practical and theoretical response to the Holocaust and to the questions concerning German-Jewish relations was, at least at the outset, an antithesis to Scholem’s. Adorno, for whom emigration to Palestine was never even a consideration, spent the years from 1933 to 1949 in exile. But as early as 1949, only four years after the end of the war, he decided to return to Germany. The decision is significant, especially in the light of Adorno’s own diagnosis, which he still maintained ten years later, namely that “National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.”49 It is difficult to determine exactly what motivated Adorno and Horkheimer to return to their homeland so soon, relatively speaking, after the end of the war. Adorno himself suggested various reasons – ranging from what he considers his close, intimate relationship with the German language to his sense of moral and political responsibility to circumvent a return of the catastrophe.50 Fifteen years after he had left Germany and eleven years after his arrival in the United States, Adorno returned to Frankfurt in October 1949. It was five months after the post-war Federal Republic of Germany was established in the areas occupied by the American, British, and French allies in West Germany. Frankfurt, the center of German finance, was located in the American Zone of Occupation. This might have given Adorno, a Frankfurt native, the sense of some continuity between his American and German experiences.
During his years in exile in America, Adorno participated in numerous research projects and was prolific in producing texts that would prove highly influential; alas, no prospect of an academic career was in sight for him. After returning to German academia in 1949, he initially only replaced Horkheimer, whose pre-war professorship at the University of Frankfurt had been renewed but who had not yet returned to the city to take up the position. Only in 1953 was Adorno offered an ordinary professorship. In the time between his return and his formal appointment, he traveled to the United States twice to participate in research activities and to cultivate further his research and scholarly contacts, but also – especially with the long stay from October 1952 to August 1953 – first and foremost in order to ensure that he retained his newly acquired naturalization as a US citizen.51 Despite his commitment to return to Germany and to contribute to post-war enlightenment, and political education in particular, his uncertainty was still significant enough to necessitate these journeys. Adorno’s long-term professional instability and insecurity in American exile was at odds with Scholem’s secure and influential position in his newly adopted homeland in Palestine. This might have held implications for the differences between their views on diasporic life and the question of a return to Germany. After emigrating in 1923, Scholem initially worked as a librarian, directing the departments of Hebrew and Judaica at the Jerusalem National Library. But, shortly after the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was formally established in 1925, he was appointed as a lecturer, and in 1933 he was promoted to a full professorship of Jewish mysticism. It is noteworthy that this is the very year in which the Nazis revoked Adorno’s license for academic teaching. Scholem’s profound ideological faith in the Zionist idea as a solution to all theological, social, and political problems of the Jews was also, even more substantially, at odds with Adorno’s skepticism about any such ideological, nationalist, and particularist solutions. The Holocaust and the Jewish catastrophe only strengthened Scholem’s views on the need for a national Jewish home, whereas they only intensified Adorno’s skepticism about such absolute solutions, deepening his worries about the threat of nationalism of any sort.
Such differences in worldviews are tacitly present throughout Adorno and Scholem’s entire correspondence. Both aware of the fundamental discrepancies in their political thought, particularly regarding German-Jewish life, the two men remained cautious not to let these differences harm their friendship. But the differences were insurmountable: Scholem opted for a decisively particularist worldview, in which Jewish life and responsibility for fellow Jews were at the center of any ethical and political consideration, while Adorno, wary and vigilant of any such kind of political bias, held on to a universalist position – especially in reflections on the ethical meaning and political lessons to be learned from the experience of the Holocaust. He famously contended: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”52
In his new role as a philosopher and public intellectual in post-war Germany, Adorno was increasingly dedicated to the task of educating the new generation of Germans to think critically, both philosophically and politically: not to accept unquestioned authorities, not to be tempted by any form of social prejudice or political chauvinism. He was committed to a “new categorical imperative” that would make a recurrence of the Holocaust impossible. Whereas Scholem’s scholarly and political efforts focused on strengthening the Jewish moral and political consciousness in the form of Jewish nationalism, Adorno emphasized the necessity of a prevention of the recurrence of Auschwitz – that is, of the Jewish catastrophe (one should keep in mind here that, in Auschwitz, not only Jews were murdered) – and of anything “similar”: “so that nothing similar will happen.” Adorno was never content with a purely particularistic position. The new ethical responsibility, engrained in him by the experiences of the Holocaust, was for him, unlike for Scholem, universal. Such discrepancies also suggest themselves at the level of their intended readership: Adorno’s writings, especially following his return to Germany, were aimed first and foremost at a German audience. From the late 1950s onward Adorno regularly, and enthusiastically, participated in radio conversations, progressively assuming the role of an engaged public intellectual. Scholem, who equally enjoyed the role of a public intellectual in the newly established State of Israel, was engaged in social and political matters of Israeli society. He published on matters of Jewish and Israeli politics, some of which were far removed from his immediate scholarly research on mysticism, such as the formation of Israeli political parties, dialogue with the Arab states, Israeli education, and the political-theological meaning of the Jewish diaspora. But over time Scholem’s intended audience changed, along with his change of attitude regarding the prospect of public appearances and publications in Germany. His texts were now addressed predominantly to a German readership (not exclusively Germans, but readers of the German language) – and this shift of focus implied a shift of content as well.
In their letters from the 1960s, Adorno and Scholem both express a remarkable change of heart, resulting, presumably, from changing social and political constellations. Adorno, eager to return to his German homeland after the war in order to reform and educate the German masses to critical thought and enlightenment, was increasingly alienated in what was simultaneously his native and newfound home. A new generation of students, profoundly influenced by his critical theory and by his call for anti-authoritarian progressive thinking, now charged him, their own educator, with conservatism, bigotry, and resignation.53 Struggling, since his return, with the national conservative tendencies in post-war West-German society, in which regime change had done little to alter the actual balance of power since many public offices continued to be filled by the very same people who had held them during the Nazi era, Adorno found himself in a new and unexpected situation in the late 1960s. His own students, demanding a full de-Nazification and a thorough democratic reform of German public universities, as well as protesting against the Vietnam War and the colonial politics in developing countries, now demanded their teacher’s support and solidarity. Although Adorno supported many of these causes, he was reluctant to participate in what he considered barbaric and violent demonstrations of power, and he compared the students’ revolts to fascist brutality. In December 1968, he reported to Scholem: “[A]ll hell has literally broken loose here, with a Walpurgis Night of the students, in which the pseudo-revolution is spinning out of control in the most ludicrous actions … they are committing atrocities.”54
In what both Adorno and Scholem might have described as a dialectical paradox, toward the end of the 1960s their views and their experiences somewhat transformed and crossed paths: Scholem, who for decades had been reluctant to participate in any dialogue with German audiences, and who addressed his writings almost exclusively to Jewish, mostly Israeli, readers, now enthusiastically
