In 1968 the progressive was attacked as reactionary
In a November 4, 1968, letter to Günter Grass, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69) made an observation about his student, Hans-Jürgen Krahl — a leader of the protest-happy German Socialist Students’ League — that might resonate with many a faculty member of that era.
“If you were to see him in a seminar,” Adorno observed of Krahl (the Frankfurt equivalent of the better-known firebrand Rudi Dutschke), “you would not think it was the same person as the man who shouts through megaphones — there is probably something pathological about this divided identity. ... He had scarcely finished his speech before turning to me and whispering that he hoped I would not take it amiss since it was purely political and not meant personally.”
Amid the many conferences and symposia this spring pondering the meaning, politics, achievements, sorrows, upshots, and downsides of 1968, a less scrutinized aspect has been the professor-student relationship when politics inundates and threatens to capsize it.
In normal times, the professor automatically stands as representative of authority, of the establishment: the grade giver, syllabus decider, future recommendation writer, the voice that signals others to shut up when it speaks. But in abnormal political times, times of protest, the professor’s formal authority creates problems for the protesters’ reflexive instincts of opposition. The professor, whether humanist or chemist, also stands before them as a living bearer of beliefs, some possibly sympathetic to the protest, with his or her own peculiar relation to authority.
Adorno’s letter to Grass comes late in Detlev Claussen’s painstaking new biographical study, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Harvard University Press). It’s a reminder that no thinker so symbolized the complexities of the professor-student relationship in an age of protest as this intricate, precious Frankfurt School icon now reduced for many to one immortal sound bite: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Claussen, a former Adorno student, teaches at the University of Hanover under a title that perfectly reflects his mentor’s commitments — professor of social change, culture, and sociology. Claussen superbly examines every aspect of Adorno’s life and career, digging like an investigative reporter into “Teddy’s” relations with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and other famous contemporaries and friends, clarifying the Frankfurt School’s evolving ethos, and zeroing in on Adorno’s awkward relation to his Jewishness.
But in the 40th-anniversary year of 1968, Claussen’s study, like other fine Adorno biographies of this decade — Stefan Müller-Doohm’s Adorno: A Biography (2003) and Lorenz Jäger’s Adorno: A Political Biography (2004) — enables us to take Adorno’s experience as a template for what Martin Buber did not call the “I-Them” dilemma, but might have.
The popular version of “Adorno versus the students in the late 60s” favors black and white over gray. A hyperindividualistic aesthete and luminary of leftist German philosophical thought — in American exile during the war years — returns to Germany in the 1950s to become one of his rebuilding nation’s truth tellers. Adorno refuses to let his countrymen treat the Hitler years as an aberration. In essays such as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (1959), he notes the continuities in psychology, and sometimes personnel, between the Third Reich and the West German state. And Adorno continues to explore the links between capitalism and industrial society, the values that led Germany to ruin.
But in the 1960s, in this version, the story gets away from him. Germany’s students, like those in France, the United States, and elsewhere, decide to resolve the post-Marxist conundrum of how thought relates to action by taking action — in many cases against the very universities that nurtured their rebellious ideas. Adorno, presumably an intellectual father of the movement, does not react as expected.
When, in 1969, student protesters take over the building of the Institute for Social Research, the fabled, reconstituted research center known popularly as “the Frankfurt School,” Adorno calls the police to throw them out. Later that year, topless female protesters bring chaos to an Adorno lecture by storming the podium, part of a student campaign of disrupting Adorno’s lectures to protest his refusal to support violent actions against the West German state and his summoning of the police. Adorno told Grass he would not let himself be “browbeaten” into “the principle of unilateral solidarity.” Supposedly distraught over student antics, Adorno dies of a heart attack four months later. Sic semper hypocrite professors, the moral supposedly goes.
Claussen helpfully reintroduces subtlety into this academic urban legend. He emphasizes how Adorno, both “from the start of the student movement” and after raucous meetings in 1967 with the Frankfurt protesters, attempted to make sure that “contact was not broken off,” no matter how badly the professors and students might disagree on tactics to accelerate university reform and battle the looming authoritarianism of the West German state.
“To this day,” writes Claussen, acknowledging the popular version, “it is widely rumored that Adorno was destroyed by the conflict with the students.” But Claussen denies that, citing contrary evidence in Horkheimer’s letters after Adorno’s death. As Claussen similarly knocks down uninformed interpretations of Adorno’s actions during the protests, as well as bogus attempts to treat them as firm articulations of Adorno’s larger views, he also rightly shares Adorno’s stinging rebukes to what the latter recognized as totalitarian instincts on the left.
Adorno said he accepted the importance of a question he articulated bluntly: “If certain structures cannot be altered by superior arguments, what legitimate methods of change remain?” Yet he warned that there would be no end to terror “as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence.” Adorno saw extreme student actions, such as the violent blockades of the conservative publishing empire Springer Press, as mistakes undertaken by activists “under the pressure of their own publicity,” as he remarked in a letter to Marcuse.
As far back as 1959, Adorno had told the Council for Christian and Jewish Cooperation, “I consider the survival of national socialism within democracy to be potentially more of a threat than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.” (Lorenz Jäger writes that Adorno later came to think of some protesters as “storm troopers in jeans.”) In 1967, Adorno told indignant students that “we would not be here and would not speak freely if America had not intervened.”
“In the eyes of the public, he was beginning to lose out to Marcuse,” Claussen writes of Adorno, alluding to the greater aggressiveness in the late 60s of Adorno’s onetime Frankfurt School peer, then far away in America, acting as a mentor to Angela Davis and other radicals. In one of his last letters to Marcuse, Adorno wrote: “Here in Frankfurt, the word ‘professor’ is used to dismiss people, to ‘demolish’ them, as they put it so nicely, much as the Nazis used the word ‘Jew.’ … I take the risk that the student movement may turn to fascism much more to heart than you.”
At Adorno’s centenary, Richard Wolin noted recently in a Bookforum essay on Claussen’s book, united intellectual Germany not only forgave Adorno for his ostensible lack of solidarity with the 60s protest movement, but also celebrated him with seemingly endless honors, from an Adorno-Platz in Frankfurt to documentaries, symposia, and exhibitions. (One must remember, of course, that in a country where half the trains are named after thinkers and poets, one can overinterpret such phenomena.)
Yet an Adorno-like figure today, placed in the same situation by a fresh generation of students, might suffer a similar fate — the slur that a supporter and inspirer had turned into a hypocritical defender of authority.
Adorno understood the historical trick being played on him. On February 4, 1969, he wrote to his friend Samuel Beckett in a tone that reflected his measured bitterness at how students viewed him despite his decades of critically taking on the German establishment: “The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary comes as something of a surprise.”
In reply, Beckett offered a thought worthy of his mighty philosophical correspondent: “Was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?”
It would make a lovely theme for one last conference on the meaning of 1968.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 41, Page B13
