off into the sixties. The young German intellectuals of that time wore Caesar bangs and simple clothes, and demonstrated their nonconformism by listening to jazz. Their attitude towards life had existentialist foundations, and Adorno’s ‘teaching of the good life’ gave it a flavour of social critique.31 ‘Even the blossoming tree lies’, they read, ‘the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.’ And: ‘For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity.’32 The dismay that sentences like these elicited in their readers is difficult to understand today; they sound oddly melodramatic to ears accustomed to the varieties of postmodern irony. Hence, it is with nostalgia that Michael Rutschky recalls the years when the world was still ‘in perfect disorder’. With a little practice, Adorno’s readers learned to apply his conceptual toolbox to situations of day-to-day life – at the risk of acting smugly superior.33 No wonder Adorno, returning from exile, seemed to many older Germans like an avenging angel. His ‘fiercely brilliant’ thinking was all the more influential among the younger generation.34
Written in exile in California in the mid-1940s, Minima Moralia anticipated the post-war era’s misgivings about the young West German state. The exiled Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who spent 1963 in West Berlin as a guest of the Ford Foundation, seems not even to have known the book’s title, and yet the impressions he recorded in the divided city came surprisingly close to Adorno’s assessment. Gombrowicz looked out over the trees of the Tiergarten from his fifteenth-floor apartment in the Hansaviertel tower block, took a drive down the broad boulevards to Freie Universität, and marvelled at the concrete hair-dos of the ladies in the cafés on Kurfürstendamm. ‘City-spa, the most comfortable of all the known cities, where cars move smoothly without traffic jams and the people move smoothly, unhurriedly, where crowds and stuffiness are almost unknown.’ Yet the cool modernism and the ahistorical atmosphere that surrounded the author instilled in him a certain anxiety. ‘Death sat on my shoulder, like a bird, throughout my entire stay in Berlin’; terrible forebodings emanated from overgrown ruins. ‘Only the everyday and the trifle’, Gombrowicz wrote of the city where he contracted a heart ailment, ‘are diabolical.’35
4 Layers of time in Berlin: ‘Trümmerfrauen’ clearing away the rubble for the reconstruction of the Hansaviertel, 1957.
Peter Gente must have had similar feelings as he walked around town with his vade mecum in his pocket. Putting the past behind one was especially difficult in Berlin, where past and future overlapped. When Gente mentioned his new favourite author at home, his mother smelled ‘Jewish subversion’: she had retained her sensitivity to racial distinctions after the end of the war.36 Her son’s reaction was to drop law and enrol in philosophy, sociology and German literature. His sitting ‘ten hours a day at his desk’ to get through the gigantic reading load of three courses cannot be explained by political misgivings alone.37 Adorno was more than just a moral authority breaking the silence that hung over the past: he attracted his first supporters by feeding their hunger for culture. He had noticed with surprise, after his return from exile in the United States in 1949, his Frankfurt students’ zeal for ‘the mind’. In a letter to Leo Lowenthal, he compared his seminar with a Talmud school: ‘as if the spirits of the murdered Jewish intellectuals had descended into the German students’. Although these students had his respect – and although they helped him to feel at home in West Germany – Adorno found their political apathy worrying. People who would rather discuss poems than the state of the world, he felt, were continuing a German pattern of behaviour that prevented them from recognizing the gravity of the disaster. And yet, by the same token – such was the dialectic of Adorno’s success – they were bound to be fascinated by Adorno.38
The work of the intellectual, Peter Gente read in Minima Moralia, encompassed ‘what the bourgeois relegate to non-working hours as “culture”’.39 On this point, at least, the book must have made sense to him straight away. Adorno made going to see Herbert von Karajan conducting, or to the Komische Oper, a serious matter. In order to be ‘susceptible of aesthetic contemplation’, he explained in one of his radio lectures, art must ‘be thought through’ as well.40 Only by reflecting on its social entanglements can one activate its secret potential for emancipation. Thus, for readers like Gente who felt a vague desire to create culture themselves, Adorno had a tempting job to offer: they were expected to act as cultural critics. Even the cinema was an opportunity to practise the strenuous toil of conceptual reflection. After the awakening he had experienced in the Siemens factory, Gente never had to award school grades again. His new reading endowed him with different ways of responding altogether.41
Adorno is said to have been the ‘trustee’ of a German tradition, that of Beethoven and Hölderlin, which had been compromised and had to wait for his work to make it listenable and readable again. Perhaps it amounts to much the same thing if we say that West German post-war intellectuals not only had a weakness for culture, but also felt a need to raise the degree of thinking involved in approaching works of art. They understood Adorno’s belief that, after the breakdown of civilization, culture ‘in the traditional sense’ must be seen as ‘dead’. Only by adopting a critical distance could they accept their cultural heritage – and by the same token that heritage took on a social relevance. Joachim Kaiser wrote that nothing could be ‘complicated enough’ for German students. Witold Gombrowicz, spending his year in West Berlin literary and academic circles, found the intellectual climate of 1963 too ‘cerebral’. Alongside the aestheticization of theory to which Adorno contributed with his books, the theorization of the aesthetic experience was the imperative of the moment.42
As the beneficiary of both developments, the new genre was suspected of cant. One of the first to fall under that suspicion was Adorno’s antithesis, the Stuttgart philosopher of technology Max Bense. Bense’s project ‘Programming Beauty’ was aimed at subjecting the field of aesthetics to the mathematical calculations of information theory. Like a cultural engineer, he wielded formulas to dismantle irrational faith in art. Aesthetic philosophy in Frankfurt and Stuttgart could not have been more different in tone: in Frankfurt, the critique of instrumental reason was de rigueur; in Stuttgart, the hard language of science ruled. But, in spite of the stylistic difference, there were striking parallels: Bense too applied his complicated formulas to works of art; he too had set aside artistic ambitions for the sake of theoretical work; his theory too was marked by an unmistakable idiom.43 As early as the 1950s, Bense’s incomprehensibility was so legendary that he became the target of a happening almost before the term was invented. In 1959, the group SPUR, the German wing of the Situationist International, announced a lecture by Bense in Munich – which the Stuttgart professor had to cancel at the last minute. Fortunately, he was able to send an audio tape, which the 300 attendees heard as a substitute – while watching a solitary glass of water on the lectern. The audience listened, could hardly believe its ears – and applauded. Only later, when Bense took legal action against the organizers, did it transpire that he had neither cancelled nor been invited in the first place. Hans-Peter Zimmer, one of the Situationists, had looted his publications and recorded a pastiche, disguising his voice. The lecture was exactly what the audience had not dared to pronounce it: pure nonsense. The discourse of theory, the sound of the sixties, had entered the period of its parody as soon as the decade began.44
In the Literary Supermarket
Peter Gente was fascinated with Adorno to such a point that he wanted to read everything the man wrote. Starting with his gateway drug, Minima Moralia, he systematically worked his way backwards to the early writings on musical aesthetics, some of which were difficult to find at that time, before the Suhrkamp edition of Adorno’s collected works. Library research was necessary to reconstruct the theoretical context. Gente collated bibliographical lists as meticulously as he had kept his cultural diary (now abandoned), copying out tables
