“Political Culturalism?” Adorno’s “Entrance” In the Cultural Concert of West-German Postwar History

Abstract

Adornos increased presence in the media on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, the amplification of his twenty-volume collected works by a seemingly endless stream of posthumous papers, the popularization of an esoteric thinker through biographical studies made possible above all by the availability of his extensive correspondence¹ — all this cannot disguise the fact that there remains a puzzle about “Adorno in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Politics and society were reviving, and yet they were also as if lamed by the leaden weight of the past. Only in the sphere of culture did numbed looks backward intersect with hopeful looks forward to create an opening for understanding. How was it possible for a Jewish re-emigrant to carry his existential confrontation with the society that had driven him away into the daily routine of the professional role he now assumed? In view of this starting point, it is astonishing to consider the sheer inexhaustible productivity of an author, who contributed to nearly every category encompassed by bourgeois high culture, feuilleton publication and scholarly work, and who became, in the course of a mere two decades, the archetypical Leftist intellectual of German postwar history. Even more surprising is the growing and eventually extraordinary success that this man had in a society for which he, after all that had happened, could have had as little liking as it had for him—a Jewish re-emigrant, who had yet to find his place in the uncertain and divided ground of West German postwar culture.