Müller-Doohm Stefan - Adorno: a biography

I dedicate this biography to my daughter Anna-Maximiliane because I would like my account of Adornos life and work to help keep alive for future generations something of the thinking that was so influential for my own intellectual orientation.

Copyright Polity Press 2005. This book was originally published as Adorno: Eine Biographie, copyright Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003.

The right of Stefan Mller-Doohm to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2005 by Polity Press

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ISBN: 0-7456-3108-8
ISBN: 0-7456-3109-6 (pb)

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List of Figures

List of Plates

To write history is to give the dates a face.

Walter Benjamin

Preface

Curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought.

A biography of Adorno lays itself open to the objection that he had no liking for this genre of writing and in fact had grave reservations about the wisdom of exploring writers lives in order to discover the key to their artistic or philosophical works. He expressed the hope that in his own case too readers would give preference to his writings rather than to the accidental facts about his life. Of course, he read and made use of biographies; the life of Richard Wagner is a case in point. But he never wearied of warning his readers not to scour musical compositions or literary texts for traces of the authors experience, subjective intentions or impulses. However, there is a constant temptation to do just that when thinking about Adorno himself. His texts contain many autobiographical allusions to happy childhood memories or sly references to local place names in Frankfurt or the surrounding area. What Adorno thought important was not such reminiscences, but the interplay between the objective content of his work and its historical context, i.e., what he called the force field consisting of the historical situation of the authorial subject, his life and his oeuvre.

This maxim has been the guiding principle of my life of Adorno, which has been completed forty years after his death and at a point in time when he would have been a hundred years old. During the six years and more that I have been working on this book I had a quotation from Adorno standing above my desk in a frame and visible at all times: Even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual life acquire meaning within given social conditions.

The present biography attempts to reconstruct the context of Adornos life with other people. It is based on the corpus of documents consisting of Adornos publications, his published and unpublished letters, a variety of notes and the transcripts of his lectures and talks, as well as interviews with key contemporaries. A large number of other sources and texts belonging to Adornos intellectual contemporaries have been consulted. Despite the sheer quantity of the material referred to, it should be borne in mind that there remain documents that have not been made available in the archives or where legal restrictions have prevented access. This applies especially to his correspondence; some letters have been blocked, in particular the highly significant correspondence with Siegfried Kracauer which is preserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Biographies are sometimes distinguished by an emotional distance from their subject. This would be inappropriate in my case. Both as a schoolboy and a student, I had the good fortune to experience directly something of the fascinating intellectual power of this protagonist of critical theory. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the financial support of two projects by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, it was possible to establish the Adorno Research Centre at the Carl von Ossietzky University in summer 1998. Under my direction my colleagues have helped to create the framework which has made it possible to write the present biography. I wish to thank the DFG for its financial support and also for the financing of a replacement professor for the whole of the winter semester 2002/3. It was only this support that it made it possible to complete work on this manuscript.

My personal thanks go to the members of the research group: Dirk Auer, Thorsten Bonacker, Thomas Jung, Jascha Rohr and Christian Ziegler. Without their productive collaboration and vigorous assistance this book could not have been written.