The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch

The Summer of Theory - Philipp Felsch


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      With Minima Moralia as a pocket compass, Gente set off into the sixties. The young German intellectuals of that time wore Caesar bangs and simple clothes, and demonstrated their nonconformism by listening to jazz. Their attitude towards life had existentialist foundations, and Adorno’s ‘teaching of the good life’ gave it a flavour of social critique.31 ‘Even the blossoming tree lies’, they read, ‘the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.’ And: ‘For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity.’32 The dismay that sentences like these elicited in their readers is difficult to understand today; they sound oddly melodramatic to ears accustomed to the varieties of postmodern irony. Hence, it is with nostalgia that Michael Rutschky recalls the years when the world was still ‘in perfect disorder’. With a little practice, Adorno’s readers learned to apply his conceptual toolbox to situations of day-to-day life – at the risk of acting smugly superior.33 No wonder Adorno, returning from exile, seemed to many older Germans like an avenging angel. His ‘fiercely brilliant’ thinking was all the more influential among the younger generation.34

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      Peter Gente must have had similar feelings as he walked around town with his vade mecum in his pocket. Putting the past behind one was especially difficult in Berlin, where past and future overlapped. When Gente mentioned his new favourite author at home, his mother smelled ‘Jewish subversion’: she had retained her sensitivity to racial distinctions after the end of the war.36 Her son’s reaction was to drop law and enrol in philosophy, sociology and German literature. His sitting ‘ten hours a day at his desk’ to get through the gigantic reading load of three courses cannot be explained by political misgivings alone.37 Adorno was more than just a moral authority breaking the silence that hung over the past: he attracted his first supporters by feeding their hunger for culture. He had noticed with surprise, after his return from exile in the United States in 1949, his Frankfurt students’ zeal for ‘the mind’. In a letter to Leo Lowenthal, he compared his seminar with a Talmud school: ‘as if the spirits of the murdered Jewish intellectuals had descended into the German students’. Although these students had his respect – and although they helped him to feel at home in West Germany – Adorno found their political apathy worrying. People who would rather discuss poems than the state of the world, he felt, were continuing a German pattern of behaviour that prevented them from recognizing the gravity of the disaster. And yet, by the same token – such was the dialectic of Adorno’s success – they were bound to be fascinated by Adorno.38

      Adorno is said to have been the ‘trustee’ of a German tradition, that of Beethoven and Hölderlin, which had been compromised and had to wait for his work to make it listenable and readable again. Perhaps it amounts to much the same thing if we say that West German post-war intellectuals not only had a weakness for culture, but also felt a need to raise the degree of thinking involved in approaching works of art. They understood Adorno’s belief that, after the breakdown of civilization, culture ‘in the traditional sense’ must be seen as ‘dead’. Only by adopting a critical distance could they accept their cultural heritage – and by the same token that heritage took on a social relevance. Joachim Kaiser wrote that nothing could be ‘complicated enough’ for German students. Witold Gombrowicz, spending his year in West Berlin literary and academic circles, found the intellectual climate of 1963 too ‘cerebral’. Alongside the aestheticization of theory to which Adorno contributed with his books, the theorization of the aesthetic experience was the imperative of the moment.42

      Peter Gente was fascinated with Adorno to such a point that he wanted to read everything the man wrote. Starting with his gateway drug, Minima Moralia, he systematically worked his way backwards to the early writings on musical aesthetics, some of which were difficult to find at that time, before the Suhrkamp edition of Adorno’s collected works. Library research was necessary to reconstruct the theoretical context. Gente collated bibliographical lists as meticulously as he had kept his cultural


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