History of Critical Theory: In the Shadow of the Frankfurt School

Midnight is “night studio” time. At least for Hannah Werkreis. The Salzburg high school student has made it a habit to circumvent her father’s prohibition and listen late at night to the voices on a Grundig receiver that find their way under her bedclothes via Radio Vienna. She was particularly impressed by the articulate manner of expression and the elegant and profound thought process of a “night studio” guest. She was so impressed by a lecture on the French writer Marcel Proust that she wrote a letter to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research asking for the manuscript.

After graduating from high school, Werviertel wants to know exactly what it is and moves to the Main metropolis to take a closer look at its intellectual hero, who gives lectures there as a professor. In a gray suit and a pocket watch chain on his lapel, “Wiesengrund” knows how to fascinate the student audience with his statements, masterpieces of free speech. Like so many members of the generation that would later be labeled “1968,” the young woman experienced an intellectual revelation.

However, she is not a real person, but rather a fictional one: in her novel »Wiesengrund«, which was published in 2016 and is well worth reading, Gisela von Wysocki incorporated experiences that she herself had with Adorno during her philosophy studies. She describes one case in which a not insignificant part of middle-class youth became aware of what is now probably the best-known representative of critical theory through nightly radio broadcasts. The future writer was inspired to write a doctoral thesis on the Viennese poet Peter Altenberg by attending Adorno’s seminars and subsequently wrote a large number of essays, radio plays, plays and two novels.

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She wrote for the feminist magazine “The Black Botin” and dealt intensively with outsiders in literary history. After Adorno’s death in the summer of 1969, she was one of 33 of his students who spoke in the Frankfurter Rundschau against the political defusing that, in their eyes, his thinking was receiving in the obituaries of the bourgeois press. Like the student left, according to the tenor of the open letter, Adorno adhered to the Marxist insight to the end that liberation in capitalist society could only be achieved through the total overthrow of the economic-political structure.

The signatories at the time included Regina Schmidt (later: Becker-Schmidt) and prominent publication venue. In it she examined the right to strike as an expression of the social balance of power. She assumed that this would provide information about what was possible in the revolutionary struggle and what function the trade unions could play in it. Rajawsky later went to Hanover with the social philosopher Oskar Negt, where she became interested in the then new post-structuralist theories from France and translated the feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray into German.

Literature as liberation

In Jörg Later’s recently published major book »Adorno’s Heirs. “A Story from the Federal Republic” we encounter the three women just mentioned – von Wysocki, Rajawsky and Schmidt – as those students of Adorno whose theoretical and political contributions are unfortunately hardly known today beyond small circles of experts and older feminist activists.

So let’s come back to Regina Schmidt. After her studies, Adorno’s assistant conducted an empirical opinion study to investigate how the West German population reacted to the Adolf Eichmann trial, the “Spiegel” affair and the Baden-Württemberg metal workers’ strike of 1963. She wrote a doctoral thesis on “History and the Philosophy of History in the Elite Concept” and in 1973 went to the Psychology Seminar in Hanover as a professor, where she set up a working group for feminist theory and initiated empirical studies on female workers. In the research group “Problems of Wage-Dependent Mothers” led by Schmidt, women with factory experience and children under the age of twelve were asked about their experiences switching between family and work.

Instead of just sitting in jazz cellars, it is now really possible to think about starting points for meaningful socialist practice.

Adorno student Elisabeth Lenk on the exclusion of the SDS from the SPD

Hella Tiedemann, née Bartels, who had also studied with Adorno and received her doctorate in Berlin in 1969 under the well-known literary scholar Peter Szondi, took a more historical path to continue what she had learned at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Together with her husband Rolf, she initially worked on the Walter Benjamin Edition and eventually looked after young academics as an adjunct professor. According to Later, their self-formulated claim was to “spoil as many students as possible for the cultural sector.”

That would certainly have been entirely in Adorno’s spirit. The fact that the scholar – for all his outwardly displayed professorial bourgeoisie – had an artistic nature with anarchist traits can be seen in his relationship with his favorite student, Elisabeth Lenk. The activist of the Socialist German Student Association (SDS), who comes from a Protestant pastor’s family and grew up in Kassel, appeared at its XVII. Delegates conference in October 1962 with a lecture on socialist theory in which she welcomed the exclusion of the student association from the SPD as liberation: Instead of just sitting in jazz cellars, it was now really possible to think about starting points for meaningful socialist practice. At that time she looked after deserters from the Algerian War and then received an invitation to Paris from socialist circles, which she gladly accepted in order to gain distance from her doctoral supervisor Adorno, who was deeply in love with her at the time.

In Paris, Lenk met the surrealist Andrè Breton, she taught as a lecturer in Nanterre and took part in the occupation of the Latin Quarter in May 1968. Her growing enthusiasm for surrealist literature in France also led to a renewed closeness between her and Adorno. For him, engaging with this literature was a welcome opportunity to escape the constraints that conceptual thinking brought with it. After completing her doctorate, Lenk moved to Berlin, where she became Peter Szondi’s assistant at the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Free University. In 1983 she published her book “The Unconscious Society”. Lenk had previously found an important supporter in Giessen sociology professor Helge Pross, a former employee of the Institute for Social Research. Pross employed Lenk as an assistant and accepted her work on surrealism as an art sociology dissertation after Adorno’s unexpected death.

From Adorno to Süssmuth

Pross was already 27 years old and had a doctorate when she came to Frankfurt from Heidelberg in 1954 and made a name for herself the following year with a pioneering thesis on “German academic emigration to the United States 1933–1941”. At the institute she took part in teacher training and dealt with aspects of gender-specific socialization and the disadvantages faced by girls in the education system. After around ten years in Frankfurt, she received a call to the University of Giessen, where she invited Adorno as the first foreign guest.

In her study on the “Managers of Capitalism,” published in 1971, Pross was interested in the question of whether and how democratic senior executives in large companies are. She became convinced that the democratic impulses emanating from the universities would also find their way into capitalist industrial companies, out of the pure self-interest of the company owners who were interested in efficient production and avoiding revolutionary situations. Pross became a sought-after speaker at companies and business associations. She wrote columns for the then popular magazine “Brigitte” and made numerous television appearances.

The pioneer of gender studies increasingly adopted socially liberal positions and, in 1982, together with the later Christian Democratic Federal Family Ministers Rita Süssmuth and Ursula Lehr, published a book about family and women’s emancipation. One can see this as a dilution of originally radical emancipatory ideas. But the retrospective interpretation of a male Adorno student seems to me to be just as true. When asked what was left of 1968, Jürgen Habermas answered, according to a widespread anecdote a few years ago: Rita Süssmuth.

In his new book, which will be published next spring, Thomas Wagner tells of the encounter between two prominent intellectual adversaries in the post-fascist Federal Republic against the backdrop of the division of Germany – the working title: “Adorno, Gehlen and the great years of sociology”.

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