"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?": On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society

Abstract

"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?"On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society Rolf Tiedemann (bio) Translated by Sean Nye (bio) Like the Pyramids or the Acropolis, Auschwitz is a fact. It is the sign of the human. The image of man is from now on inseparable from the gas chamber. —Georges Bataille Whoever comes from Germany to Spain in order to speak about Adorno is absolved from the difficulty of needing to introduce an unknown author.1 Just in my own, by no means complete, collection of translations of Adorno's writings into Spanish and Catalan, I count no fewer than twenty-four volumes: almost as many as Adorno himself published in German; with the exception of two volumes that were translated while he was still living, although they were all first published after 1969, the year of Adorno's death. And already in 1983, the philosopher must have been so popular in your country that he was inducted into the trivial immortality of a crime novel with one of his most difficult books; in any case, Montalbán considered Aesthetic Theory worthy to be cited in one of the famous auto-da-fés by his "Pepe" Carvalho. Thereafter, everyone who wanted to tackle practically self-evident lecture topics such as "Adorno and Spain" or "Adorno's view of Spain" would, however, have fallen into the greatest imaginable difficulties: there aren't any topics of such a kind, and Spain was certainly not one of Adorno's topics. He did not speak Spanish, nor did he ever visit Spain. The great paintings of Spain lay outside of his interests, so much so that Greco is named just once or twice as a precursor to Expressionism; Velazquez and Goya are not found in his works. Neither did he seem to take note of the musicians Albéniz or Granados. De Falla was for him, wrongfully and unsustainably, more [End Page 123] craft than art; "Noches en los jardines de España" even refined and noble kitsch. Adorno cites Calderón a single time, but only to cast doubt that he could have known Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. He once encountered Ortega y Gasset in Darmstadt towards the beginning of the 1950s, and he had nothing but contempt for his writings. To be sure, one encounters Don Quixote comparatively more often, and he held extraordinarily high regard for such poetry as Lorca's dramas, but with that, Spanish literature in his writings and indeed also in his knowledge may admittedly be largely exhausted. The novel of the errant knight primarily served him as an early example of the bourgeois "experience of the disenchanted world" (Notes to Literature, 30, 11/41), but he scarcely had an eye for the exemplary, and last but not least exemplary Spanish, art of Cervantes. He wrote about Lorca, but not about the poet of "Poeme del cante jondo" or "Bodas de sangre"; instead he wrote on the occasion of a desolate sentence he found in a German magazine and which says nothing about the poet but only makes known much about the, already at that time, "political climate spreading in Germany": "One may only think of the victims of fascism as though they were the real criminals: otherwise not only would Mr. Franco be insulted, but also the threatening, healthy and cozy common sense" ("Gleichwohl," 20.2/499). Spain—you won't want to hear it, and I say it only hesitantly and with the request that you not see in it any affront to your hospitality—Spain was in Adorno's intellectual household, first of all, the Falangist dictatorship, which outlasted the National Socialists in his own land for three decades; Spain was for him the land of Caudillo Francisco Franco, who would outlive Adorno himself by five years. He rejected repeated invitations to Spain, always with a reference to Franco. During the mid-1960s, a singer who had befriended him and with whom he often performed publicly had once almost talked him into performing together in Madrid, but at the last moment, he still declined: with the explanation that he could not step foot in the country where...