Address upon Accepting the Theodor W. Adorno Prize on 1 October 1989

Abstract

I would like to thank my hometown of Frankfurt and especially the members of the selection committee for awarding me the Adorno Prize. I am especially pleased that you gave me the prize this year, since-several months ago comments were made in the various media by different people about my friends Adorno and Horkheimer, comments so contemptible that I want to take this opportunity to protest yet again against the misrepresentation and distortion of these men and their work. Allow me to take advantage of this opportunity to remind myself of the potential historical continuity of a human life to reminisce, that is, in an emphatic rather than a sentimental or idealizing way, to recollect what is still worth remembering about a person, along with his weaknesses, even those that could have been avoided. I want to try to explain what in particular moved me today to remember Adorno, something that has become a daily occurrence for me. It was more than anything else the spirit of collegial and intellectual solidarity that bound us together. For example, when I was analyzing the work of Knut Hamsun in the 1930s and had detected, by way of a textual analysis, a sympathy for National Socialism on Hamsun's part that had as yet gone unrecognized, Adomo contributed to my diagnosis by suggesting a comparison between Hamsun and Sibelius, in whose music he found similar cynical motifs which, whether expressed verbally or in music, glorified a rigid concept of nature with pantheistic overtones. Our cooperative efforts came to fruition in the theses on anti-Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in studies of the authoritarian personality and of the demagogic techniques of agitators. Both of us believed