benefited from contact with several figures in the Institute’s history who were still living in America, including Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Karl August Wittfogel and Paul Lazarsfeld. And I was in contact with Felix Weil, who wrote extensive letters to me about the Institute’s early history. Although Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock were diplomatic about their relations with all of them, it was not hard to sense certain tensions. Thus, for example, in a cordial letter sent to me on November 11, 1968, in which he assured me that Horkheimer and Pollock would be happy to meet in Montagnola, Adorno explicitly wrote that Lazarsfeld “was only connected with the Institute for a relatively short time and very loosely in America.”7 Clearly, he wanted to caution me against accepting Lazarsfeld’s view of Critical Theory, which he likely assumed would be unfriendly.8 Many years later, Habermas would speculate in a conversation that Adorno’s hostile response might have been motivated by his identifying me with Löwenthal, who had provided an enormous amount of help to me in the summer of 1968. I had not realized at the time that they had had a very serious falling out, due, among other things, to disputes over Löwenthal’s being owed a pension by the Institute, but perhaps Adorno’s suspicion was fueled by the assumed link.9
In any event, when I first approached Horkheimer by letter on November 18, it generated a warm response only four days later: “You will certainly be welcome in Montagnola,” he wrote. “I suggest you let me know as soon as possible when you can be here so I can see to it that we can really talk to each other and you can use the archives.” He then added: “I am sure that you know that the Institute’s history in the USA started with Nichlos Muray Butler’s [sic] great kindness and understanding. I met him the first time a few weeks after my arrival in New York and I shall never forget what we owe to him. Needless to say that there are many things which I can tell you and even more which you may find here in our files.”10 Butler, it should be recalled, had been the autocratic president of Columbia University, a position he held for a remarkable forty-three years, and was a figure of considerable controversy. He was a prominent Republican, an early admirer of Mussolini’s Italy and a genteel anti-Semite. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for his work with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. In December 1933, he refused to bar a Nazi speaker from the Columbia campus on the grounds of free speech. And yet, only a few months later, he was open-minded enough to welcome the Institute, despite its leftist leanings, to Columbia, thus earning Horkheimer’s undying gratitude many years later.11
I provided Horkheimer a schedule of my planned visit, and he responded warmly on December 11, 1968, albeit with one qualification. Adorno had informed me that the Institute’s materials were in Pollock’s possession, but Horkheimer said that Pollock had told him “the files concerning the Institute as such being at his disposal are very few. Most of the files in the archive contain personal correspondence which during the lifetime of the authors should not be made public. You will have mostly to rely on printed materials. Therefore, the larger part of the information you will need will be given in your conversations with Professors Adorno, Pollock and myself.”12 Those conversations began with several meetings in Frankfurt in January and February with Adorno, when I also had a chance to speak with Habermas, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer.
I had expected to meet Horkheimer in Montagnola in late March, but in the middle of the month, he took a trip to Frankfurt. So, in fact, our first personal contact came when he unexpectedly burst into a conversation I was having with Adorno in the director’s office of the Institute. It was a remarkable moment, as suddenly I was in the presence of both authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the only time I would have that experience. In a piece I later composed following Adorno’s death, I recalled that he had shown what seemed to me “deference” to his older colleague, a characterization that Gretel Adorno later disputed when I sent her a copy of the piece: “Deference is much too strong,” she wrote; “consideration would be better.”13
Whatever the adjective, it was clear to me that Horkheimer remained the senior figure in their relationship, although Adorno had long outstripped him in terms of scholarly productivity and was to exercise a much more substantial influence in subsequent years. My next contact with Horkheimer came at the end of March, when I left Frankfurt for Switzerland, staying for a month in Lugano, a short drive from the twin houses that Horkheimer and Pollock had built in the beautiful Ticino region of northern Switzerland.14 Pollock, it turned out, was a much more voluble source of information about the Institute than Horkheimer. He allowed me to tape our conversations, something that Horkheimer and Adorno had refused to do. The latter had denied my request using the metaphor of “verbal fingerprints,” which I cited in the essay I composed after his death. I later discovered, thanks to an illuminating footnote by Rolf Tiedemann to Adorno’s lectures on Kant, that he had used the same expression on other occasions to prevent transcriptions of his verbal performances, which were less precise than his carefully wrought written ones.15 As a result of Horkheimer’s similar caution, the only sound of his voice I have on tape came during one of my interviews with Pollock, when a bird call is heard outside the room and Pollock says, “aha, that is Horkheimer!”
Bird calls aside, my recollection of Horkheimer during the unrecorded interviews we did have is of a very large, imposing, always impeccably dressed figure who would lean in to emphasize a point and speak in a deliberate and measured way. He was in his mid-seventies by then and seemed to me less sprightly in conversation than Adorno or Pollock. He was warm but somewhat guarded, clearly concerned to put as positive a face as possible on the Institute’s history. As forewarned, I was not allowed to see any personal correspondence but was given access to very helpful scrapbooks of materials they had collected over the years.
Shortly after my time in Switzerland, I drove to Vienna and settled in for what I thought would be several months of writing. On a trip to Budapest, where I’d hoped to connect with Georg Lukács, I made the mistake of driving my little BMW 1600 through an intersection at the same time a large truck was going in the other direction. The result was that I only got to speak with Lukács on the telephone and spent several weeks in the Költõi Traumatological Clinic recovering from a cracked pelvis, and then another two in a Viennese hospital, before returning to America to complete my recovery. Pollock sent a letter on June 20 expressing his and Horkheimer’s concern; they also commented generously on a review I had done of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, the first publication of his work in English.16 Of some interest is Pollock’s observation, which doubtless expressed Horkheimer’s opinion as well: “In the last years of his life B[enjamin] seems to have fled into the Marxist world of thought [Gedankenwelt] as an escape from his despair. It can never be known, had he lived longer, if he would have overcome the contradictions between his work and what he had learned from Brecht and Sternberg as Marxism.”17
My next contact with Horkheimer followed the sudden death of Adorno on August 6, 1969, when I sent him a condolence letter. His secretary, G. E. Kluth, responded on August 14: “Your letter of August 8 did not yet reach Professor Horkheimer. Because of the sudden death of Professor Adorno he had to interrupt his vacation in the mountains. At the time being, he is in Frankfurt, where he attended yesterday his friend’s funeral. I telephoned briefly with Professor Horkheimer and informed him about the contents of your letter. He asked me to convey to you his deeply felt thanks. For obvious reasons he will not be able to answer you personally in the near future. He is certain to find your understanding.”18
It was in fact more than a year later that our correspondence resumed. In the interim, I sent drafts of my chapters to Pollock and Löwenthal for their respective thoughts and received carefully detailed and wonderfully helpful suggestions from both. At the same time, Pollock shared with me the increasingly troubling news of health problems he was suffering. I remember still being shocked to receive an official notice of his death on December 16, 1970, jointly issued by his widow, Carlota, and Horkheimer. Once again, I had the melancholy task of sending a message of condolence to Horkheimer, who replied in a moving letter on January 5, 1971:
I thank you for your kind words of December 23. For 60 years I had lived together with Fred Pollock. He helped
