was the director this surely was not the case, and after I had been appointed up to our emigration several of us definitely were non-conformists in some ways but no “Exiles.” During our stay in America most of us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany. Otherwise our relations to conservative people like President Butler would have never been what they were, nor would Franz Neumann have spent so much time in West-Berlin to help organizing [sic] the university, nor had I returned to Frankfurt to do about the same there and in addition to rebuild the Institute with American and German public funds.33
Weil was no less distressed by the initial idea for a title, which he and Horkheimer had discussed by phone, and let me know more explicitly why it was not only imprecise, but also, in his eyes, dangerous:
Here is why I consider this title fundamentally wrong and damaging: especially because of the reinforcement of misunderstanding you give by your insistence on saying, or broadly hinting at, the influence the so-called joint ethnic origins of our group is supposed to have had on our way of thinking, the “Exiles” title will lend retroactively to justify all the attacks our enemies launched against the Institute and the Frankfurt School, to wit, that we as rootless outsiders had no business or justification to instill “undeutsche Gedanken” [un-German thoughts] = subversive feelings into German students.34
Clearly, I had unintentionally entered a minefield by assuming that the status of “permanent exile” would be more a badge of honor than a source of reproach, but I could now better understand the source of their anxiety. There were—and continue to be—criticisms from the nationalist right of the allegedly baleful influence of returning émigrés on postwar German culture.35 Whereas I thought, perhaps naively, that slanders against “rootless cosmopolitans” were things of the past, Horkheimer and Weil still felt their sting and were determined not to let my book give ammunition to their purveyors. Ironically, such charges anticipated a comparable critique of the emigres’ influence on American culture later leveled by xenophobic cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom.36
Hoping to dissuade me, Horkheimer and Weil offered a few alternatives, ranging from the pedestrian “The Early Stages of Critical Theory” to the melodramatic “Rebels with a Cause.” Finally, I hit on the title that the book ultimately bore, which I derived consciously from two earlier works—C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—and unconsciously from a passage in Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, which I had read a number of years earlier.37 Later, someone casually mentioned to me that source, and I had a chance to publicly credit Brown in the preface to a later book, a collection of my essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America, which I titled Permanent Exiles.38 In any event, both Horkheimer and Weil were pleased with the new choice, and as I ultimately got to use both titles, I was also happy with the outcome.
Much of our wrangling over the title played out against the backdrop of one final episode in the story of Horkheimer’s role in the book: the writing of the preface he graciously provided. Despite my concern that having such a preface might leave the impression that the book was somehow a “court history,” I thought it worth mulling over the possibility shortly after the dissertation was completed. Horkheimer replied cautiously in a letter of July 23, 1971, asking if I would be satisfied with a two-page preface without an imminent deadline. A succession of illnesses was making it hard for him to concentrate on his work, but my positive answer had encouraged him to try. On August 31, 1971, at the end of a letter that dealt primarily with details of Paul Tillich’s role in the Institute’s early years and some uncertainty over the existence of a Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt before the migration, he added, “I hope my little preface, which I intend to write at a time when I am not overburdened as during these weeks, will not disappoint you too much.”39
On December 12, 1971, I received a letter from Matthias Becker with Horkheimer’s promised preface. “During his serious illness of the past weeks,” Becker wrote, “he was greatly concerned to make the deadline he had promised. We are a bit late, but I think that you will be very satisfied with his introductory words.”40 Needless to say I was not only grateful, but also deeply moved by the gesture. I translated the text and sent it to Montagnola for any emendations Horkheimer might want to make. With a few minor changes, the preface appeared when the book was finally published in the spring of 1973. Perhaps the most meaningful change appeared in the second thoughts he had about the moving sentence from which I have taken the title of this chapter. In German, it reads, “Die Sehnsucht danach, dass die Gruel auf Erden nicht die letzte Gültigkeit besässen, ist freilich ein metaphysischer Wunsch.” Looking at my translation, Horkheimer changed “metaphysical” to “non-scientific,” but he left standing the formulation “the hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word.”41
These were not themselves the last words I received from Horkheimer. In addition to the dispute over the title, he responded generously to an essay I published in 1972 called “The Frankfurt School in Exile” and wrote of his impatience for the publication of the book, which he hoped would coincide with the imminent English translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Finally, on March 10, 1973, he informed me that two copies of the book had arrived and that he found them “beautiful and [was] happy with them.” The last words of that final letter, after he requested I send him the reviews, were simply ones of friendship: “How are you? Are you well in Berkeley; will you be coming any time soon back to Europe?”42
Four months later, on July 7, 1973, Horkheimer died in a hospital in Nuremberg at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bern, Switzerland. Shortly after his death, I was sent a copy of a photograph, one of the last taken of him, in which he was dressed impeccably, as always, in a three-piece suit, and reading a copy of The Dialectical Imagination. There can be few more moving images for a historian than one that shows the hero of your narrative, nearing the end of life and apparently finding some solace in your attempt to make sense of it. During the period I knew Max Horkheimer, he lost his closest friends, Adorno and Pollock, as well as his much-beloved wife, Maidon, who died in October of 1969. He was in many ways a diminished figure, beset by illness and wary of the ways in which his legacy was being read by critics on both ends of the political spectrum.
I was enormously fortunate to have had an opportunity to be the first to provide a general history of that legacy and even more fortunate to win Horkheimer’s trust in so doing. Although it was always clear that he was invested in my telling it in a way that redounded to his credit, I never felt coerced into bending the evidence to paint a rosier picture than the documents afforded. I can fully appreciate the anxieties he—and Felix Weil—felt about reducing their thought to an expression of some ill-defined Jewish spirit or even the experience of Weimar Jewry, although I would also still hope that a nonreductive analysis of that dimension of their story can prove illuminating. As for the dispute over my proposed title, the outcome was favorable for everyone. The alternative rightly emphasized their thought rather than their lives, and I ultimately got to use Permanent Exiles for a collection about a more disparate group of émigrés who did not share a common intellectual position.
What is perhaps most moving is the fact that, more than four decades after Horkheimer’s death and the publication of The Dialectical Imagination, the message bottles thrown into the sea by the Frankfurt School continue to wash up on unexpected shores, to be opened by new generations of readers who find in them inspiration for the development of a twenty-first-century critical theory. Whether metaphysical or non-scientific, the wish that such a theory may help us to diminish the cruelties of a world still a long way from the utopia yearned for by the Frankfurt School remains very much alive today.
