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had started out awarding too many 1s.

      In the depressing post-war atmosphere of 1950s Germany, Adorno made it plain that there was ‘no longer anything harmless and neutral’: his diagnosis of a society paralysed to death stood against the backdrop of the German genocide.17 Elsewhere, he wrote about the primal scene of the ghostly life: ‘In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middle ground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies.’18 Images like these must have conjured up childhood memories in Peter Gente. Towards the end of the war, prisoners from a nearby labour camp had turned up in his home town of Halberstadt. Children passed around the rumours of underground factories where these figures assembled aircraft – their parents said not a word about them. In return, Gente said nothing about his parents for the rest of his life. The rupture – precipitated not least by his reading of Adorno – was too deep for him to accord them any importance beyond rejection. As a result, only a few isolated facts are known about them. Gente’s father was a lawyer who had served as a lieutenant on the Eastern front and had been taken prisoner by the Red Army. His mother, from a ‘very anti-Semitic family’, contributed that heritage to the marriage. Gente remembered helping his mother carry his paralysed grandmother to the basement shelter during an air raid that destroyed large parts of Halberstadt in April of 1945. The family’s big house on the outskirts of the city was not hit. But when Gente’s father returned from Russia six years later, his career was ruined: a former member of the Nazi Party had no hope of advancement in the legal bureaucracy of East Germany. A short time later, the family had to flee to the West – allegedly because the father’s contacts with the American intelligence service had been exposed.19

      Like Thomas Mann, the first critics to review Minima Moralia in the fifties pointed out its poetic character. They either revealed the book to be ‘secretly a lyric poem’, or attested that ‘only a musician’ could have composed it.24 Adorno himself later claimed, in an interview in Der Spiegel, to be a ‘theoretical person who feels that theoretical thinking comes extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions’.25 This was no doubt the reason for the book’s great success: it catered for the poetic demand of the post-war period. In the same year in which Minima Moralia was published, Gottfried Benn noted that the poets had triumphed over the philosophers. Even the philosophers, he declared in his 1951 Marburg lecture on ‘Problems of Lyric Poetry’, now longed to write poems. ‘They feel that systematic, discursive thinking has reached an impasse at the moment; consciousness can bear at the moment only something which thinks in fragments; five hundred pages of observations on truth, apt though some sentences may be, are outweighed by a three-verse poem.’26 If this diagnosis is correct – and the number of new poetry magazines emerging in the 1950s suggests that it is – then Adorno and his philosophical aphorisms were aligned with the trend of the time.


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