and transcripts from 1949-1968 , which, however, contains lectures critical of culture and music in addition to educational policy.

Musical writings

Rolf Wiggershaus sees the philosophy of music as the “starting point and end point” of Adorno's thinking. For Heinz-Klaus Metzger he is “the first truly trained musician among philosophers”. He published his first music-philosophical and sociological essays in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1932: On the social situation of music ; 1936: About jazz , under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler; 1938: About the fetish character in music and the regression of hearing ; 1939: Fragments on Wagner ; 1941: On Popular Music ). In the 20-volume edition of his Gesammelte Schriften , eight volumes alone are reserved for Adorno's musical writings (volumes 12 to 19), beginning with the philosophy of new music (first edition 1949), through the musical monographs on Richard Wagner , Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg (GS 13) and ending with the collection of his opera and concert reviews. In his first book publication after the Second World War, the Philosophy of New Music , the author expressed that the musical and philosophical writings of Adorno are closely interlinked . In the “preface” he describes it as an “excursion into the dialectic of the Enlightenment ” (GS 12: 11). Adorno speaks of the affinity between music and philosophy: "Philosophy longs for the immediacy of music, just as music longs for the express meaning of philosophy."

According to Adorno, both sensual experience - in his understanding: mimetic comprehension through hearing, representation and performance - and conceptual reflection contribute to understanding music . "Aesthetic reflection on music without mimetic understanding is empty, aesthetic experience of music without conceptual understanding is deaf."

In his early essay from 1932 - On the social situation of music - he found that all music bears the mark of alienation and functions as a commodity. Whether it opposes or submits to market conditions determines its authenticity . It fulfills its social function when “it presents social problems in its own material and according to its own formal laws” (GS 18: 731). Among the forms of New Music, he primarily attributes authenticity to the atonal music of the Schönberg School. According to the composer and musicologist Dieter Schnebel , he had "great difficulties with music that was structured differently than that of the Vienna School". He saw Stravinsky as “technically reactionary ” (GS 12: 57) and Paul Hindemith as its neoclassical counterpart; and so he met the work of John Cage with reserve.

Among the most controversial topics in his musical writings are his verdict on jazz and his thesis on the progress of materials in music.

With the thesis “Jazz is a commodity in the strictest sense” (GS 17: 77), Adorno denied his first polemic in principle against the emerging entertainment industry , which was later to be called the culture industry in the dialectic of the Enlightenment . Martin Jay points out that Adorno did not yet know jazz firsthand. Richard Klein, co-founder of the project and the magazine Musik & Ästhetik and co-editor of the Adorno Handbook , speaks of Adorno's “notoriously incomprehensible statements about jazz”. The pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen , on the other hand, admits that Adorno described the musical phenomena in jazz exactly, but drew the wrong conclusions from them. Adorno never fundamentally changed his conception of jazz in later publications either.

Central to Adorno's music philosophy is the theorem of the unilinear progress of the musical material, which manifests itself in the “depletion and the new development of sounds, techniques and forms”. The pre-formed nature of the musical material gives it an obstinacy and places demands on the compositional work, which at the same time demand the spontaneity of the subject. The demands that the material places on the composer stem from “that the 'material' itself is a sedimented spirit, something socially preformed through the consciousness of people. As its self-forgotten, former subjectivity, such objective spirit of the material has its own laws of motion ”(GS 12: 39). The concept of material is, as it were, the "interface between art and society". As an “objectivation of artistic, intellectual work” it conceals - conveyed through the artist's consciousness anchored in the society of his time - “traces of the respective ruling society”.

As a student of the Schönberg School, Adorno sees a qualitative advance in the transition from tonality to atonality of the twelve-tone technique , analogous to the break from objectivity to abstraction in painting (GS 12: 15). The musicologist Carl Dahlhaus assesses Adorno's position on the twelve-tone system as follows: On the one hand, he considered it “the necessary consequence of the progressive condensation of the thematic work from Beethoven to Brahms to Schönberg, on the other hand, he saw in it a systemic compulsion that, as it were, undermined the music. In his Kranichstein lecture Vers une musique informelle in 1961 , Adorno regards the twelve-tone technique as a necessary transition stage “to overcome tonality and towards liberated, post-tonal music” - a musique informelle . Adorno uses strong images to characterize it: it is "an image of freedom in all dimensions [...]" and "a little like Kant's eternal peace" (GS 16: 540).

In the 1960s, after Eisler's death, he published the work Composition for the film , which he wrote together with him in the USA, under both names.

Compositions

In his self-assessment, Adorno saw himself as a “musician of the second Viennese school”. As a composer, however, he left only a narrow work, including piano pieces, mostly miniatures , songs, orchestral pieces and two fragments from a planned opera. After 1945 he gave up composing entirely.

The French conductor and composer René Leibowitz attributes Adorno's compositions to free atonality. They are completely emancipated from the classical tonal functions without - with a few exceptions - "submitting to the exact principles of series or twelve-tone compositions". The composer Dieter Schnebel places them between the compositions of Anton Webern and Alban Berg . According to Leibowitz, Adorno's “authentic compositional activity” benefited from the high level of his writings on music theory.

Of Adorno's compositions, only the six were short orchestral pieces during his lifetime . op. 4, printed; the score was published by Ricordi in Milan in 1968 . Heinz-Klaus Metzger , a friend of Adorno's, edited Adorno's compositions in two volumes with the composer Rainer Riehn (1981) in the Munich edition text + kritik . In 2007 , a final third volume of Adorno's compositions was published, edited by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito and Ulrich Krämer, which, in addition to the piano pieces, contains compositions that were in the estate but rejected by the composer.

The composer Adorno was played occasionally before 1933, and only a little more frequently since the 1950s. In 1923, a string quartet by the young composer was performed as part of a concert by the Lange Quartet , which earned him the recognition of a critic for being called "almost on an equal footing with his teacher Bernhard Sekles and his rival Paul Hindemith ". In December 1926 his Two Pieces for String Quartet, composed under the aegis of Berg, became . op. 2, premiered by the Kolisch Quartet as part of the program of the International Society for New Music , his six short orchestral pieces in 1928 . op. 4, in Berlin under the direction of Walter Herbert.

The conductors Gary Bertini , Michael Gielen , Giuseppe Sinopoli and Hans Zender as well as the violinist Walter Levin with the LaSalle String Quartet stood up for the composer Adorno. The singer Carla Henius was very committed to his work; he sometimes performed with her. Since 1981 the pianist Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito has gradually premiered Adorno's piano pieces at concerts in Palermo, Bozen, Berlin, Hamburg and other places. Early string quartets were premiered by the New Leipzig String Quartet , and string trios by the Freiburg trio recherche. Adorno suffered from the weak response that his compositions received.

reception

Adorno memorial plaque on his house in Frankfurt's Westend

Impact history

Adorno did not form a “school”, at least in the institutional sense, although there was no shortage of students. This had an impact: after his death, his chair for philosophy and sociology was divided up and filled with scientists, some of whom held opposing positions. The Institute for Social Research thus became a predominantly empirically oriented research institute under the management of Ludwig von Friedeburg and Gerhard Brandts .

Adorno's literary work was soon published in extensive editions by his student Rolf Tiedemann : Gesammelte Schriften (1970 ff.) And Nachgelassene Schriften (1993 ff.), Which were published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. In an editorial afterword, Tiedemann describes that Adorno was not at all interested in working through his work: “You’ll do it then” was the evasive answer. Adorno had refused to become the “museum attendant of his own thinking”. This, together with the radio lecture Education to Maturity and Criticism of Schools of Thought (jargon of authenticity), allow the conclusion that Adorno did not want to be a master for his students, but rather wanted to promote independent, critical thinking. It is noteworthy in this context that he described certain texts as “ messages in a bottle ”, that is, a message whose deciphering in terms of time, space and the person of the finder is extremely indefinite in the future.

memories

Theodor W. Adorno Prize

→ Main article : Theodor W. Adorno Prize

In 1976 the city of Frankfurt donated the Theodor W. Adorno Prize . It was there that the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture founded the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in 1985 , in which the scientific and artistic legacy of Adorno was merged with that of Walter Benjamin. The archive was set up and managed from 1985 to 2002 by Rolf Tiedemann, who also combined the series of Frankfurter Adorno Blätter , the first prints of Adorno's texts with contributions to the discussion on his thinking and the Dialectical Studies , in which inaccessible and more recent works from school or the spirit of Adorno were published. In 2004 the Benjamin estate was separated from the Theodor W. Adorno Archive and deposited in the archive department of the Berlin Academy of the Arts ; the Adorno estate is now in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. On the 100th birthday of Adorno in 2003, the city of Frankfurt proclaimed an Adorno year .

Monument and place names

→ Main article : Adorno monument

Adorno monument by Vadim Zakharov on Theodor W. Adorno-Platz in Frankfurt am Main on the Westend campus

In the immediate vicinity of Frankfurt University on the Bockenheim campus , a square was renamed Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz (now: Tilly-Edinger-Platz ) and in 2003 the Adorno memorial for the philosopher was inaugurated: a glass case with a chair, desk and one the metronome on it . A plaque commemorates his work on his former home on Kettenhofweg in Frankfurt's Westend, where Adorno lived from 1949 to 1969. The memorial was moved to the Westend campus in 2016 and the name of the square in 2015 .

Pedestrian lights

→ Main article : Adorno traffic light

The Adorno traffic light , a pedestrian traffic light built in 1987, next to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main.

Biographies

In the Adorno year , in addition to several introductions and text editions, three extensive biographies of Adorno were published:

• Stefan Müller-Doohm : Adorno. A biography Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2003,
• Detlev Claussen : Theodor W. Adorno. One last genius . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003,
• Lorenz Jäger : Adorno. A political biography . DVA, Munich 2003.

Opposing positions

Axel Honneth accuses Adorno of “social- theoretical reductionism ”. His social theory, which is fixed on the civilizational process of mastering nature, analytically no longer allows an independent “sphere of social action”, in which Honneth sees a “farewell to sociology”.

In his Philosophical Discourse on Modernism, Jürgen Habermas refers to the “performative contradiction” in Adorno's totalizing criticism of reason, history, culture and society. If all reason is criticized as corrupted, the question arises as to the place of this criticism of reason. Adorno was aware of the paradoxical structure of his thinking, but he withdrew ad hoc to the “certain negation ” of Hegel. In his “unrestrained skepticism of reason”, Adorno underestimated the reasonable content of cultural modernity and showed a certain carelessness towards the “achievements of occidental rationalism ”.

With Georg Lukács, whose early works ( The Theory of the Novel , History and Class Consciousness ) Adorno highly valued and which are “absolutely indispensable” in his education, he got into a sharp controversy in the 1950s and later, which was sparked by aesthetic issues , but ultimately also included mutual criticism of the political options of both. Adorno agreed with Lukács that art is a medium of knowledge ( extorted reconciliation. GS 11: 264), but he vehemently rejected the " reflection theory " advocated by him, according to which a work of art should reflect objective and social reality ( extorted reconciliation , GS 11: 253). In this question, Adorno Lukács accuses “dogged vulgar materialism ”. Rather, Adorno sees the relationship between art and reality in the fact that art "in its autonomous constitution expresses what is veiled by the empirical form of reality" ( Blackmailed Reconciliation , GS 11: 264). Politically, Adorno accuses Lukács of adapting to the "desolate level" of narrow-minded party functionaries, delusional of living in a non-antagonistic society ( extorted reconciliation , GS 11: 279). Lukács, on the other hand, describes Adorno as a “non-conformist masked conformism” prisoner who moved into the “Grand Hotel Abgrund”, where he and other Western intellectuals enjoy refined comfort.

Criticism of Adorno's Negative Dialectics practiced Jean Amery in 1967 in an essay he ironically modification of the title of directed by Adorno against Martin Heidegger Scripture jargon of authenticity , with the jargon of dialectics overwrote. As a survivor of Auschwitz, he criticized the fact that under the formula "absolute negativity" Auschwitz had to serve as a dialectical self-exaltation of philosophical thought - in a "self-delighted language".

Opposing positions to Adorno's understanding of science took the representatives of critical rationalism such as Karl Raimund Popper and Hans Albert as well as numerous representatives of mainstream sociology, who saw themselves as empirical scientists or ascribed to quantitatively oriented empirical social research . In Alphons Silbermann , Adorno had a contentious opponent of empirical sociology of art and culture . Ralf Dahrendorf represented his own position between the opponents in the so-called positivism dispute, but it was closer to Popper's thinking than to that of the Frankfurt School.

Adorno's position on music theory was questioned even before postmodernism . In a summarizing criticism, the Habermas student Albrecht Wellmer complained that Adorno had pushed aside Debussy , Varèse , Bartók , Stravinsky and Ives or openly defamed them as wrong turns with his thesis of unilateral progress and a clearly identifiable level of development of the musical material . A “peculiar narrowing of the view” and the “fixation on the German-Austrian musical tradition” would have caused him to misjudge the “productive pluralism of paths to new music in the 20th century”.

Hans Robert Jauß , a prominent representative of the aesthetics of reception , argues against Adorno's “Aesthetics of Negativity” that he “cannot bring all of the pre-autonomous art”, which includes considerable affirmative works of art, “down to the general denominator of negativity”, that he is aesthetic Ignore experience and interaction between the work of art and the public and disapprove of the enjoyment of art as banausal.

Honors

German postage stamp from 2003 for the 100th birthday of Adorno

• 1954 Arnold Schönberg Medal
• 1959 German Critics' Prize for Literature
• 1963 Goethe plaque from the city of Frankfurt am Main
• 1987 Adorno demanded traffic lights in 1962 after a fatal traffic accident in the Senckenberg plant, which was built 25 years later and bears his name
• 2013 An asteroid in the main outer belt is named after him: (21029) Adorno
• 2015 A central square in Frankfurt am Main on the Westend campus of the Goethe University named after him "Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz".
• A grammar school founded in Frankfurt in 2015 has been called Adorno-Gymnasium since January 2018 . It is to have a provisional location on the Westend campus in summer 2019 and move into a new building on Miquelallee in the long term .

Known students

• Regina Becker-Schmidt (* 1937), sociologist
• Heide Berndt (1938–2003), urban sociologist
• Silvia Bovenschen (1946–2017), writer
• Bazon Brock (* 1936), professor of aesthetics
• Peter Bulthaup (1934–2004), philosopher and chemist
• Detlev Claussen (* 1948), sociologist
• Michaela von Freyhold (1940–2010), development sociologist
• Peter Furth (1930–2019), social philosopher
• Peter Gorsen (1933–2017), art scholar
• Karl Heinz Haag (1924–2011), philosopher
• Jürgen Habermas (* 1929), political scientist and social philosopher
• Peter von Haselberg (1908–1994), journalist
• Hans Imhoff (* 1939), action artist and writer
• Joachim Kaiser (1928–2017), music and literary critic
• Alexander Kluge (* 1932), lawyer, author and filmmaker
• Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1943–1970), student activist in the 1968 movement and SDS
• Elisabeth Lenk (* 1937), sociologist
• Kurt Lenk (* 1929), political scientist
• Rudolf zur Lippe (1937–2019), philosopher
• Werner Mangold (1927–2020), sociologist
• Otwin Massing (1934–2019), political scientist and sociologist
• Günther Mensching (* 1942), philosopher
• Heinz-Klaus Metzger (1932–2009), music theorist
• Karl Markus Michel (1929–2000), writer and publicist
• Ivan Nagel (1931–2012), theater scholar, publicist and artistic director
• Oskar Negt (* 1934), social philosopher
• Dieter Prokop (* 1941), sociologist
• Ulrike Prokop (* 1945), social scientist
• Helmut Reichelt (* 1939), sociologist
• Alfred Schmidt (1931–2012), philosopher
• Hermann Schweppenhäuser (1928–2015), philosopher and publicist
• Monika Seifert (1932–2002), sociologist and educator
• Bassam Tibi (* 1944), political scientist
• Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018), philosopher and philologist
• Rolf Wiggershaus (* 1944), publicist
• Gisela von Wysocki (* 1940), writer

Fonts

Book editions during his lifetime:

• Kierkegaard. Construction of the aesthetic . Tübingen 1933.
• Willi Reich (Ed.): Alban Berg . With Berg's own writings and contributions by Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno and Ernst Krenek. Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich 1937.
• Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of the Enlightenment . Philosophical Fragments . Amsterdam 1947
• Philosophy of new music . Tübingen 1949.
• Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford: The Authoritarian Personality . New York 1950, published posthumously in Germany under the title Studies on Authoritarian Character . Frankfurt am Main 1973 (see also authoritarian personality )
• Minimum moralia . Reflections from the damaged life . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1951
• Experiment about Wagner . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1952.
• Prisms. Cultural Criticism and Society . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1955.
• On the metacritic of epistemology. Studies on Husserl and the phenomenological antinomies . Stuttgart 1956.
• Dissonances. Music in the managed world . Goettingen 1956.
• Aspects of the Hegelian philosophy . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main. 1957.
• Notes to Literature I . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1958.
• Sound figures. Musical writings I . Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1959.
• Mahler. A musical physiognomy . Frankfurt am Main 1960.
• Notes on literature II . Frankfurt am Main 1961.
• Introduction to the sociology of music. Twelve theoretical lectures . Frankfurt am Main 1962.
• Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno: Sociologica II. Speeches and lectures . Frankfurt am Main 1962.
• Three studies on Hegel . Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• Interventions. Nine critical models . Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• The faithful répétiteur. Textbooks for musical practice . Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• Quasi una fantasia. Musical writings II . Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• Moments musicaux. Newly printed articles 1928–1962 . Frankfurt am Main 1964.
• Jargon of authenticity . To the German ideology . Frankfurt am Main 1964
• Notes on literature III . Frankfurt am Main 1965.
• Negative dialectic . Frankfurt am Main 1966
• Without a mission statement. Parva aesthetica . Frankfurt am Main 1967.
• Mountain. The master of the smallest transition . Vienna 1968.
• Impromptus. Second series of newly printed musical essays . Frankfurt am Main 1968.
• Six short orchestral pieces, Op. 4 <1929> . Milano 1968.
• Theodor W. Adorno, Hanns Eisler: Composition for the film . Munich 1969.
• Keywords. Critical models 2 . Frankfurt am Main 1969.

Collective issues:

• Collected Writings . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann with the participation of Gretel Adorno , Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz . Vol. 1–20 (bound in 23 vols.). 1st edition. Frankfurt am Main 1970–1980. - [Rev. Paperback edition] Frankfurt am Main 1997. - Licensed edition of the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998. - [Revised and expanded electronic edition on CD-ROM:] Digital Library Volume 97, Directmedia Publishing Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89853-497- 9 .
• Legacy writings . Edited by Theodor W. Adorno Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1993 ff. [Previously published: 10 vols.]
• A selection . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1971. - License edition. of the German Book Association, Stuttgart 1971.
• Criticism. Small writings on society . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1971.
• Philosophy and society . Five essays. Selection and epilogue Rolf Tiedemann. Stuttgart 1984.
• “Whether I can still live after Auschwitz.” A philosophical reader . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1997.
• Coming to terms with the past. Speeches and conversations . Selection and accompanying text by Rolf Tiedemann. Munich 1999, DerHörVerlag. (AUDIO BOOKS. Voices of Philosophy.) 5 CD: ISBN 3-89584-730-5 ; 2 MC: ISBN 3-89584-630-9 .
• Compositions . Edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn . 2 vol., Munich 1980
• Compositions . Volume 3: Compositions from the estate. Edited by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito and Ulrich Krämer. Munich 2007
• Piano pieces . Edited by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito , afterword by Rolf Tiedemann. Munich 2001

Important posthumous individual issues:

• Aesthetic theory . Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1970; 13th edition. 1995.
• About Walter Benjamin . Edited and annotated by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1970. - [Revised and expanded edition:] Frankfurt am Main 1990.
• Notes on literature IV . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Indian Joe's treasure. Singspiel after Mark Twain . Edited and with an afterword by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1979.
• Beethoven. Philosophy of music. Fragments and texts . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. (Nachgelassene Schriften. Ed. By Theodor W. Adorno Archive. Dept. I, Volume 1.) Frankfurt am Main 1993. - 2nd edition. 1994. - [paperback edition] Frankfurt am Main 2004.
• Problems of moral philosophy <1963> . Edited by Thomas Schröder. Frankfurt am Main 1996. (Nachgel. Schr., Section IV, Volume 10.)
• Metaphysics. Concept and problems <1965> . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1998. (Nachgel. Schr., Section IV, Volume 14.)
• On the doctrine of history and freedom <1964/65> . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 2001. (Nachgel. Schr., Dept. IV, Volume 13.)
• Ontology and Dialectics <1960/61> . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 2002. (Nachgel. Schr., Section IV, Volume 7.)
• Lecture on negative dialectics. Fragments for the lecture 1965/66 . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 2003. (Nachgel. Schr., Section IV, Volume 16.)
• To a theory of musical reproduction. Records, a draft and two schemes . Edited by Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main 2001. (Nachgel. Schr., Dept. I, Volume 2.)
• Dream logs . Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Afterword by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Frankfurt am Main 2005. Radio play adaptation
• Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory , ed. by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Frankfurt am Main 2006.
• Composition for the film . Text of the edition in Volume 15 of the Gesammelte Schriften , reviewed, corrected and supplemented by Johannes C. Gall. With an afterword by Johannes C. Gall and a DVD "Hanns Eisler's Rockefeller-Filmmusik-Projekt" , published on behalf of the International Hanns Eisler Society. by Johannes C. Gall. Frankfurt am Main 2006.
• Aspects of the new right-wing radicalism. A lecture . Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-58737-9 .
• Remarks on ›The Authoritarian Personality‹ and other texts. , ed. v. Eva-Maria Ziege , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-29900-5 .
• Lectures 1949-1968 . Edited by Michael Schwarz. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019.

Correspondence

• Theodor W. Adorno - Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1928–1940 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Alban Berg: Correspondence 1925–1935 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Max Horkheimer: Correspondence 1927–1937 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Max Horkheimer: Correspondence 1938–1944 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Max Horkheimer: Correspondence 1945–1949 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Max Horkheimer: Correspondence 1950–1969 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923–1966 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main.
• Theodor W. Adorno - Ernst Krenek: Correspondence . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main
• Theodor W. Adorno - Heinz-Klaus Metzger: Correspondence 1954–1967 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main.
• Asaf Angermann (ed.): Theodor W. Adorno - Gershom Scholem: The dear God lives in detail. Correspondence 1939–1969 . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-58617-4 .
• Wolfgang Schopf (Ed.): "So I should be an angel and not an author". - Adorno and his Frankfurt publishers. The correspondence with Peter Suhrkamp and Siegfried Unseld . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003
• Theodor W. Adorno - Lotte Tobisch : The private correspondence (1962–1969) . Edited by Bernhard Kraller and Heinz Steinert . Droschl , Graz 2003
• Theodor W. Adorno - Paul Celan : Correspondence 1960–1968 . Edited by Joachim Seng. In: Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII. Edition text + kritik 2003, pp. 177–202.
• Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk : Correspondence 1962–1969 . Edited by Elisabeth Lenk. edition text + kritik , Munich 2001
• Theodor W. Adorno - Harald Kaufmann : Correspondence 1967–1969. In: Harald Kaufmann: Inside and out. Writings on music, musical life and aesthetics Ed. Werner Grünzweig and Gottfried Krieger. Wolke, Hofheim 1993, pp. 261-300.
• Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel : Correspondence 1936–1969. Edited by Christoph Gödde. edition text + kritik, Munich 1991.
• Theodor W. Adorno and Ulrich Sonnemann : Correspondence 1957–1969 . Edited and commented by Martin Mettin and Tobias Heinze. In: Journal of Critical Theory . Volume 25, No. 48/49, 2019, pp. 167-222.
• Theodor W. Adorno: Letters to the parents. 1939-1951. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003.

Compositions

• Four poems by Stefan George for voice and piano , op. 1 (1925–1928)
• Two pieces for string quartet , op. 2 (1925–1926)
• Four songs for medium voice and piano , op.3 (1928)
• Six short orchestral pieces , op.4 (1929)
• Legal action. Six songs for voice and piano , op. 5 (1938–1941)
• Six bagatelles for voice and piano , op. 6 (1923–1942)
• Four songs based on poems by Stefan George for voice and piano , op.7 (1944)
• Three poems by Theodor Däubler for four-part female choir a cappella , op. 8 (1923–1945)
• Two propaganda poems for voice and piano , undated (1943)
• Sept chansons populaires francaises, arrangées pour une voix et piano , o. O. (1925–1939)
• Two songs with orchestra from the planned Singspiel Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe after Mark Twain , o.O. (1932/33)
• Child year. Six pieces from op.68 by Robert Schumann, set for small orchestra , not specified (1941)
• Compositions from the estate (piano pieces, piano songs, string quartets, string trios, etc.) , cf. Theodor W. Adorno: Compositions Volume 3. ed. by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito and Ulrich Krämer, Munich 2007.

literature

Philosophy bibliography : Theodor W. Adorno - Additional references on the topic

Introductions

• Deborah Cook (Ed.): Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. Acumen, Stocksfield 2008, ISBN 978-1-84465-120-7 .
• Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. 2nd, expanded and updated edition. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-476-02626-2 (first 2011).
• Stefan Müller-Doohm: The Sociology Theodor W. Adornos. An introduction . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1996.
• Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989.
• Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for an introduction. 7th supplemented edition. Junius, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-88506-671-2 .
• Tilo Wesche: Adorno. An introduction . Reclam, Ditzingen 2018.
• Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . CH Beck, Munich 1987.
• About Theodor W. Adorno . With contributions by Kurt Oppens, Hans Kudszus, Jürgen Habermas, Bernard Willms, Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Ulrich Sonnemann. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968.

Biographies

• Detlev Claussen : Theodor W. Adorno. One last genius. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-010813-2 .
• Lorenz Jäger : Adorno. A political biography. 2nd Edition. DVA, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-421-05493-2 .
• Stefan Müller-Doohm : Adorno. A biography Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-58378-6 .

Biographical places

• Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Naples. How a landscape of longing turns into philosophy . Siedler, Munich 2013.
• Claus Offe : The Culture Industry and Other Views of the American Century. In: Ders .: Introspection from a distance: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 91-120.
• Reinhard Pabst (Ed.): Theodor W. Adorno. Childhood in Amorbach. Pictures and memories . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2003.
• Wolfram Schütte (Ed.): Adorno in Frankfurt . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003
• Heinz Steinert : Adorno in Vienna. About the (im) possibility of art, culture and liberation . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989
• Viktor Žmegač : Adorno and Viennese Modernism at the turn of the century . In: Axel Honneth / Albrecht Wellmer (eds.): The Frankfurt School and the Consequences . Lectures at a symposium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation from 10. – 15. December 1984 in Ludwigsburg. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1986, pp. 321–338.

Adorno leaves

• Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.): Frankfurter Adorno leaves. Volume I-VIII. edition text + kritik, 2003, ISBN 3-88377-752-8 .

Adorno Conferences

• Ludwig von Friedeburg , Jürgen Habermas (ed.): Adorno Conference 1983. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983.
• Michael Löbig, Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (Ed.): Hamburg Adorno Symposion. Lüneburg 1984, ISBN 3-924245-01-0 .
• Frithjof Hager, Hermann Pfütze (Ed.): The unheard of modernity. Berlin Adorno Conference. zu Klampen, Lüneburg 1990, ISBN 3-924245-17-7 .
• Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialectics of Freedom. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005.
• Andreas Gruschka , Ulrich Oevermann (Hrsg.): The vitality of the critical social theory. Documentation of the workshop on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Theodor W. Adorno. Wetzlar 2004, ISBN 3-88178-324-5 .

Advanced studies

• Alex Demirovic : The non-conformist intellectual. The development of critical theory for the Frankfurt School . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29040-1 .
• Wolfram Ette, Günter Figal , Richard Klein, Günter Peters (eds.): Adorno im Widerstreit. To the presence of his thinking . Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2004.
• Rainer Hoffmann: Figures of appearance: Studies on the image of language and the form of thought Theodor W. Adornos (= treatises on philosophy, psychology and pedagogy. Vol. 195). Bouvier, Bonn 1954.
• Gillian Rose : The Melancholy Science. An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno . Macmillan, London 1978, ISBN 0-333-23214-3 .
• Hermann Schweppenhäuser (ed.): Theodor W. Adorno for memory . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971
• Rolf Tiedemann : No man's land. Studies with and about Theodor W. Adorno . Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-88377-872-3 .
• Journal for the history of ideas : Adorno. Issue XIII / 1 - spring 2019,

philosophy

• Dirk Auer, Lars Rensmann , Julia Schulze Wessel (eds.): Arendt and Adorno. 2nd Edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-29235-8 .
• Jürgen Habermas: "I myself am a piece of nature" - Adorno on the interwoven nature of reason. In: Jürgen Habermas: Between Naturalism and Religion. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-58448-0 , pp. 187-215.
• Fredric Jameson : Late Marxism. Adorno or The Persistence of Dialectics . Argument Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-88619-391-8 .
• Manuel Knoll: Theodor W. Adorno. Ethics as first philosophy, Fink, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-7705-3665-8 .
• Ulrich Müller : Theodor W. Adornos Negative Dialectic . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-15626-9 .
• Gerhard Schweppenhäuser : Ethics after Auschwitz. Adorno's negative moral philosophy . 2nd revised edition. Springer VS, Würzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-11770-2 .
• Martin Seel : Adorno's philosophy of contemplation . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-29294-3 .
• Rolf Tiedemann : Myth and Utopia. Aspects of Adorno's philosophy . Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-86916-013-9 .
• Albrecht Wellmer : On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-28132-1 .
• Philipp von Wussow: Logic of Interpretation. Adorno and philosophy . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3547-0

Sociology / Social Criticism / Political Economy

• Frank Böckelmann: About Marx and Adorno. Difficulties of late Marxist theory. Second edition of the Frankfurt 1971 edition with a foreword by the author. Ça ira, Freiburg 1998, ISBN 3-924627-53-3 .
• Dirk Braunstein: Adorno's Critique of Political Economy . Transcript, Bielefeld 2011.
• Iring Fetscher , Alfred Schmidt (ed.): Emancipation as reconciliation. On Adorno's criticism of the “commodity exchange” society and prospects for transformation. Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-8015-0356-9 .
• Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (Ed.): Sociology in late capitalism. On the social theory of Theodor W. Adornos . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1995, ISBN 3-534-12309-3 .

Psychology / psychoanalysis

• Wolfgang Bock : Dialectical Psychology. Adorno's reception of psychoanalysis . VS-Springer Verlag, Wiesbaden 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-15325-0

Aesthetic theory / sociology of art and literature

• Martin Endres, Axel Pichler, Claus Zittel (Eds.): Eros and Knowledge - 50 Years of Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory ", Berlin: De Gruyter 2019.
• Klaus Baum: The Transcendence of Myth. On the philosophy and aesthetics of Schelling and Adorno . Wuerzburg 1988.
• Gerhard Kaiser : Theodor W. Adorno's “Aesthetic Theory”. In: Ders .: Benjamin. Adorno. Two studies . Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Ines Kleesattel: Political Art Criticism. Between Rancière and Adorno. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2016, 978-3-85132-824-0.
• Burkhardt Lindner , W. Martin Lüdke (Ed.): Materials for the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adornos. Construction of modernity . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980.
• Walther Müller-Jentsch : Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969). Art sociology between negativity and reconciliation. In: Christian Steuerwald (Hrsg.): Classics of the sociology of the arts . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2017, pp. 351-380.
• Heinz Paetzold : Neo-Marxist Aesthetics . Part 2: Adorno, Marcuse . Schwann, Düsseldorf 1974, ISBN 3-590-15705-4 .
• Andreas Pradler: The monadic work of art. Adorno's monad conception and its background in the history of ideas (= epistemata. Würzburg scientific writings. Vol. 426). Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2411-7 .
• Marcus Quent, Eckardt Lindner (ed.): The promise of art. Current approaches to Adorno's aesthetic theory . Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-85132-741-0 .
• Birgit Recki : Aura and autonomy. On the subjectivity of art in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno . Würzburg 1988, ISBN 3-88479-361-6 .
• Britta Scholze: Art as Critique. Adorno's way out of dialectic . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1828-1 .
• OK Werckmeister : The work of art as negation. On the historical determination of art theory Theodor W. Adornos . In: Ders .: End of Aesthetics. Essays on Adorno, Bloch, the yellow submarine and the one-dimensional man . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 7-32.
• Albrecht Wellmer : On Negativity and Autonomy of Art. The topicality of Adorno's aesthetics and blind spots in his music sociology . In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2005 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 237-278.
• Martin Zenck : Art as conceptless knowledge. On the concept of art in the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adornos (= theory and history of literature and the fine arts. Texts and treatises. Vol. 29). Fink, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-7705-1365-7 .

Music theory / music sociology

• Richard Klein, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.): Thinking with your ears. Adorno's philosophy of music . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998.
• Matteo Nanni: Auschwitz - Adorno and Nono . Philosophical and music-analytical investigations . Freiburg i.Br. 2004, ISBN 3-7930-9366-2 .
• Ralph Paland: "... a very large convergence"? Theodor W. Adornos and György Ligetis Darmstadt Form Discourse. In: Christoph von Blumröder (Hrsg.): Compositional stations of the 20th century: Debussy, Webern, Messiaen, Boulez, Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Höller, Bayle . (Signals from Cologne: Contributions to the music of the time 7). Münster 2003, ISBN 3-8258-7212-2 , pp. 87–115.
• Nikolaus Urbanek: Looking for a contemporary musical aesthetic. Adorno's “Philosophy of Music” and the Beethoven fragments . transcript, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-8376-1320-9 .
• Hans Wollschläger : Moments musicaux. Days with TWA . Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-878-7 .

Compositions

• Gabriele Geml, Han-Gyeol Lie (ed.): "Quite rhapsodic". Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno: The compositional work . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2017.
• Martin Hufner: Adorno and the twelve-tone technique . ConBrio, Regensburg 1996, ISBN 3-930079-74-7 .
• René Leibowitz : The composer Theodor W. Adorno. In: Max Horkheimer (Ed.): Certificates. Theodor W. Adorno on his sixtieth birthday . Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1963, pp. 355–359.

Culture industry

• Dieter Prokop : With Adorno against Adorno. Negative dialectics of the culture industry . VSA Verlag, Hamburg 2003.
• Dieter Prokop: The non-identical in the culture industry. New critical communication research on the creativity of media goods. Herbert von Halem Verlag, Cologne 2005.
• Dieter Prokop: Aesthetics of the Culture Industry . Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2009.
• Heinz Steinert: The discovery of the culture industry . Publishing house for social criticism, Vienna.
• Heinz Steinert: Culture Industry. 3. Edition. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2008.

Movies

• Adorno. 1. The citizen as a revolutionary. Documentary film, Germany, 2003, 58:40 min., Script and direction: Meinhard Prill and Kurt Schneider, production: arte , SWR , first broadcast: August 1st, 2003 on arte, synopsis by ARD , a. a. with Alexander Kluge, Rüdiger Safranski , Rolf Wiggershaus , Regina Becker-Schmidt , Bazon Brock , Richard Sennett , Martin Jay , review in the FAZ :.

• Adorno. 2. Whoever thinks is not angry. Documentary, Germany, 2003, 58:50 min., Script and direction: Meinhard Prill and Kurt Schneider, production: arte , SWR , first broadcast: August 8, 2003 on arte, synopsis by ARD .

radio play

• Dream logs . With Andreas Dorau . Composition and realization: zeitblom . BR radio play and media art 2016. As a podcast / download in the BR radio play pool.

Frankfurt Adorno Lectures

Since 2002, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and the Suhrkamp Verlag have been holding annual Adorno lectures at Frankfurt University. The winners are dedicated to today's possibilities of critical social theory as philosophers, sociologists, historians, art historians, political scientists and literary scholars of international standing.

• See Adorno lectures

Web links

Commons : Theodor W. Adorno  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikiquote: Theodor W. Adorno  - Quotes

• Audio recordings with Theodor Adorno in the online collections of the Austrian Mediathek (lectures, interviews)
• Audio documents by Theodor W. Adorno: radio broadcasts, lectures, compositions
• Concert recordings and videos of music by Theodor W. Adorno on Youtube
• wikibooks Theodor W. Adorno
• Literature on Theodor W. Adorno in the Hessian Bibliography
• Works by and about Theodor W. Adorno in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Theodor W. Adorno  in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothekorno
• Theodor W. Adorno: Marginalia on theory and practice (PDF; 208 kB)
• Barbara Schmidt, Irmgard Zündorf: Theodor W. Adorno. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
• Lambert Zuidervaart:  Theodor Adorno. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Andrew Fagan:  Adorno. In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Theodor W. Adorno in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Reinhard Pabst: A son from a good family. Theodor W. Adorno's childhood in Frankfurt- PDF (742.7 kB)
• Video stream: There is no right life in wrong
• Video stream: Adorno - whoever thinks is not angry
• Video stream: The path to critical theory - Adorno Horkheimer Fromm Habermas
• Gerhild Tesak: Theodor W. Adorno . In: Wulff D. Rehfus (Hrsg.): Manual dictionary philosophy (=  Uni-Taschenbücher . No. 8208 ). 1st edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / UTB, Göttingen / Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-8252-8208-2 ( philosophie-woerterbuch.de ( memento of April 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) - formerly online document No. 1).
• Audio recording: Round table on "50 Years of Minima Moralia" with Katharina Hacker, Thomas Lehr and Wilhelm Schmid (2002)
• Michael Schwarz: "He speaks easily, writes difficultly". Theodor W. Adorno at the microphone , in: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 8 (2011), pp. 286–294.
• Theodor W. Adorno archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno
• Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. Hessian biography. (As of January 15, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
• Adorno, Theodor W. in the Frankfurter Personenlexikon

Notes and individual references

The by Rolf Tiedemann ed. Collected publications are cited in the article with the abbreviation GS and the indication of volume and page number.

• Volume 1: Early philosophical writings . Frankfurt am Main 1973.
• Volume 2: Kierkegaard. Construction of the aesthetic. Frankfurt am Main 1979.
• Volume 3: Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Frankfurt am Main 1987.
• Volume 4: Minima Moralia. Reflections from the damaged life. Frankfurt am Main 1980.
• Volume 5: On the metacriticism of epistemology. Three studies on Hegel. Frankfurt am Main 1970.
• Volume 6: Negative Dialectics. Jargon of authenticity. Frankfurt am Main 1973.
• Volume 7: Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main 1970.
• Volume 8: Sociological Writings I. Frankfurt am Main 1972.
• Volume 9/1: Sociological Writings II. First half. Frankfurt am Main 1971.
• Volume 9/2: Sociological Writings II. Second half. Frankfurt am Main 1971.
• Volume 10/1: Cultural Criticism and Society I: Prisms. Without a mission statement. Frankfurt am Main 1977.
• Volume 10/2: Cultural Criticism and Society II: Interventions. Keywords. Frankfurt am Main 1977.
• Volume 11: Notes on Literature. Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Volume 12: Philosophy of New Music. Frankfurt am Main 1975.
• Volume 13: The Musical Monographs. Frankfurt am Main 1971.
• Volume 14: Dissonances. Introduction to the sociology of music. Frankfurt am Main 1973.
• Volume 15: Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler: Composition for the film. Theodor W. Adorno: The faithful répétiteur. Textbooks for musical practice. Frankfurt am Main 1976.
• Volume 16: Musical writings I-III: sound figures (I). Quasi una fantasia (II). Musical writings III. Frankfurt am Main 1978.
• Volume 19: Musical Writings VI. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann u. Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt am Main 1984.
• Volume 20/1: Mixed writings I. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

1. ↑ "Among all intellectual groups none has influenced the political-cultural self-image of the Federal Republic [...] more than the Frankfurt School". Clemens Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, Friedrich H. Tenbruck: The intellectual founding of the Federal Republic. An impact analysis of the Frankfurt School . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 20. See also the remark by René König, quoted on p. 204, about the successful use of mass media made by “an apparently esoteric group of intellectuals” like that of the Frankfurt School, and about their influence on the political journalism of their time. Based on a statistical analysis by Clemens Albrechts of 218 radio and television broadcasts, Emil Walter-Busch states that Adorno was " the media star among the intellectuals of western post-war Germany". See the chapter “Adorno's politically enlightening lectures 1950–1966” in: Emil Walter-Busch: History of the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory and Politics . Fink, Munich 2010, pp. 164–175, here p. 175. According to Michael Schwarz, employee of the Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno archives, “almost 300 radio broadcasts can be determined for the 1950s and 1960s . In addition, there are more than 300 appearances in front of a presence audience. So you could hear Adorno somewhere almost every week. ”See Michael Schwarz: “ He speaks easily, writes difficult ”. Theodor W. Adorno at the microphone. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History . Online edition 8 (2011), issue 2, p. 1.
2. ↑ DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE IVORY TOWER - DER SPIEGEL 19/1969. Retrieved April 19, 2020 . 
3. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Letters to the parents. 1939-1951. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 121.
4. ^ According to the baptismal register of the Frankfurt cathedral parish from 1903. See: A son from a good family. In: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Ed.): Research Frankfurt . Issue 3–4, 2003, p. 44 [1]
5. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Letters to Parents 1939–1951. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 234.
6. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . Beck, Munich 1987, p. 12.
7. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 47.
8. ↑ Dorothea Razumovsky: Credo, Canon, Theory and Practice. In: Stefan Müller-Doohm (Ed.): Adorno-Portraits. Memories from contemporaries . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 280.
9. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 37.
10. ↑ Christian Schneider: Breaks and loopholes. Theodor Adorno's letters to his parents. In: Mittelweg 36, 12th year, issue 6/2003, p. 50.
11. ↑ Dorothea Razumovsky: Credo, Canon, Theory and Practice. In: Stefan Müller-Doohm (Ed.): Adorno-Portraits. Memories from contemporaries . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 280.
12. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno in self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 8.
13. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . Beck, Munich 1987, p. 12.
14. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: Adorno. A political biography . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 15.
15. ^ Rilo Wesche: Adorno. An introduction . Reclam, Ditzingen 2018, p. 7.
16. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for the introduction to Junius, Hamburg 1996, p. 10.
17. ↑ Anniversary publication : 50 years of Freiherr-vom Stein-Schule, grammar school for boys, Frankfurt am Main, 1909–1959 . Frankfurt am Main 1959, p. 100.
18. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno in self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 20.
19. ↑ Original quotations in the running text are marked with the letters "GS" for those published by Rolf Tiedemann. "Collected writings" as well as the indication of volume and page number proven, see above before note 1.
20. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: Adorno. A political biography . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 31.
21. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 61f.
22. ^ Theodor W. Adorno Archive: Adorno. An image monograph . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 20.
23. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 926.
24. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 86.
25. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 130.
26. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 927.
27. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 129.
28. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 136.
29. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 147.
30. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 129.
31. ^ Heinz Steinert: Adorno in Vienna. About the (im) possibility of art, culture and liberation . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 152.
32. ^ Heinz Steinert: Adorno in Vienna. About the (im) possibility of art, culture and liberation . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, pp. 155-160.
33. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 139.
34. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 142f.
35. ^ Viktor Žmegač : Adorno and Viennese Modernism at the turn of the century . In: Axel Honneth / Albrecht Wellmer (eds.): The Frankfurt School and the Consequences . Lectures at a symposium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation from 10. – 15. December 1984 in Ludwigsburg. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1986, pp. 321–338.
36. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 137f.
37. ↑ Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Naples. How a landscape of longing turns into philosophy . Siedler, Munich 2013.
38. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 156-161.
39. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 183.
40. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 88.
41. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 217f.
42. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 139.
43. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno in self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 69.
44. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 271.
45. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 280.
46. ↑ Student newspaper Diskus January 1963; quoted according to GS 19: 638. For more details, Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 793-795 (fn. 63).
47. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923-1966 . Edited by Wolfgang Schopf. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 308.
48. ↑ Quoted from Detlev Claussen. Theodor W. Adorno. One last genius . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 279.
49. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 347.
50. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 288.
51. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 292.
52. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 293.
53. ↑ This is the usual clothing for graduates at Anglo-American colleges and universities .
54. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1928–1940 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 76.
55. ↑ The sharp demarcation originally intended for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung from Mannheim's ideological concept, which Adorno disqualified as formal sociological, was not published after Horkheimer's objection, considering the situation of emigrants, although it had already been set. The work was first published in 1953 under the title The consciousness of the sociology of knowledge . Compare with Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 239–243.
56. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 302f.
57. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 289 f.
58. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 356.
59. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 348.
60. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 929.
61. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 930.
62. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: Adorno. A political biography . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 148f.
63. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 369–371.
64. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 372 f.
65. ↑ See the volume Economy, Law and State in National Socialism. Analyzes by the Institute for Social Research 1939–1942 . Ed. by Helmut Dubiel and Alfred Söllner . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984. A working paper by Adorno with the title Reflections on Class Theory , which was first published posthumously in the Gesammelte Schriften (GS 8: 373–391), comes from this discussion context.
66. ^ A term introduced by Paul F. Lazarsfeld for empirical social research on behalf of a public or private administration. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld: Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. Vol. IX / 1941, pp. 2-16.
67. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 379.
68. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 397.
69. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 392.
70. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 409.
71. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel, Volume I: 1927–1837 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 65.
72. ↑ Adorno justified this accusation with the post- doctoral thesis Marcuse: Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity , published in 1932 by Vittorio Klostermann , because he thanked Heidegger in the foreword and the publisher Vittorio Klostermann belonged to the young conservative Tat group. Adorno ignored the fact that Marcuse had already left Freiburg in 1931 because of political differences with Heidegger and went to Frankfurt, where Horkheimer supervised the completion of his habilitation. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel, Volume I: 1927–1937 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 70.)
73. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 931.
74. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School. History - Theoretical Development - Political Significance . Hanser, Munich 1986, p. 327.
75. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for an introduction . Junius, Hamburg 1996, pp. 39-44.
76. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 471. - Christian Schneider: Breathing pauses and loopholes. Theodor Adorno's letters to his parents. In: Mittelweg 36, 12th year, 2003, issue 6, pp. 41–56.
77. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, p. 116.
78. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School. History - Theoretical Development - Political Significance. 2nd Edition. Hanser, Munich 1987, p. 438.
79. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, p. 117.
80. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 480 f.
81. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 9 f.
82. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2003 (Originally Suhrkamp, ​​Ffm, 2002), p. 76.
83. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 479.
84. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 444.
85. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 528 f., 934.
86. ↑ Claus Offe: Self-observation from a distance. Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the USA . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 92, 104, 108 (with original quotations from Adorno).
87. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Max Horkheimer for an introduction . Junius, Hamburg 1998, p. 126.
88. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School. History. Theoretical development. Political importance . 2nd Edition. Hanser, Munich 1987, p. 450.
89. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 494.
90. ↑ Joachim Perels: Defense of memory in the face of its destruction - Theodor W. Adorno. In: Michael Buckmiller; Dietrich Heimann; Joachim Perels (Hrsg.): Judaism and political existence. Seventeen portraits of German-Jewish intellectuals. Offizin Verlag, Hannover 2000, p. 274.
91. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 503.
92. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 46.
93. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 501 f.
94. ↑ Helmut Gunnior, Rudolf Ringguth: Max Horkheimer with photo documents and personal testimonies. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988 (23rd – 25th thousand), p. 92.
95. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 508.
96. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 494 f.
97. ↑ Staci von Boeckmann: Trachodon and Teddie: About Gretel Adorno. In: Stefan Müller-Doohm (Ed.): Adorno-Portraits. Memories from contemporaries . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 335–351.
98. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 93.
99. ↑ According to Henning Ritter , Adorno could “'American' better than anyone else in the country”. He "came back with the American key to everything in hand, with a deep dislike for everything American." Henning Ritter: Adorno's style. When Adorno speaks. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 2008 .
100. ↑ Wolfgang Bonß: Critical theory and empirical social research - a tension. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 245.
101. ↑ Cf. Theodor W. Adorno et al.: The Positivism Controversy in German Sociology . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1969.
102. ↑ Dieter Thomä: The idea of ​​life. Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH Co KG, 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-25010-9 ( limited preview in Google book search).
103. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 495 f.
104. ↑ On Adorno's 100th birthday, Suhrkamp Verlag invited 24 feature editors to “ re-read ” the famous book; it was re- edited by Andreas Bernard and Ulrich Raulff under the title “Minima Moralia” (Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003).
105. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 496.
106. ^ Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: Adorno's Critique of Newer Music. In: Richard Klein, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.): Thinking with your ears. Adorno's philosophy of music . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 251 f.
107. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 566 f.
108. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 1: Chronicle . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 26 f.
109. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 1: Chronicle . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 256 f.
110. ^ A joint public declaration by Adorno, Friedeburg and Habermas on December 11, 1968 begins with the sentence: "We support the protest of our students against the dangers of a technocratic university reform". Quoted from: Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 2: Documents . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 502.
111. ↑ Dieter Brumm and Ernst Elitz : Don't be afraid of the ivory tower , conversation with Theodor W. Adorno, Spiegel No. 19, May 5, 1969.
112. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 1: Chronicle . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 382.
113. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 1: Chronicle . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 418.
114. ^ Letter to Samuel Beckett, February 4, 1969, in: Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.): Frankfurter Adorno Blätter , Volume III, edition text + kritik, 1998, p. 25.
115. ^ Letter to Alexander Kluge, April 1, 1969, in: Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.): Frankfurter Adorno Blätter , Volume VI, edition text + kritik, 2000, p. 100.
116. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 2: Documents . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 639.
117. ↑ See documents 300, 313, 322, 331, 336, 340, 346, 349 in: Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 2: Documents . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998.
118. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurt School and Student Movement. From the message in a bottle to the Molotov cocktail 1946–1995 . Volume 2: Documents . Rogner & Bernard, Hamburg 1998, p. 652.
119. ↑ FASZ August 4, 2019 / Andreas Lesti: Adorno's last mountain tour
120. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: Adorno. A political biography . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 32.
121. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for an introduction. 5th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2009, p. 31.
122. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for an introduction. 5th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2009, pp. 30-38.
123. ↑ In a conversation between Horkheimer, Adorno and Gadamer about Nietzsche's moral criticism, Adorno complained that Nietzsche “lacked the concept of definite negation”, “that if one opposed something that was recognized as negative, the negated in this other must be included in a new form ”. Max Horkheimer: Collected writings. Volume 13: Legacy Writings 1949–1972 . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 116.
124. ^ Tilo Wesche: Negative Dialectics: Critique of Hegel. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 318.
125. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Theory and Practice. Social Philosophical Studies . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963, p. 170.
126. ↑ Jan Rehmann: Ideology criticism. The ideological critique of critical theory . In: Uwe H. Bittlingmayer / Alex Demirović / Tatjana Freytag (eds.): Handbook of Critical Theory. Volume 1. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2019, pp. 663–700, here p. 664.
127. ↑ Martin Jay : III. The integration of psychoanalysis . In: Ders .: Dialectical Fantasy. The history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923–1950 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 113-142.
128. ↑ Christian Schneider: The wound Freud. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 284.
129. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Problems of Moral Philosophy. Nachged Schriften, Division 4, Volume 10: Lectures . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 123.
130. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Correspondence . Volume I: 1927-1937. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 129 f.
131. ↑ He summarizes this pointedly in the apparently paradoxical formulation: “The more psychoanalysis is sociologized, the more dull its organ for the knowledge of socially caused conflicts becomes” (GS 8: 28).
132. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 590.
133. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: The dream of the distance from me. Adorno's literary essays. In: Mittelweg 36, 12th year, issue 6/2003, pp. 3–40.
134. ^ Henning Ritter: Adorno's style. When Adorno speaks. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 2008 .
135. ↑ ^{a b} Rudolf zur Lippe : On the language of Adornos solon-line.de, March 2, 2013.
136. ^ Henning Ritter: Adorno's style. When Adorno speaks. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 2008 .
137. ↑ On the “porous” mental images cf. Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Naples. How a landscape of longing turns into philosophy . Siedler, Munich 2013, pp. 48–52.
138. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: Adorno, lawyer for the non-identical. In: ders .: On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 137.
139. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Composition of language - linguistic design of music in Adorno's work. In: Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Ed.): Theodor W. Adorno to the memory . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 127.
140. ↑ Ruth Sonderegger: Aesthetic Theory. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 417.
141. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: A philosophizing intellectual. In: About Theodor W. Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 37.
142. ↑ Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Naples. How a landscape of longing turns into philosophy. Siedler, Munich 2013, p. 62.
143. ↑ Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Naples. How a landscape of longing turns into philosophy. Siedler, Munich 2013, p. 237.
144. ↑ Andreas Lehr: Small forms. Adorno's combinations: constellation / configuration, montage and essay. Dissertation, Freiburg i. B. 2000 (online at: freidok.uni-freiburg.de ) , p. 31.
145. ↑ Stefan Müller-Doohm: The essay as a form. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 43.
146. ↑ Andreas Lehr: Small forms. Adorno's combinations: constellation / configuration, montage and essay . Dissertation, Freiburg i. B. 2000 (online at: freidok.uni-freiburg.de ) , p. 198.
147. ↑ Andreas Lehr: Small forms. Adorno's combinations: constellation / configuration, montage and essay . Dissertation, Freiburg i. B. 2000 (online at: freidok.uni-freiburg.de ) , p. 197 f.
148. ↑ Britta Scholze: Art as criticism. Adorno's way out of dialectic. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, p. 302.
149. ↑ Martin Seel: Minima Moralia. Reflections from the damaged life. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 35.
150. ↑ See the linked special pages for these four works.
151. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: Adorno, lawyer for the non-identical. In: ders .: On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 139.
152. ↑ Max Horkheimer: The current situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research . Public inaugural lecture when taking over the chair for social philosophy and heading the institute for social research on January 24, 1931. In: Ders .: Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 3: Writings 1931-1936 . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 20-35.
153. ↑ Max Horkheimer: Foreword to volume 1/2 of the first volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1932). In: Ders .: Collected writings. Volume 3: Writings 1931-1936 . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 36.
154. ↑ Karl Markus Michel : Attempt to understand the 'aesthetic theory'. In: Burkhardt Lindner , W. Martin Lüdke (ed.): Materials for the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adornos. Construction of modernity . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 64.
155. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: On negativity and autonomy of art. The topicality of Adorno's aesthetics and blind spots in his music philosophy. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-29328-1 , pp. 237 and 240.
156. ^ Lore Hühn, Philipp Schwab: Intermittenz and aesthetic construction: Kierkegaard. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 326, 329.
157. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno in self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, pp. 74f.
158. ↑ Petra Gehring: Metacriticism of the theory of knowledge: Husserl. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 354.
159. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 655.
160. ↑ Exemplary: Tilo Wesche: Dialektik or Ontologie: Heidegger. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 364-373.
161. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . Beck, Munich 1987, p. 9.
162. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: Adorno, lawyer for the non-identical. In: ders .: On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 135-166.
163. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . Beck, Munich 1987, pp. 40-47.
164. ↑ Peter Decker: The methodology of critical search for meaning. Adorno's system-forming conceptions in the light of philosophical tradition. 1982 p. 37.
165. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School. History - Theoretical Development - Political Significance. Hanser, Munich 1986, p. 592.
166. ↑ Petra Gehring: Metacriticism of the theory of knowledge: Husserl. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 362.
167. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor. W. Adorno as an introduction. 5th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2009, p. 63.
168. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor. W. Adorno as an introduction. 5th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2009, p. 69.
169. ^ Rüdiger Bubner: Aesthetic Experience. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 71.
170. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Theory of communicative action. Volume 1. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 514.
171. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Ethics after Auschwitz. Adorno's negative moral philosophy . Argument, Hamburg 1993, p. 9.
172. ↑ From the estate published the SS 1963: Theodor W. Adorno: Problems of Moralphilosophy 1963 . Edited by Thomas Schröder. TB edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010.
173. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Problems of Moral Philosophy 1963 . Edited by Thomas Schröder. TB edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 9.
174. ^ Quote from the lecture WS 1956/57 after Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Ethics after Auschwitz. Adorno's negative moral philosophy . Argument, Hamburg 1993, p. 179.
175. ^ Quote from the lecture WS 1956/57 after Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Ethics after Auschwitz. Adorno's negative moral philosophy . Argument, Hamburg 1993, p. 179.
176. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Negative moral philosophy. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 400.
177. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Negative moral philosophy. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 404.
178. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Negative moral philosophy. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 401.
179. ↑ Rahel Jaeggi : “No individual can do anything against it.” Adorno's Minima Moralia as a critique of forms of life. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 133.
180. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: Adorno, lawyer for the non-identical. In: ders .: On the dialectic of modernity and postmodernism. Critique of reason according to Adorno . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 140.
181. ↑ Martin Seel: Minima Moralia. Reflections from the damaged life. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 34.
182. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Problems of Moral Philosophy 1963 . Edited by Thomas Schröder. TB edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 248f.
183. ↑ Quoted from the lecture 1956/57 from Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Ethik nach Auschwitz. Adorno's negative moral philosophy . Argument, Hamburg 1993, p. 193.
184. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Problems of Moral Philosophy 1963 . Edited by Thomas Schröder. TB edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 262.
185. ↑ On this section cf. Georg W. Bertram: Metaphysics and Metaphysics Criticism. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 405-414.
186. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 663.
187. ^ Theodor W. Adorno Archive (ed.): Nachgelassene Schriften. Department 4: Lectures. Volume 14: Metaphysics. Concept and Problems (1965). Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 108.
188. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Theses Against Occultism . In: Minima Moralia . Reflections from the damaged life. Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1951. Online in Critique Network - Journal for Critical Theory of Society .
189. ↑ Sabine Doering-Manteuffel : Occultismus , Beck, Munich 2011, p. 7.
190. ^ Hermann Kocyba: The Positivism Controversy in German Sociology. Introduction. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 69.
191. ^ Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus. Sentence 1
192. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, Karl R. Popper: The Positivism Controversy in German Sociology . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1969.
193. ^ Gerhard Schweppenhäuser: Theodor W. Adorno for an introduction. 5th edition. Junius, Hamburg 2009, p. 86.
194. ↑ Thomas Mann in: Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel 1943–1955 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 122.
195. ↑ Introduction to Emile Durkheim, 'Sociology and Philosophy'
196. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Current of Music: elements of a radio theory . Edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006.
197. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 444.
198. ^ Emil Walter Busch: History of the Frankfurt School. Critical Theory and Politics . Fink, Munich 2010, p. 128.
199. ↑ group experiment. A study report , edited by Friedrich Pollock, with a foreword by Franz Böhm, appeared in 1955 as Volume 2 of the Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology in the European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main.
200. ↑ Wolfgang Bonß: Critical theory and empirical social research - a tension. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 245f.
201. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Aesthetic Theory. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 81.
202. ↑ See letter to Walter Benjamin of March 18, 1936, in: Theodor W. Adorno - Walter Benjamin: Briefwechsel 1928–1940 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 168–177 and letter to Max Horkheimer of March 21, 1936, in: Theodor W. Adorno - Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel 1927–1937 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 2003, p. 130-132.
203. ↑ Britta Scholze: Art as criticism. Adorno's way out of dialectic . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, p. 97.
204. ^ Günter Figal: Critical Theory. the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and their surroundings. In: Anton Hügli , Poul Lübcke (ed.): Philosophy in the 20th century. Volume 1: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existential Philosophy and Critical Theory . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 336.
205. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: Theodor W. Adornos "Aesthetic Theory". In: Ders .: Benjamin. Adorno. Two studies . Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 109.
206. ^ Günter Figal: Critical Theory. the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and their surroundings. In: Anton Hügli, Poul Lübcke (ed.): Philosophy in the 20th century. Volume 1: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existential Philosophy and Critical Theory . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 332 f.
207. ↑ Ruth Sonderegger: Aesthetic Theory. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 416.
208. ↑ Norbert Schneider: History of Aesthetics from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism . Reclam, Stuttgart, p. 184.
209. ↑ Jan Philipp Reemtsma: The dream of the distance from me. Adorno's literary essays. In: Mittelweg 36, 12th year, issue 6/2003, p. 27.
210. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 541.
211. ↑ Markus Fahlbusch: About jazz. In: In: Axel Honneth (ed.): Key texts of critical theory . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 19.
212. ↑ Which means: coming to terms with the past
213. ↑ Angela Keppler: Ambivalences of the culture industry. In: In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 253.
214. ↑ Angela Keppler: Ambivalences of the culture industry. In: In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 253f.
215. ↑ Angela Keppler: Ambivalences of the culture industry. In: In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 254.
216. ↑ Detlev Clausen: Theodor W. Adorno. One last genius . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 198-212.
217. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Generous remigrants. About Jewish Philosophers in the Early Federal Republic. A personal memory. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. from July 2, 2011 (online at: nzz.ch )
218. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Generous remigrants. About Jewish Philosophers in the Early Federal Republic. A personal memory. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. dated July 2, 2011.
219. ↑ Volker Heins: “Don't let yourself worry!” Adorno's unpublished lectures. In: WestEnd. 8th year, issue 2/2011, pp. 116-126.
220. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: A letter. In: Rainer Erd, Dietrich Hoß, Otto Jacobi, Peter Noller (eds.): Critical theory and culture. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 393.
221. ↑ Volker Heins: “Don't let yourself worry!” Adorno's unpublished lectures. In: WestEnd. 8th year, issue 2/2011, p. 119.
222. ↑ Volker Heins: “Don't let yourself worry!” Adorno's unpublished lectures. In: WestEnd. 8th year, issue 2/2011, p. 124.
223. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Aspects of the new right-wing radicalism - A lecture . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-58737-9 .
224. ↑ According to Jens-Christian Rabe, the literary critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the Suhrkamp Verlag began with this lecture to publish the lectures held for a general audience in the 1950s and 1960s. More will follow later. Süddeutsche Zeitung from 20./21. July 2019, p. 15.
225. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Lectures 1949-1968 . Ed. by Michael Schwarz. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019.
226. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: Theodor W. Adorno . Beck, Munich 1987, p. 17.
227. ^ Heinz-Klaus Metzger: The end of music history . In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 164.
228. ↑ The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was published in Paris from year 2 (1933) to year 7 (1938), the last two volumes appeared in New York under the title Studies in Philosophy and Social Science .
229. ^ Lydia Goehr: double movement. The musical movement of philosophy and the philosophical movement of music. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, p. 302.
230. ↑ Guido circle: The philosophical criticism of musical works. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 74.
231. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Finding new tones. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 150.
232. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Finding new tones. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 150.
233. ↑ Adorno later admitted this self-critically with the remark that the essay “suffered sensitively from the lack of specifically American knowledge” ( Scientific Experiences in America , GS 10/2: 704).
234. ↑ See Richard Klein, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.): Thinking with the ears. Adorno's philosophy of music . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 14.
235. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: On negativity and autonomy of art. The topicality of Adorno's aesthetics and blind spots in his music philosophy. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, p. 266.
236. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 308.
237. ↑ Gunnar Hindrichs: The progress of the material. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 52-56.
238. ↑ Reinhard Kager : Unity in the fragmentation. Reflections on Adorno's concept of “musical material”. In: Richard Klein, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.): Thinking with your ears. Adorno's philosophy of music. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 97 f.
239. ^ Carl Dahlhaus: Enlightenment in Music. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 131.
240. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: On negativity and autonomy of art. The topicality of Adorno's aesthetics and blind spots in his music philosophy. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 256 f.
241. ↑ See Theodor W. Adorno: On the first print of the original version. Afterword from 1969 to composition for the film (GS 15: 144–146).
242. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Collected writings . Volume 13: The Musical Monographs . 4th edition Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 324.
243. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Finding new tones. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 151.
244. ^ Heinz-Klaus Metzger: The end of music history. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 177.
245. ^ René Leibowitz: The composer Theodor W. Adorno. In: Max Horkheimer (Ed.): Certificates. Theodor W. Adorno on his sixtieth birthday . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 355.
246. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Finding new tones . In. Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 151.
247. ^ René Leibowitz: The composer Theodor W. Adorno. In: Max Horkheimer (Ed.): Certificates. Theodor W. Adorno on his sixtieth birthday . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 359.
248. ↑ Hartmut Scheible: Theodor W. Adorno in self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 50.
249. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 146.
250. ^ Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 928.
251. ^ Dieter Schnebel: Finding new tones. In: Josef Früchtl, Maria Calloni (ed.): Spirit against the zeitgeist . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 152.
252. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno on his 100th birthday ( Memento of the original from May 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: frankfurt-interaktiv.de. Retrieved July 20, 2012. 
253. ↑ uni-frankfurt.de accessed on March 16, 2016
254. ↑ Official Journal Frankfurt 42-2014
255. ↑ image withdrawal from the Information System of the City of Frankfurt
256. ↑ Philipp von Wussow: "A caricature of the theory". To the more recent Adorno biography. In: Naharaim. 1, 2007, pp. 131-147.
257. ↑ Axel Honneth: Critique of Power. Levels of reflection in a critical social theory . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 110 f.
258. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: The discourse of modernity. Twelve lectures . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 144-147.
259. ↑ Hans-Ernst Schiller: Death and Utopia: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 31.
260. ^ Georg Lukács: Foreword . In other words: The theory of the novel. An attempt at the philosophy of history on the forms of great ethics. Second edition increased by a foreword. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963, p. 17.
261. ↑ Jean Améry: Jargon of the Dialectic. In: ders .: Works, Volume 6: Essays on Philosophy. Klett-Cotta, 2004, p. 289 f. See also the review by Andreas Dorschel : The mind is always disturbed. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 7, 2004, No. 129, p. 14.
262. ^ Albrecht Wellmer: On negativity and autonomy of art. The topicality of Adorno's aesthetics and blind spots in his music philosophy. In: Axel Honneth (Ed.): Dialektik der Freiheit. Frankfurt Adorno Conference 2003. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 258, 261.
263. ↑ Hans Robert Jauß: Aesthetic experience and literary hermeneutics. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 44-54.
264. ^ University of Frankfurt am Main
265. ↑ Lorenz Jäger : television. The citizen on the barricades: "Adorno". In: FAZ . August 1, 2003.
266. ^ BR radio play Pool - Adorno, Traumprotokoll

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