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| Run Away and Come Back Again |
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| Written by Avi Alpert | |||||
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“Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated,” wrote Adorno, the famous German philosopher, in his reflections on his exile to America. Despite the mutilation he reported, the time between Adorno’s arrival in America in 1937, at age 34, and his return to Germany twelve years later, was a period in which he produced some of the most significant work in philosophy and cultural criticism in the twentieth century. Given his prolific writing and intellectually vibrant context - the standard measures of an intellectual’s success - why did Adorno feel mutilated in exile, and why did he decide to return to Germany? Born into an upper class family in Frankfurt, Adorno began his career as an academic philosopher until 1933 when his half-Jewish heritage was enough to lead the rising Nazi regime to take away his post. He fled to London in 1934 and studied at Oxford until he had the opportunity to move to America. Once on American shores, Adorno’s contact with the extravagance of Los Angeles intensified the alienation he already felt as a new immigrant. He became fascinated with Hollywood films and their societal impact. Never fully taking to American culture, he and colleague Max Horkheimer came to call Hollywood and other mass entertainment the “culture industry.” This critique, for which Adorno became considered a European elitist par excellence, asserted that mass entertainment was not a space of free leisure, but part of a system of domination that indoctrinated people as consumers of information and products. Though Adorno’s critique has universal relevance, it is part of his distinctive thoughts on the question of art after the Holocaust. Adorno’s most famous statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” issues a warning on any art form that seeks to make beauty out of the world that remained after the destruction of the Holocaust. Such art, Adorno wrote, is “in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.” Similarly, Adorno’s critique of mass culture expresses a fear that art could simultaneously arouse fascist sentiments and drown out their horror. Though Adorno ultimately discovered positive elements of his time in America, he still felt a deep need to return to Germany. In part, he wanted to return simply because Germany was still his homeland, not just by birth, but also in terms of his intellectual and linguistic heritage. Indeed, part of the refugee’s mutilation, Adorno wrote, was because “his language had been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped.” In addition to his linguistic and cultural yearnings, Adorno wanted to see what possibilities for a better world remained after the Holocaust, and he wanted to find out at the site of the destruction. As he wrote to Horkheimer shortly after his return to the Rhineland, “What survives here may well be condemned by history and it certainly bears the marks of this clearly enough, but the fact that it...still exists...permits the feeble hope that something humane survives, despite everything.” In Negative Dialectics, the last book he published in his lifetime, Adorno famously called for a “new categorical imperative” – a new moral absolute along the lines of what Kant had first elaborated. The new imperative was simple: “to arrange...thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself.” For Adorno, the only way to end mutilation and alienation was to ensure the removal of the Fascist conditions – both mental and physical – that would permit something like the Holocaust to occur again. How else could he do this than by moving back to where it had all begun, by going in search of that “feeble hope that something humane survives” in Europe? The question we might ask ourselves, then, is not why did Adorno return to Germany, but how could he not have? In times of his most extreme lack of faith in humanity, Adorno saw the need to go back into the darkness, and to wrest from its very core the possibility of redemption.
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