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118-592: The Ferienkurse were initiated in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke , then responsible for culture in the municipal government of Darmstadt . He directed them until his death in 1961, succeeded by Ernst Thomas  [ ru ] (1962–81), Friedrich Ferdinand Hommel (1981–94), Solf Schaefer (1995–2009), and Thomas Schäfer, who has been artistic director and president of the IMD from 2009. The courses were first held annually, lasting for about twelve days. From 1970, they have been held biennially for two to three weeks. The first venue

236-424: A Catholic from Corsica , was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism , ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her name, Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Upon his application for US citizenship , his name

354-471: A music critic for well-known Essen daily newspapers, and a choral conductor. Already as a child, Steinecke wrote poems and a play. He attended a gymnasium in his home town. At the age of 17 he wrote his first composition. From 1927, he wrote incidental music for school theatre performances as well as for productions of the Kiel Student Theatre. Steinecke first completed practical music studies at

472-631: A public figure , not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews, and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio, and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as "The Administered World" (September 1950), "What is the Meaning of 'Working Through the Past?"' (February 1960), and "The Teaching Profession and its Taboos" (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine , Frankfurter Rundschau , and

590-438: A "musique informelle", which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else. Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end." At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann . Adorno's 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz

708-598: A book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments , the text waited another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment , by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through

826-400: A button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it." Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on

944-527: A car accident in Darmstadt on 23 December 1961 at the age of 51. A street in Kranichstein was named after him. Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( / ə ˈ d ɔːr n oʊ / ə- DOR -noh ; German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ ʔaˈdɔʁno] ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund ; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher , musicologist , and social theorist . He

1062-452: A concert hall where people sit as if they were in church." In essays published by the institute's Zeitschrift , Adorno dealt with the atrophy of musical culture that had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies—toward conformism, trivialization, and standardization—already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the Project. At

1180-445: A culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch , culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness. Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and

1298-480: A draft of his Philosophy of New Music , a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion", he wrote after reading the manuscript. The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed from

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1416-515: A great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem , wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke , was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against

1534-475: A job in the new cultural administration of the city of Darmstadt under Mayor Ludwig Metzger  [ de ] . On his application he stated that he was politically unencumbered and made no statements about his activities in the NS time. Also at a later time Steinecke was not subjected to a denazification procedure. On 1 August 1945 he was given a temporary contract of employment as cultural advisor. On 1 December 1945,

1652-761: A language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache"). In September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York, and saw his mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler , Michel Leiris , and René Leibowitz , Adorno delivered

1770-598: A lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's Two Pieces for string quartet, Op. 2, was performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the habilitation . After writing the Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique, as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for voice and piano, Op. 6, Adorno presented his habilitation manuscript, The Concept of

1888-461: A lecture entitled "The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany" at a conference on opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would "raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness." With Horkheimer as dean of

2006-511: A lecture on Goethe 's Iphigenie in Tauris . After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist", a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a meeting with

2124-545: A magnet. Every day brings new fascination ... concentrated nourishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is made of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne here. This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field; in this respect it is similar to your book. Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann 's novel Professor Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel ; declaring his sympathy with those who protested

2242-714: A music and theatre critic for the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung in Essen until 1939. He then moved to Darmstadt to work as the editor for southwestern Germany for the Düsseldorf theatre newspaper Der Mittag . He also worked as a correspondent for several daily newspapers. Due to the closure of the German theatres on 1 September 1944, he became unemployed. After the end of the Second World War he applied in Darmstadt for

2360-586: A permanent post for Adorno at the Institute. In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift , Adorno was expected to be the institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project . In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks that had become manifest through Benjamin's " The Work of Art in

2478-441: A psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest." In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959) and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on

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2596-433: A strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel 's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety", "inwardness", and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy —were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism

2714-436: A theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb." Adorno would refer to the radical students as "stormtroopers ( Sturmabteilung ) in jeans." In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for

2832-444: A transcendence that Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible. "No cathedral", he wrote, "can be built if no community desires one." In the summer of 1924 Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius . Before his graduation, Adorno had already met his most important intellectual collaborators, Horkheimer and Benjamin. It

2950-564: A trio for flute, viola and cello by Günter Bialas (1923), Henze's Kranichsteiner Kammerkonzert for flute, piano and strings, and Hölderlin-Lieder by Hermann Reutter . Willy Burkhard 's Symphonie in einem Satz (1944) and Hindemith 's String Quartet No. 6 (1943) received their first performance in Germany. During the first years of the event, a focus was on German premieres of works, sometimes decades after their composition, by composers such as Arnold Schönberg , Anton Webern , Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók . Schoenberg's Piano Concerto

3068-439: A writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus , Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory , which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett , is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art, which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy , and explode

3186-555: Is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in Negative Dialectics , for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in "Commitment", he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany's struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended

3304-522: Is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked. In March, as the swastika was run up the flagpole of the town hall, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the Institute's offices. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in

3422-412: Is now threatening to engulf Europe", Horkheimer wrote, "our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle." As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning that his Spanish visa

3540-519: Is sponsored by several organisations, especially public broadcasters. A prize, the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis  [ de ] was installed in 1952, first for performers, then also for composers. Recipients include performers (with their instrument listed) and composers: During the late 1950s and early 1960s the courses were charged with a perceived lack of interest on the part of some of its zealot followers in any music not matching

3658-636: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology , arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin. Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow , and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at

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3776-616: The American Jewish Committee . In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity". The result of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality ,

3894-643: The Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music . Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, with seminars on "Kant's Transcendental Dialectic", aesthetics, Hegel, "Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge", and "The Concept of Knowledge". Adorno's surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate

4012-527: The Folkwangschule in Essen with Ludwig Riemann (1863–1927) and Felix Wolfes . He then studied musicology with Ernst Bücken , art history, theatre and literature and philosophy at the University of Cologne and the University of Kiel . In 1928, he completed a seventy-page music aesthetic, incorporating ideas by Ferruccio Busoni and Hans Mersmann . In addition to his studies, he worked as an assistant at

4130-685: The Second Viennese School , Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus , while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War . Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research , Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism , antisemitism , and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies

4248-654: The Springer Press , which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in Die Zeit , signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as

4366-644: The Volkshochschule . He also founded a municipal chamber music series and organized the first art exhibitions. Steinecke is particularly remembered for initiating the Darmstädter Ferienkurse , which began in 1946 as International Summer Courses for New Music, and which were later managed by the Kranichstein Music Institute. They connected Germany again to the in international scene of contemporary classical music which had been cut by

4484-600: The Zeitschrift für Musik , the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch  [ de ] . In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale , which in 1923 he called a "dismal Bohemian prank". In these early writings he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances that either sought or pretended to achieve

4602-480: The serial music being written at that time by himself and composers such as Boulez, Maderna, Stockhausen, Berio, and Pousseur ) as a pejorative term, implying a "mathematical", rule-based music. The courses presented in 70 years around 5,000 world premieres. The record label col legno has published recordings, often documenting world premieres and first performances in Germany. Wolfgang Steinecke Wolfgang Steinecke (22 April 1910 – 23 December 1961)

4720-589: The "Darmstädter Schule" ( Darmstadt School ). Notable performers instructed in new playing techniques, and works by young composers ( Nachwuchskomponisten ) were offered in so-called Atelierkonzerte (atelier concerts). For the organisation of the event, the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt was founded in 1948. It also keeps an archive of past events and compositions. It holds around 20,000 photographs, 10,000 letters, sound files and other documents, available online since 2016. The event

4838-506: The 1955 essay collection Prisms . In response to the publication of Thomas Mann 's The Black Swan , Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente . A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature , appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame", which, along with studies of Proust , Valéry , and Balzac , formed

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4956-514: The Age of its Technical Reproducibility ". At around the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic", which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment . Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes , they entertained few delusions about their work's practical effects. "In view of what

5074-536: The American Military Government agreed to employ Steinecke. The employment contract was regularly extended in the following period. He received a salary in the rank of a government councillor. During his time as cultural advisor until 1948 Steinecke rebuilt the cultural administration in the heavily destroyed city of Darmstadt. This included the opening of the municipal library, the Academy of Musical Arts and

5192-672: The Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the institute's work fell upon Adorno. At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek 's opera Leben des Orest , and a seminar on "Criteria of New Music" at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with

5310-665: The Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative , which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt 's articles in Merkur , claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's Writings and Letters with

5428-519: The European New Left . Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl . As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of

5546-451: The Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger 's language of authenticity , writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust , and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As

5664-510: The Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought. Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler , Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in

5782-652: The Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for "the precision of their materialist deciphering" as well as the way in which "musical facts ... had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me." In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of Enlightenment —man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on 16 February 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark, New Jersey , to discuss

5900-768: The Nazis from 1933 as " degenerate music ". During that time, representatives of the modernist movement had been expelled, silenced, or murdered. The first event in 1946 offered courses in conducting by Carl Mathieu Lange , musical composition by Wolfgang Fortner , piano by Georg Kuhlmann , voice by Elisabeth Delseit, violin by Günter Kehr , opera direction by Bruno Hey and Walter Jockisch , and music criticism by Fred Hamel . A first series were courses, lectures and concerts from 25 August to 21 September. They were followed by public concerts and lectures, titled "Internationale zeitgenössische Musiktage" (International contemporary music days) from 22 to 29 September, held in collaboration with

6018-598: The Nazis. The programs was in the early years influenced by musicians and composers such as Hugo Distler , Wolfgang Fortner , Gerhard Frommel  [ de ] and Hermann Reutter . From 1950, Steinecke devoted himself exclusively to the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. He succeeded in bringing many composers, performers and philosophers to meeting in Darmstadt, where the Darmstadt School was born. Theodor Adorno , in an obituary for Steinecke, draws attention to

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6136-602: The New Music", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann , Adorno feared that music was being sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed

6254-935: The Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" in the Viennese musical journal 23 , "On Jazz" in the institute's Zeitschrift , "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäische Revue . But Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift . Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline , Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, which later became Minima Moralia . While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, and Berg died in December of

6372-508: The Poems of Theodor Däubler, op. 8 . Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University , critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music at

6490-450: The Project's plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music. Although he was expected to embed the Project's research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press

6608-455: The Project's topic, "Music in Radio." Adorno was primarily interested in how musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony", he wrote, "heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in

6726-510: The Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open." Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno

6844-562: The Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a "non- Aryan ", he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterward Adorno was forced into 15 years of exile. After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With

6962-663: The Reich during the First World War . Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin , Max Horkheimer , and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber , Max Scheler , Georg Simmel , as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer —came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from how this tradition had discredited itself. Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with

7080-544: The US, and consisting of ' qualitative interpretations ' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions. The books have had a major influence on sociology and remain highly discussed and debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda , in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines

7198-644: The Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche ( Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre ), to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application because the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In the manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged from Freud 's early writings. Against

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7316-554: The autumn of 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain 's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer titled The Treasure of Indian Joe , which he never completed. By the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over 100 opera or concert reviews and 50 critiques of music composition. As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag , Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing

7434-577: The central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to Literature . Adorno's entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers' Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress". Although the Zeitschrift

7552-426: The chapters that treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer 's Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade , as well as analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism. With their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on antisemitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford -led Public Opinion Study Group and

7670-501: The city of Darmstadt, its Landestheater , and the broadcasters Süddeutscher Rundfunk and Radio Frankfurt . Events included an exhibition of the Neue Darmstädter Sezession , "Zeitgenössische deutsche Kunst", and also Carl Orff's opera Die Kluge , and the award ceremony of the Georg Büchner Prize to Fritz Usinger . Concerts presented several world premieres, such as Erich Sehlbach  [ de ] 's string sextet, Fortner's für Klavier , Günter Raphael 's sonata for solo flute,

7788-423: The composer Ernst Krenek , discussing problems of atonality and the twelve-tone technique. In a 1934 letter, he sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from

7906-409: The detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with Benjamin 's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project , Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments that should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as

8024-496: The end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was prolific, publishing "The Radio Symphony", "A Social Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular Music", texts that, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, are found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation, Current of Music . In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found

8142-408: The essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced. According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique 's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer. At this time Adorno struck up a correspondence with

8260-411: The essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television"; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute. Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed three essays: "Notes on Kafka", "Valéry Proust Museum", and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were included in

8378-438: The factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete , or Gretel, moved into the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she became acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht , and Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s. After fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from

8496-428: The form of the essays "The Authoritarian State", "The End of Reason", and "The Jews and Europe", served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic. In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California", setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with

8614-471: The function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler , Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature." Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's Four Songs for medium voice and piano, Op. 3,

8732-544: The halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision", and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967–68, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection, which would soon take on ever greater importance,

8850-817: The help of the Academic Assistance Council , Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford , in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle , Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl 's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and begun making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing, "The Form of

8968-452: The important bridges he built at Darmstadt between the new generation and the pre-War generation of Schoenberg , Alban Berg , and Anton Webern . and He also worked as a music critic for various newspapers and magazines, including again Der Mittag . Steinecke was married to the photographer Hella Steinecke née Dahm (1921–1982). The marriage remained childless. Steinecke died as a result of

9086-447: The impossibility of love. In California Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler , with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, films' visual aspects. Adorno also assisted Thomas Mann with his novel Doktor Faustus after

9204-723: The institute's self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on 8 September 1937. A little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take with the Princeton Radio Project , then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld . Yet Adorno's work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on

9322-458: The institution. Composers such as, initially, Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pierre Boulez , Luigi Nono , Bruno Maderna , and later Luciano Berio , Aldo Clementi , Franco Donatoni , Niccolò Castiglioni , Franco Evangelisti , Karel Goeyvaerts , Mauricio Kagel , Gottfried Michael Koenig , Giacomo Manzoni , Henri Pousseur , Helmut Lachenmann , and Brian Ferneyhough presented their radical approach and theories. They are sometimes referred to as

9440-640: The latter asked for his help. "Would you be willing", Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work—I mean Leverkühn's work—might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?" At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return, Adorno had reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music and completed two compositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op.7 , and Three Choruses for Female Voices from

9558-517: The musical culture that had grown up around Schoenberg . In addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch . In Vienna he and Berg attended public lectures by the satirist Karl Kraus , and he met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic . Berg, whom Adorno called "my master and teacher",

9676-698: The piano by the time he was twelve. At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren Middle School, before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium , where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Before his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of György Lukács 's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch 's The Spirit of Utopia , of which he would later write: Bloch's

9794-520: The police were brought in to close the building. Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language", delivered in Zürich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory . In June 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical Models . During

9912-529: The privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion. Adorno was nominated for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature by Helmut Viebrock. Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund) was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt on 11 September 1903, the only child of Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952) and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946). His mother,

10030-530: The publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link . Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions", he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possible any more." After striking students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment,

10148-479: The publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp , inducing the latter to publish Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900 , Kracauer's writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin's writings. Adorno's own recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952: I have spent days attached to your book as if by

10266-723: The rich concert offerings of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker , Stravinsky , Bartók , Busoni , Delius , and Hindemith —but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung ' s literary editor, of whom he would later write: For years Kracauer read [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in

10384-415: The same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the institute, Karl Mannheim , as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique that held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in

10502-541: The same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished opera Lulu . At this time Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin about the latter's Arcades Project . After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on 9 June 1937 and stayed for two weeks. While he was in New York, Horkheimer's essays "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" and "Traditional and Critical Theory", which would soon become instructive for

10620-528: The scandal of big-game hunting; and, penning a defense of prostitutes. Because Adorno's American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The Stars Down to Earth ), and

10738-775: The slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers ... Under his guidance, I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself. Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard , and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like

10856-401: The social sciences. His lecture "The Actuality of Philosophy" created a scandal. In it Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind", Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate

10974-513: The subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Péter Szondi , Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give

11092-479: The surface of the composition. At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929, he accepted Paul Tillich 's offer to present a habilitation on Kierkegaard , which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic . At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted

11210-434: The survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mindsets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again. Later on, however, Jean Améry —who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity" ("absolute Negativität"), using

11328-611: The theatre with Georg Hartmann  [ de ] at the Städtische Bühnen Kiel . In 1934 he received his doctorate under Friedrich Blume in Cologne. The title of the dissertation was "The Parody in Music". During the Nazi regime, Steinecke was related to numerous influential musicians and musicologists, including his doctoral advisor Friedrich Blume, but also Fritz Stein . He worked as

11446-464: The uncompromisingly modern views of Pierre Boulez – the "party subservience" of the "clique orthodoxy" of a "sect", in the words of Kurt Honolka , written in 1962 in an effort to "make the public believe that the most advanced music of the day was no more than a fancy cooked up by a bunch of aberrant conspirators conniving at war against music proper." This led to the use of the phrase " Darmstadt School " (coined originally in 1957 by Luigi Nono to describe

11564-580: The war in Vietnam, and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws , as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz". The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as

11682-542: The weekly Die Zeit . At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke , Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school , which included composers like Pierre Boulez , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Luigi Nono , Bruno Maderna , Karel Goeyvaerts , Luciano Berio , and Gottfried Michael Koenig , soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, "The Aging of

11800-471: The writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge . In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and, in 1968, on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper , later published as

11918-458: Was Jagdschloss Kranichstein , a rural hunting lodge in Darmstadt. Beginning in 1949, public buildings in Darmstadt have been used not only for some concerts as in the beginning, but also for courses. The Ferienkurse were founded to reconnect Germany to the international scene in classical music, as modernist forms of classical music (such as expressionist music , the Second Viennese School and serialism ) had been systematically suppressed by

12036-446: Was a German musicologist , music critic , and cultural politician . In Darmstadt, he revived cultural life after World War II, especially by initiating the Darmstädter Ferienkurse , which connected Germany to the international scene of contemporary music . Hans Wolfgang Steinecke was born in Essen , to Käthe and Hugo Wolfram Steinecke. His father was a full-time Reichsbahn inspector,

12154-587: Was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch , Walter Benjamin , Max Horkheimer , Erich Fromm , and Herbert Marcuse , for whom the works of Freud , Marx , and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society . As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry , his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951), and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced

12272-433: Was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology ... I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit. Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism that swept through

12390-426: Was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends: [I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works. After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel , with whom he developed

12508-428: Was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened, holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to

12626-483: Was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of antisemitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported Franz Leopold Neumann 's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of " monopoly capitalism "; on the other were those who supported Friedrich Pollock 's " state capitalist theory." Horkheimer's contributions to this debate, in

12744-490: Was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt. Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on

12862-471: Was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including Sociologica (1955), a collection of essays, Gruppenexperiment (1955), Betriebsklima , a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann, and Soziologische Exkurse , a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline. Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became

12980-638: Was not an Institute member, the journal published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938), and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as a social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism , as concepts like reification , false consciousness , and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At

13098-535: Was not naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms that conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday that was later published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life . These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration , totalitarianism , and individuality , as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling, and

13216-552: Was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch . In a proposal for transforming the journal, he sought to use Anbruch to champion radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner , the later Richard Strauss , as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith . During this period he published

13334-532: Was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale personality test . After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed " enemy aliens ", became increasingly restricted. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who

13452-898: Was played in 1948, and his String Quartet No. 4 in 1949. That year, a symphony concert was dedicated exclusively to Schoenberg's works, including the German premiere of his Violin Concerto , honouring his 75th birthday. The 70th birthday of Webern was honoured with a concert of his chamber music in 1953. It was the first forum of contemporary music in Germany after World War II, including music theory and philosophy. Lectures were held by instructors such as Theodor W. Adorno , René Leibowitz , Heinz-Klaus Metzger , and later Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan , offering critical reflection of advanced composition. Composers such as Edgard Varèse , Olivier Messiaen , Ernst Krenek , Earle Brown and John Cage visited, presenting their work and aesthetic in composition classes, and contributing to worldwide recognition of

13570-491: Was published, 23 March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers. Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research , an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Löwenthal , social psychologist Erich Fromm , and philosopher Herbert Marcuse , sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in

13688-452: Was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the university conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931. On the very day his revised study

13806-418: Was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself." At the time of Negative Dialectics ' publication, student protests fragilized West German democracy. Trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's 1967 state visit, German support for

13924-444: Was through Cornelius's seminars that Adorno met Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock . During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg 's Three Fragments from Wozzeck , premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg, and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in

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