It is a true consolation to know that when you wrote about the Institut, you were aware of his decisive role when it was founded and during its history up to the moment when we left for good. You are perfectly right when you say, your work will be a real help for all those who wish that the most important period of the Institut will not be forgotten.19
I completed my dissertation late in the spring of 1971, directed by H. Stuart Hughes, who had been a friend of Franz Neumann and Marcuse from their days together in the Central European Bureau of the Office of Strategic Services.20 I sent a copy to Horkheimer, who impatiently wrote on May 2 that it had not yet arrived, adding, “I think it is very important that I can let you have my remarks, your study should be one of the decisive sources for all those interested in the Institute’s history. Should you have another copy, please send it to me by airmail.”21
A copy did finally arrive and Horkheimer shared it with Matthias Becker, who had begun writing his biography, which, alas, Becker never finished because of his untimely death in 1974 at the age of forty-one. We corresponded over the course of my research and writing, and he was enormously helpful. Becker had been able to win Horkheimer’s trust to the extent that he permitted him to tape their conversations, which were only discovered in 2008.22 On June 8, Horkheimer wrote to introduce him and included his first letter to me:
Here is a letter from Dr. Becker of Bremen who will be Professor at Bremen University when it starts functioning. He is a highly intelligent young philosopher and I had given him the first chapter of your important thesis. His remarks seem precise to me, and it is indeed a pity that the three of us can’t have a common discussion. In a recently published book of my late friend Adorno, he quoted a sentence of a review: “God dwells in the detail.” This certainly goes for descriptions like the history of the Institute.23
The letter from Becker accompanying Horkheimer’s contained several useful suggestions for changes, which were gratefully incorporated in my book, as were others he offered in three subsequent letters in 1971.24 In addition to suggestions for minor alterations in details, Becker’s letters also hint at a certain tension between Horkheimer and Felix Weil over some aspects of the Institute’s founding and early history. How to handle Weil, whose generosity had initially funded the Institute, was a perennial challenge for its leadership over the years. Becker requested that I not share with Weil all of the suggestions he had made in order to “avoid being burdened with an unforeseeable correspondence.”25 Weil, who was then teaching real estate law to American GIs at the army base in Ramstein, Germany, was in fact, an indefatigable letter writer, but, from my historian’s point of view, this was a great blessing. He responded quickly and with great eagerness to my questions and to drafts of my chapters.
Two issues in particular most exercised him and were also of concern to Horkheimer, with whom he frequently telephoned as my project developed. Both were of some importance. The first concerned the role that the Jewish background of most of the Institute’s members might have played in their development. This is, of course, an enormously complex and sensitive matter that has received frequent treatment in the Frankfurt School literature.26 Much depends on which figures are stressed, which periods in their lives, the definition of what it means to be Jewish—religious, ethnic, cultural—as well as the intangible issue of influence itself. In light of crude anti-Semitic denigrations of Critical Theory as an expression of something sinister to be deplored in the legacy of Judaism—a denigration that, alas, continues to this day27—it is fully understandable that both Horkheimer and Weil wanted to avoid being reduced to whatever version of Jewishness might be held responsible for their ideas. Like Freud, who was famously anxious to avoid the same reproach, they were very wary of such a simplistic reduction. Even though Löwenthal and Fromm had gone through periods of serious religious commitment during their association with the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, and Benjamin, abetted by his friendship with Gershom Scholem, had drawn on theological motifs in his work, the Institute in the 1920s had maintained a strongly materialist—that is, essentially Marxist—orientation.
There was, however, a subtle difference in the acknowledgment of the residual importance of their Jewish origins between Horkheimer and Weil. Although conceding that the Institute had always been especially sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism, Weil was adamant that he and his colleagues had long since left any trace of a meaningful Jewish heritage, understood in religious or other terms. To suggest that something else still mattered, he argued, was to fall into the trap of accepting racist definitions of Jewish identity. Horkheimer, for his part, had come to acknowledge in contrast at least a certain link between Critical Theory’s refusal to picture utopia and the Jewish prohibition on picturing God, the famous Bilderverbot. When he had returned to Germany after the war, he increasingly identified as a Jew, so much so that a headline of an interview with him in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland in 1952 was titled “The Jewish Rector and his German University.”28
When I pointed this out to Weil, he replied impatiently:
You refer to Horkheimer’s stressing his Jewishness as Rektor of the university. You seem not to know that then he even, on the high holidays, attended synagogue services (but not of the orthodox kind, just the reform-liberal one). But, as he told me, he did this not as a late Believer, but as an ostentatious act of a political nature … anyway you cannot project back into the 20s what the old Horkheimer of the 60s said or is now saying (including the “other” and the Bilderverbot, where I can’t follow him at all).29
The issue was also raised in Horkheimer’s letter to me of July 10, 1971, in which he wondered what I had meant by the “ethnic origins” of the members of the School. Whatever response I made—my own letters were not preserved—seemed to placate him, as on July 23, he responded:
Many thanks for your letter of July 15 and especially for what you said about the positive relations between the Critical Theory and the Bilderverbot. I myself frequently pointed to this connection. What a pity that we cannot talk personally about the significance of the materialistic as well as the theological elements in the development of the Frankfurter Schule.30
I ultimately veered closer to Horkheimer than Weil in my account, but I also remained convinced that, however much fuel it might give to anti-Semitic critics of Critical Theory, it was impossible to ignore the volatile and rapidly evolving situation of German Jews in the Weimar era in making sense of the Frankfurt School’s origins and perhaps its intellectual investments as well. I felt some vindication when I read in Leo Löwenthal’s autobiographical interviews with Helmut Dubiel the following admission: “However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish traditions, which were codeterminative.”31
On the other sensitive issue that arose, Weil and Horkheimer were firmly united. The dissertation had lacked a snappy title, so when I looked for one for the book, I returned to the essay I had written for Midstream in 1969 after Adorno’s death, which had been called “The Permanent Exile of Theodor Adorno.” Although Marcuse and Löwenthal were in favor, both Weil and Horkheimer had grave misgivings about calling the book Permanent Exiles. When I floated it as a possibility, Horkheimer responded in January 1972, that it “seems to me problematic, as it doesn’t apply to a number of our members, Theodor W. Adorno, Fred Pollock and myself. Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse made America their home.”32 When I wrote back explaining that I had meant it metaphorically to suggest the even before their actual emigration, Institute members had been anxious to avoid co-optation and after the war, Critical Theory had maintained its distance from any real “homecoming,” Horkheimer was not placated. On March 5, he sent an urgent telegram that read “title still seems misleading to me,” backed up by a letter sent the same day, which is worth extensively quoting:
The idea that during “the period from 1923 to 1950” the Institute’s members
