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ADORNO IN AMERICA: GERMAN EXILES AND THE

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Symposium at the GHI, December 9, 2003. Co-sponsored by the HeinrichBoll Foundation and the GHI. Conveners: Keith Alexander (GHI), HelgaFlores-Trejo (Heinrich Boll Foundation). Speakers: Detlev Claussen (Uni-versity of Hannover), Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland College Park).

This symposium brought together scholars from the greater WashingtonD.C. area to focus on Theodor W. Adorno. Professor Detlev Claussen,author of Ein letztes Genie, a recent biography of Adorno that used Ador-nos original texts to illuminate his life and intellectual development,shared his knowledge of Adorno with the group. Professor Jeffrey Herfcommented on Claussens presentation and placed it in a broader per-

spective of postwar intellectual history.Claussen emphasized the decade Adorno spent in the United States,

asserting that Adorno would not have been Adorno if not for his Ameri-can exile from Nazi Germany. According to Claussen, it was during histime in exile that Adorno matured intellectually, and the fact that hespent these years in the United States steered his intellectual developmentin a certain direction. Adorno came to America a German philosopher ofthe old school, while his scholarly and personal experiences in the UnitedStates equipped him with modern techniques of social research and newinsights into himself and his European culture. This fusion of Germanphilosophy and American empirical methods freed traditional philoso-phy from dogma and allowed Adorno to contribute to pioneering works

such as The Authoritarian Personality. Another legacy of American exilethat applied to both Adorno and Max Horkheimer was what Adornotermed the experience of substantive democratic forms. This aspect ofthe American experience, captured in Adornos Minima Moralia, wascompletely unfamiliar to the Germans reading this work in the postwarera. Furthermore, Claussen noted that Minima Moralia reads like an in-verted tourist guide, in which the European begins to understand himselfthrough exile.

Claussen also attacked many of the stereotypes about AdornosAmerican exile. He refuted the oft-repeated myth that the exiles fromNazi Germany fled to a culturally barren United States only to return tothe Land of Poets and Thinkers once they no longer faced a mortal threat

in Germany. By the same token, however, Adorno was not the conser-vative critic many painted him to be. Claussen traced the origins of thesemyths to both the anti-Americanism and the anti-intellectualism of thepostwar period.

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Also, while intellectuals increasingly looked to the radically bour-geois United States as a source of progress and change, exiles livingthere simultaneously kept themselves at arms length from their hostnation. Claussen compared the pressure to adapt to the host country and

blend in to its society to the pressure to assimilate historically experi-enced by Jews. While Adorno undoubtedly felt this pressure from theAmerican melting pot, he observed that America also nurtured oneutopian hope: of being able to be different without fear. According toClaussens interpretation, Adornos American exile enabled him to bringthis hope back to a Germany that only recently had been very hostile tosuch an ideal.

Jeffrey Herfs commentary on Claussens talk focused on what Herfidentified as a central paradox inherent in the Frankfurt Schools thoughtas expressed by Adorno. Adorno was a strong defender of the particularand the individual against the general and the collective; however, his

analysis of Nazism and the Holocaust relied on a general interpretation ofthe Enlightenment rather than a specific treatment of Germany. Instead ofthe Holocaust being a German catastrophe, from Adorno and Hork-heimers perspectives, it was the Enlightenment that radiated disastertriumphant. This was quite compatible with the multiple restorationsof the postwar period. As Herf put it, the theoretical strategy of gener-alization, the indictment of abstractions rather than particularities of Ger-man history, made critical theory a much less bitter pill to swallow forgenerations seeking a usable past with which to fashion a new and decentsociety.

Herf also singled out Claussens treatment of Adornos relationshipwith Thomas Mann as a particularly insightful part of the book, and

noted that this relationship is important to understanding both Adornoand Manns metamorphosis during their time in America. UnlikeAdorno, Manns work, especially Dr. Faustus, did not shy away fromexploring specifically German guilt for Nazi atrocities and the resultingimplications for being German in the future.

Nevertheless, Herf emphasized that Adorno made critical contribu-tions to breaking the silence regarding the Nazi past that prevailed in theGermany to which he returned in 1949. Unlike Thomas Mann, Adornoand Horkheimer did not give up on Germany, but rather worked torestore a different Germany based on freedom and tolerance. More-over, they created in Frankfurt an environment that produced a numberof influential postwar academic and political figures who embodied the

Lefts shift from embracing radical anti-fascism to espousing a culture ofdebate and discussion. Herf concluded his comments by noting that itwas no accident that Claussen, himself a student of Adorno, became themost vociferous non-Jewish voice to condemn the extremes of the West

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German Left during the 1970s and 1980s and to argue in favor of em-bracing liberal democratic values.

The discussion touched upon such themes as Adornos legacy inpost-war West Germanys process of coming to terms with the past; thereasons for the previous neglect of Adornos American years in under-standing and analyzing Adornos life; and the special relationship be-tween Adorno and his students. Claussen noted the importance ofsupplementing philosophical ideas with experience, and Herf noted therole of Adornos frank discussions of Nazism in cementing the bond

between Adorno and his students. Claussen wrapped up the discussionby reiterating the importance of Adornos time in America for enablinghim to combine social theory and social research. According to Claussen,this was the new element in Adornos approach, and was the uniquelegacy of his American experience.

Keith Alexander

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