Adorno Made Easy

Abstract

A certain twentiet-century Puritanism regards askance, as at best a guilty pleasure. Adorno wasn't consistently of that view, though he would probably have thought his own career rather light on biographical interest. The parts that matter friendships with Berg and Schoenberg, Brecht and Mann, Scholem and Benjamin, affiliation with the Frankfurt School, exile during the Hitler years, post-war return to the Cold War DDR, friction with student protesters in Spring '68 are by now folklore, for which the documentation can be found in the work of Martin Jay, Susan Buck-Morse, Rolf Wiggershaus, and others. But if you've been waiting for a of Adorno, it would seem a good time: in the past year, two of them, originally from Germany, have appeared in English. The first of them to appear here, Lorenz Jager's Adorno: A Political Biography, is just what we don't want: a glib, journalistic culture-wars screed. (Think Dinesh D'Souza commissioned to do a political biography of Fredric Jameson.) The other, Stephan Muller-Doohm's Adorno: A Biography is more like it, an academic door-stopper at three times the length of the Jager, with 122 pages of notes, 30 of bibliography, 32 of index, and a back-cover blurb from Martin Jay. The author has interviewed virtually everyone living who knew Adorno, from Hans-Magnus Enzensberger to Jurgen Habermas and Rolf Tiedemann; he approaches his subject with a due respect for Adorno's brilliance and importance; and he has saturated himself in Adorno's work, friendships, and milieu. And yetis this the Adorno we've waited for? I'm inclined to think not.