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Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius

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This book was a slight disappointment for me but only because I was expecting a regular biography or even a conventional critical study, but, as the author's introduction points out, Adorno himself harbored deep suspicions about the biographical genre, and so Mr. Claussen, one of Adorno's last students, has written a different kind of book about his revered teacher.

I will admit that the advantages of the author's approach to the life of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), as trumpeted by the publisher's dustjacket and the accompanying critical blurbs, were partially lost on me. I was hoping for a more conventional approach, one that would supply enough interesting and even intimate biographical details and provide the reader with something of the relevant intellectual background to make the ideas discussed more understandable. But such was not always the case.

I will be more to the point--this book is NOT for someone seeking a first look at the life and thought of Theodor Adorno. Some contexts are provided, and sometimes with amazing detail, but more often than not they seemed remote and in some cases of little apparent value in trying to understand Adorno the man (the extended discussions, for example, of the situation and prospects of the German Jewish bourgeoisie by the early 20th century did not merit the space devoted to it). Adorno's main ideas peek out of nowhere in the narrative as Claussen presents them in a consciously unsystematic manner, and, unless one already has some knowledge of their meaning, their significance can be lost on the first-time reader.

And true to what the author states in the introductory chapter, appropriately entitled "Instead of an Overture" (p. 4ff.), the book reads as if the author wanted to present Adorno not directly as a biographical subject, but rather as a man who until his death in 1969 continued to interact with some of the most significant intellectual and cultural figures of the last century--Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Pollack, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukacs, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Gershom Scholem, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg.

These long sections really constitute the meat of the book and they are in their own right fascinating, but the general reader will find himself at some points straining to keep all the pieces together and arrive at a greater sense of continuity. It would have made the book longer, but a little more discursive material added to these sections would have made them, I think, more rewarding to read. In fact any of the above figures taken individually had more space devoted to his relationship with Adorno than did his wife, Gretel Karplus, who only merits passing mention along the way. The book begins in a regular narrative fashion with Adorno's youth in Frankfurt but it passes quickly into a jumbled, back-and-forth manner of presentation in which events from the 1950s or 1960s are freely mixed with events from thirty years before, and vice-versa.

But Theodor Adorno remains a man whose ideas are of continuing interest and influence. One wonders, for example, what he would have thought about the techno-barbarism of our own hyper-manipulative 'culture industry' busy as it is multiplying media at every turn and blessing them with a self-critical autonomy that only serves to blind people to their thoroughly coercive nature. And the book does clear up a few things along the way: Claussen deals with the misunderstanding that has accompanied Adorno's notorious remark, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" simply by providing the line that follows it, "And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today...", namely, people will keep on writing poetry in the wake of Auschwitz, but will they do it with any consciousness of what that might mean, or will they just continue scribbling in accordance with the prevailing modes of bourgeois self-regard while blinkered to the reifying ideologies of our material culture? [Here's a hint--Adorno categorically rejected the idea of art for art's sake...]

There are no doubt other more conventional treatments of Adorno out there, but this book--inspired by the love, respect, and sympathy of one man for his teacher who would no doubt have approved of its aim--CONSCIOUSLY does its own thing.

[Note: After reading this book I picked up Stefan Mueller-Doohm's "Adorno: A Life" and found it to be exactly the kind of biography I was seeking. If you are making the effort to familiarize yourself with Adorno and his work, get the Mueller-Doohm book because it does an admirable job of covering not just his personal life and his interactions with other great artists and thinkers but it also includes expositions of his books and ideas together with just about the right of amount of contextualization.]