The Summer of Theory. Philipp Felsch

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Reflections from Damaged Life

The following year, in 1957, Gente had an awakening. It occurred, however, not in the cultural sphere where he was seeking his future, but at the base, in wage labour. The scene is symptomatic of the young West Germany, which was already approaching full employment in the second half of the 1950s. On the assembly line of the Siemens factory in Spandau, where Gente worked to support himself while studying law – in accordance with his father’s wishes – he listened to two of his fellow students talking about a certain Adorno, whom they seemed for some reason to consider absolutely essential. Exactly what it was that captured his attention, he couldn’t remember later on. But the impression it made was certainly deep. ‘Adorno challenged earlier life’, Gente’s later self-criticism states tersely.¹¹ He got a copy of Adorno’s best-known book, Minima Moralia, and couldn’t put it down, although he understood hardly any of its impenetrable aphorisms.¹² Yet the author, claiming that only thoughts ‘which do not understand themselves’ can be true, apparently saw the hermetic tone as part of his message.¹³ The difficult language, yielding its meaning only to patient reflection, contributed to the influence of a book which made those Gente had read before it seem irrelevant.¹⁴

In 1957, Adorno’s ‘reflections from damaged life’, as Minima Moralia’s subtitle calls them, were still an insider tip. Six years after its publication, there was little to indicate that the book would be a philosophical hit, selling over 120,000 copies to date. In the middle of the post-war boom, between Opel Rekords and ice cream parlours, Gente was unsettled by it – by the way of thinking of a little-known Frankfurt philosophy lecturer who saw only disaster wherever he looked. ‘Life does not live’, reads the epigram, like a warning, on the first page; the pages that follow contain variations on that paradox. Condensing his experience of American exile into miniatures, Adorno exposes modern life as a state of deception. What seems to be alive and authentic is in reality long dead; the apparent aspiration to progress is caused by a ghostly compulsion to keep moving.¹⁵ It is a post-cataclysmic world we are living in. ‘The disaster does not take the form of a radical elimination of what existed previously’, a key passage reads – ‘rather the things that history has condemned are dragged along dead, neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast’. Hence the macabre atmosphere of Minima Moralia: its pages are populated by the undead. Among the figures whose eerie ‘post-existence’ Adorno exposes are the achievements of the preceding bourgeois era – such as liberalism, socialism and the hospitality industry, which reached a state of rigor mortis with the advent of room service. Adorno discovers the ghastliest signs of decay in the tiniest details of day-to-day life – hence his now famous observations that the inhabitants of the Enlightened hemisphere no longer know how to give gifts, to be at home in their homes, or to close a door. ‘The world is systematized horror’ is his judgement of the present. That condemnation had the sinister weight, two decades before Apocalypse Now, of Coppola’s Colonel Kurtz watching a snail crawl along a razor’s edge. Meanwhile, German radios played the sentimental songs of the Austrian rover Freddy Quinn.¹⁶

      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

Along with an initially small but later fast-growing number of his generation, Peter Gente made Minima Moralia his breviary: a book that was digestible only in small portions, but one that could be consulted in every circumstance. The dons of German universities did not know what to make of Adorno’s ‘painfully convoluted intellectual poetry’, as Thomas Mann once called the book.²⁰ As a result, the influential reading experiences were extramural.²¹ Later, Gente the publisher would insist on making ambulatory books – readable on the train, ‘while travelling’ or around town – no doubt influenced by his experience as an Adorno reader.²² ‘I carried Minima Moralia around with me for a good five years. Every day, always with me, a regular vade mecum.’²³ With his melancholy diagnosis of the present, Adorno instituted a new use for philosophy: his books replaced the volume of poetry in the young reader’s coat pocket.

      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.

Adorno himself would by no means have wanted his work to be misunderstood as a prose poem, however. He is known to have rejected philosophers ‘borrowing from literature’ and expecting ‘that Being itself will speak in a poésie concocted of Parmenides and Jungnickel’, and decried the resulting language as a ‘jargon of authenticity’.²⁷ But Adorno went further: in a world which had passed through an apocalypse, he saw no future for poetry itself. After Auschwitz, in his notorious dictum – also dated 1951 – writing poems was a barbaric act.²⁸ Was he carrying this idea to its logical conclusion in Minima Moralia? Was the book a subversion of the poetic form by discursive philosophy?²⁹ Adorno was smuggling a work of social analysis full of difficult philosophical references into his readers’ reach by disguising it as literature. As the sixties progressed, they took the bait. Although Gente continued to read novels, he no longer read them as edifying tracts. Michael Rutschky, who discovered Minima Moralia a few years after him, wrote that Adorno’s texts made ‘literary writing seem completely anaemic compared with philosophy’.³⁰ Ten years after Gottfried Benn’s premature declaration of victory, different circumstances prevailed: ‘theory’ – now in the singular as a mass noun – had so thoroughly co-opted poetry that it was in the process of superseding it.