Philipp Felsch - The Summer of Theory

Every new medium has kindled in its turn the apocalyptic discourse of the death of the book – television, in particular, and later the screen culture of the digital age. 47In the post-war period, that discourse was first heard as a critique of the paperback book. In the same year in which Adorno reported on the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Hessian radio network broadcast Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘analysis of paperback production’, an examination of the leading German publishers’ catalogues. Rowohlt’s rororo series, named for the mass-producing rotary printing press, had entered the German market as early as 1946. From then on, paperback production had only grown, in all segments of the industry. In his critique, an attempt to grasp the significance of the paperback phenomenon, Enzensberger essentially came to the same conclusions as Adorno. He, too, saw intellectual culture deteriorating to a commodity, the reader demoted to a consumer. Of course, the fear that cheap paperbacks would be not so much read as briefly leafed through and then stuffed back onto the shelf, or even thrown away, was not limited to Germany. It was a common motif of cultural criticism wherever publishers pressed forward into the new book market – in Paris and Rome no less than in Frankfurt. The paperback seemed to be a harbinger of the global ‘mass culture’. 48What worried Enzensberger most was the reader’s disenfranchisement: he thought the flood of new titles robbed readers of their ability to judge. In the ‘literary supermarket’, where anticipated sales took the place of the cultural canon, helpless readers were prey to the manipulations of the culture industry. 49

Neither Enzensberger nor Adorno could have imagined in 1959 that they would owe their own success as authors to the generation of paperback readers. 50Once Minima Moralia appeared in a soft cover in the early 1960s, no one carried it around in hardcover any more. Adorno later attained high sales figures in the various paperback series published by Suhrkamp. The new medium, which, from its critics’ perspective, ensured the conformance of the consumer, was supplying difficult ideas – initially as contraband – to a growing readership. 51The history of theory is not conceivable without these upheavals in the book market, and that is what makes Peter Gente, the book collector and book producer, such an exemplary figure in that history. It was the Penguin designer Hans Schmoller, a German-Jewish emigrant, who remarked in 1974 on the paradox of the ‘paperback revolution’: ‘though in the West paperbacks have become big business, this has not prevented their publishers from giving free rein to expressing ideas strongly opposed to established political and economic systems and indeed advocating their overthrow’. 52

After having been forgotten for an interim, Adorno was omnipresent in the 1960s. 53He filled the lecture halls and appeared in the young mass media – most of all, radio, the German ‘counter-university’ of the post-war period. 54The barely modulated voice, separating its words with tiny pauses, was unmistakable. It was a hit with the audiences of the cultural programmes and the night-time airwaves. Learning by radio how to read Hegel: such breathtakingly highbrow content sends today’s cultural editors into raptures of nostalgia. It is hardly imaginable any more, Joachim Kaiser wrote for Adorno’s hundredth birthday, what influence the philosopher had in those days. 55At that time, when Kaiser himself fell under that influence, he described it in these terms: ‘Anyone writing, speculating, politicizing, aestheticizing today must engage with Adorno.’ 56No one has held a comparable monopoly since. In the seventies, as Marxism grew sclerotic, Critical Theory submerged in the think-tank on Lake Starnberg – the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World, whose second director was Jürgen Habermas – and the French came to dominate the theoretical airspace, another German generation grew accustomed to living in the philosophical provinces, dependent on onerously decrypted imports from a Mecca of theory across the Rhine. The Weltgeist didn’t live here any more.

Before ’68, when German society had maintained an eloquent silence about its recent past, it had been otherwise – this was one of history’s ironies. Dangerous ideas hadn’t had to be smuggled across the border then; they were right there in Frankfurt. And if you weren’t one of the chosen few who personally inhabited Adorno’s orbit, as Joachim Kaiser did, you could pick up the Frankfurt phone book, look up his address and write to him. 57Adorno’s philosophical presence seems in retrospect almost to have demanded direct communication. The Situationists in Munich apparently thought so too, although their missive also contains a first grain of resistance against Adorno. In 1964, five years after they had taken on Max Bense, they posted on German university buildings their famous ‘lonely hearts advert’, composed of excerpts from the as yet largely unknown Dialectic of Enlightenment , in block letters: ‘THE CULTURE INDUSTRY HAS SUCCEEDED SO UNIFORMLY IN TRANSFORMING SUBJECTS INTO SOCIAL FUNCTIONS THAT, TOTALLY AFFECTED, NO LONGER AWARE OF ANY CONFLICT, THEY ENJOY THEIR OWN DEHUMANIZATION AS HUMAN HAPPINESS, AS THE HAPPINESS OF WARMTH’, and more in that vein. Readers who felt the poster made them stop and think were invited to contact ‘Th. W. Adorno, Kettenhofweg 123, 6 Frankfurt/Main’. Among those who wrote to the address given was the University of Stuttgart, which sent an invoice for the cost of removing the posters, although Adorno, like Bense before him, had known nothing of the Situationists’ action. 58

The ‘nexus of deception’ that Adorno depicts in sombre colours penetrated to the capillaries of day-to-day life. In the absence of functional differentiation, which had no place in his theory, nothing was safe from the falseness of society as a whole – and from that fact Adorno derived an almost boundless authority. The numerous unsolicited letters among his archived papers show how willing his German readers and listeners were to appeal to his expertise. His remark in Minima Moralia that, in a society in which ‘every mouse-hole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation’ did not stop them from asking the book’s author for advice in almost every imaginable circumstance. 59He gave it, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes reluctantly, but he always made an honest effort to help. ‘Intellectual people’, Adorno wrote in one of his return letters, must have had a great need for spiritual guidance at that time. 60

The questions, arriving from every state of the Federal Republic and from all social classes, make up an intellectual portrait of post-war West Germany. Doctoral candidates in philosophy sent Adorno their dissertation projects; disillusioned students turned to him in search of meaning. The expectations people had in writing to Adorno are astounding. In those days, the figure of an intellectual was still filled with promise. A law student in Tübingen who had doubts about his career assured Adorno he was ‘the only man in Germany’ who could ‘help him to moral freedom’, and hoped he might maintain ‘relations of correspondence, however minimal’, with him. 61The Baroness von Gersdorff, who wrote to Adorno in 1956, made no bones about having finished her letter only after four false starts – and in the middle of the night: ‘The cause of this schoolgirl uncertainty can be found in the considerable respect your books instil in me.’ 62

The letters on Minima Moralia alone could provide material for a brief reception history. ‘I am completely mesmerized by the Minima Moralia ’, wrote a Swiss woman who had met Adorno in the high Alpine valley of Engadine. ‘I read, I read again, I say yes and of course – & I am frightened and then rescued when a clear truth is simply there and I recognize it.’ 63In the 1950s, some readers used the book as their gospel. ‘I have been wandering around for several months now in the glowing space of your ideas’, says a letter from Wiesbaden; ‘most recently I have drawn daily instruction and light from your sketched thoughts, as others read the watchwords of the Moravian Church every morning for the strength they inspire’. 64Is it possible that Adorno’s most loyal followers were those in the provinces? ‘I am a teacher in a remote East Frisian village of 500 inhabitants, and I have few opportunities to receive stimulation of this kind’, wrote a solitary listener who had heard him on the radio. ‘Be assured that your words found attentive and eager ears even in the remotest corner!’ 65