Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius | Date: 28 April 2011, 06:36
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Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius
By Detlev Claussen
* Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages: 464
* Publication Date: 2008-04-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674026187
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674026186
Product Description:
He was famously hostile to biography as a literary form. And yet this life of Adorno by one of his last students is far more than literary in its accomplishments, giving us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
The biography begins at the shining moment of the German bourgeoisie, in a world dominated by liberals willing to extend citizenship to refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Detlev Claussen follows Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) from his privileged life as a beloved prodigy to his intellectual coming of age in Weimar Germany and Vienna; from his exile during the Nazi years, first to England, then to the United States, to his emergence as the Adorno we know now in the perhaps not-so-unlikely setting of Los Angeles. There in 1943 with his collaborator Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed critical theory, whose key insight—that to be entertained is to give one’s consent—helped define the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century.
In capturing the man in his complex relationships with some of the century’s finest minds—including, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukacs, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht—Claussen reveals how much we have yet to learn from Theodor Adorno, and how much his life can tell us about ourselves and our time.
(20080401)
Contents: Instead of an overture : no heirs -- The house in Scho?ne Aussicht : a Frankfurt childhood around 1910 -- From Teddie Wiesengrund to Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno -- Adorno as "non-identical" man -- Transitions -- Bertolt Brecht : "to those who come after us" -- Theodor W. Adorno : "out of the firing-line" -- Hanns Eisler, the non-identical brother -- Fritz Lang, the American friend -- Frankfurt transfer -- Adorno as "identical" man -- The palimpsest of life.
Summary: Identifying the non-identical man
Rating: 4
This book was a slight disappointment for me but only because I was expecting a regular biography or even a conventional critical study, but, as the author's introduction points out, Adorno himself harbored deep suspicions about the biographical genre, and so Mr. Claussen, one of Adorno's last students, has written a different kind of book about his revered teacher.
I will admit that the advantages of the author's approach to the life of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), as trumpeted by the publisher's dustjacket and the accompanying critical blurbs, were partially lost on me. I was hoping for a more conventional approach, one that would supply enough interesting and even intimate biographical details and provide the reader with something of the relevant intellectual background to make the ideas discussed more understandable. But such was not always the case.
I will be more to the point--this book is NOT for someone seeking a first look at the life and thought of Theodor Adorno. Some contexts are provided, and sometimes with amazing detail, but more often than not they seemed remote and in some cases of little apparent value in trying to understand Adorno the man (the extended discussions, for example, of the situation and prospects of the German Jewish bourgeoisie by the early 20th century did not merit the space devoted to it). Adorno's main ideas peek out of nowhere in the narrative as Claussen presents them in a consciously unsystematic manner, and, unless one already has some knowledge of their meaning, their significance can be lost on the first-time reader.
And true to what the author states in the introductory chapter, appropriately entitled "Instead of an Overture" (p. 4ff.), the book reads as if the author wanted to present Adorno not directly as a biographical subject, but rather as a man who until his death in 1969 continued to interact with some of the most significant intellectual and cultural figures of the last century--Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Pollack, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukacs, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Gershom Scholem, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg.
These long sections really constitute the meat of the book and they are in their own right fascinating, but the general reader will find himself at some points straining to keep all the pieces together and arrive at a greater sense of continuity. It would have made the book longer, but a little more discursive material added to these sections would have made them, I think, more rewarding to read. In fact any of the above figures taken individually had more space devoted to his relationship with Adorno than did his wife, Gretel Karplus, who only merits passing mention along the way. The book begins in a regular narrative fashion with Adorno's youth in Frankfurt but it passes quickly into a jumbled, back-and-forth manner of presentation in which events from the 1950s or 1960s are freely mixed with events from thirty years before, and vice-versa.
Part of this may lie in the fact that a German author has written a book about a thinker and a philosopher who, comparatively speaking, is much more well known in his native Germany than he is in the United States where, outside of American academic and/or artistic circles, he is completely unknown. There are simply some things that a German author can take for granted when writing for a literate German audience, and, given that some of these contexts are not more fully sketched out, it is up to the non-German reader to fill in the gaps.
But Theodor Adorno remains a man whose ideas are of continuing interest and influence (one wonders, for example, what he would have thought about the techno-barbarism of our own hyper-manipulative 'culture industry' busy as it is multiplying media at every turn). And the book does clear up a few things along the way (he deals with the misunderstanding that has accompanied his notorious remark, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" simply by providing the line that follows it, "And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today..."). There are no doubt other more conventional treatments of Adorno out there, but this book--inspired by the love, respect, and sympathy of one man for his teacher who would no doubt have approved of its aim--CONSCIOUSLY does its own thing.
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