No Man's Lands: Refuse and Refuge in Adorno's American Experience

Abstract

Abstract In “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Adorno likens his early trips from New York City to a previously abandoned New Jersey brewery, the site of the Princeton Radio Research Project, to Kafka's story about the “Great Natural Theater of Oklahama [sic]” at the end of the novel Amerika (German title: Der Verschollene). It is easy enough to account for this association. The natural theater story tells of Karl Rossmann's hire and transportation by train to a kind of circus in the American dustbowl. Rossmann is a European immigrant in search of refuge. It is, however, a highly…