existence cannot be subordinated to his essence. But what these loose comparisons help us understand is that the Abgrund may well be less fatal to Critical Theory—and emancipatory practice—than one might suspect. It alerts us to the anarchic moment—in the sense of lacking an original ur-moment or archē—in Critical Theory, as well as its surprising similarity to Heidegger’s notion of a simultaneous origin that defies a primal ground (Gleichursprünglichkeit).69 It allows us to realize that there may be many different starting points and disparate grounds for critical reflection without searching for the one Archimedean point on which critique must be balanced. It is perhaps symbolically meaningful that the actual location of Weil’s First Marxist Work Week was not a luxurious grand hotel “equipped with every comfort” at the edge of an abyss, but rather a much more modest train station hotel, owned by a Communist named Friedrich Henne, in the small town of Geraberg bei Arnstadt near Ilmenau in Thuringia.70 From such humble origins—although not from them alone—something remarkable came into the world.
The title of this chapter cites a remarkable admission from the preface Horkheimer graciously provided for the first edition of my history of the Frankfurt School, which appeared shortly before his death in 1973. It acknowledges that the long-standing Marxist insistence on the scientific validity of its theories is insufficient to motivate the yearnings that fueled its critique of capitalist oppression. However, one construes the alternative—the precise word in Horkheimer’s German draft was “metaphysical,” which he reconsidered in vetting my translation—it raises the question once again of the implicit normative basis of Critical Theory, a question that haunts its evolving history. This chapter recounts the enabling interaction, albeit at times delicate, I had with Horkheimer while writing the dissertation that became The Dialectical Imagination. It recalls, among other things, his unease with two possible explanations for the Frankfurt School’s dogged insistence on critique: their experience as exiles and the legacy of their (for the most part) Jewish backgrounds. Neither one, he impressed upon me (with the fervent concurrence of Felix Weil, the Institute’s major benefactor), should be stressed as sources of their critical distance from conventional academic and political assumptions. Although I appreciated the reasons for his resistance—and indeed, as the final chapter of this book shows, the fears he and Weil had about the dangers of foregrounding the Jewish identity of their colleagues were, alas, justified—I was unwilling to forego at least conjecturing about the contextual matrix out of which their ideas developed.
“Today for the first time, I sat in on a conversation between Fred and Jay. Naturally I didn’t say a word that we knew about the lecture; otherwise probably a report on disagreements would have ensued. We should seek that no great story is made out of it.”1 So wrote Max Horkheimer to Theodor Adorno on March 25, 1969, from Montagnola, Switzerland, where he had lived for a decade following his retirement from the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Fred in question was, of course, economist Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and collaborator, who was then generously allowing a young dissertation student from Harvard’s History Department to pick his brain about the Institute’s history. We have no record of Adorno’s response, nor is it absolutely clear what problematic lecture Horkheimer might have wanted to avoid discussing. The passage is, however, significant because it indicates that the leaders of the Frankfurt School were very much concerned about the ways in which their history might be written. By chance, it was on that very day that Adorno wrote a much less flattering letter about the would-be historian to Herbert Marcuse, which came to light many years later and led me to write a reflection on what I called, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, “the ungrateful dead.”2
Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer and Pollock seem somehow to have reached the conclusion that their history was in reasonably secure hands, and so they continued to cooperate with the historian until the dissertation became a book called The Dialectical Imagination in 1973. In what follows, I want to return to the role Horkheimer played in its creation, drawing on some twenty letters and telegrams he sent while I was preparing it. There are no major revelations in the correspondence, but revisiting it now may help illuminate the ways in which historical protagonists try to shape the stories told about them and the challenges historians may have when writing about living figures.
It will not, of course, be a surprise to learn that people prefer to be remembered fondly by posterity, but, in this case, what stands out is the highly charged context in which this historical account was undertaken. The end of the 1960s and the early 1970s was a period of extraordinary tension for the surviving members of the Institute’s inner circle, who were then trying to cope with the unanticipated turmoil unleashed at least in part by their own earlier work. The situation is accurately captured by the subtitle of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s three-volume collection of documents concerning the Frankfurt School and the German student movement: “From messages in the bottle to Molotov cocktails.”3 Although one does not want to turn what may well have been contingent events into expressions of something deeper, it is worth remembering that Adorno, Pollock and Horkheimer were all to die before the turmoil ended: Adorno in 1969, Pollock in 1971 and Horkheimer in 1973. At least the first of these deaths has often been interpreted as hastened by the stress of confrontation with students.
It is thus not surprising that they were highly cautious about cooperating in the potential framing of their history in ways that might play into the hands of contemporary critics. In fact, certain aspects of their past were then serving as sources of, or at least excuses for, critiques of their present positions. Most notably, their reluctance to endorse the more explicitly radical arguments they had made in the prewar era enraged students who had been stimulated precisely by those arguments. This reluctance was most famously captured in Jürgen Habermas’s oft-quoted remark that when he had been a student at the Institute in the 1950s, “Horkheimer was terribly afraid of us opening the chest in the basement that contained a complete series of the [Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung].”4 It was only with considerable trepidation that he permitted the reprinting of some of them in the two-volume collection edited by Alfred Schmidt as Kritische Theorie in 1968.5
What such fear demonstrates is that beyond worrying about getting their history right, they were also anxious about the uses to which it was already being put. And to compound the anxiety, they did not share a united position on precisely what the right response should be. Although in public they maintained a united front, we now know from the revealing correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse the depth of their disagreement over the student movement and the Institute’s stance toward it.6 My research trip to Frankfurt and Montagnola overlapped with the most volatile moment in that deeply vexed history, the student occupation of the Institute in late January and Adorno’s calling the police to disburse it, which embittered the relationship between Marcuse and his old colleagues. It is in fact probable that the unnamed lecture mentioned in Horkheimer’s letter was the one Marcuse was to give in Frankfurt later that spring, which, much to the chagrin of the Institute’s leaders, he had tied to a demand to speak with the students.
The nexus between theory and practice, always a problematic one, was thus further complicated by a triangulation with historical reconstruction. For in addition to the explicit conflict over the ways to translate critical theory into politically effective action, there was also an implicit tension over the proper way to narrativize the Institute’s past. When I arrived in Europe to begin my research in January 1969, I was only dimly aware of all that was at stake. In retrospect, my dimness—and here I would include the still uncertain grasp I had of many of the issues raised by the Frankfurt School’s work—was probably an advantage. As an outsider to the controversies then swirling around the Institute, neither a student nor disciple of any of the principle players, I was not identified with any one position.
