Adorno (en)

ADORNO at amazon.com
Adorno, at first grown up upper-class-protected, became acquainted with the horror only outside the family (his mother was a classical musician). Outside: on the school-yards, pursued and pushed by his peer group, because he always was teacher’s darling. Outside: being a Jew walking on Nazi-streets of a pre-Hitler Germany with subtle racial discrimination. They soon would build Auschwitz. The same pattern, which at first as the contempt of mediocre school-gangs came into much too close contact to Adorno, secondly reached more painful intensity in the shape of the ideological constructions and daily realities of the National Socialism in the Third Reich. Though no one had a presentiment of the coming Holocaust, Adorno told, that the exploding of inhumanity did not astound him, after all that he had to suffer in the years before. Adorno fled to the U.S. for political reasons and because his father had Jewish roots. He worked in New York in the “Institute for Social Research”. After exile (in the 1950s) Adorno returned to Frankfurt. He soon became a hero of the student revolts of 1968, but unfortunately students prefered a style of discussion and acting (Adorno’s lectures were disrupted by bare breast girls), – a style of discussion and acting, which the (latent conservative) upper-class child Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (called “Teddy” by the students) disliked in the beginning, in the middle and at the end of his life. His literary and philosophical masterpiece MINIMA MORALIA however is a testament of a razor-sharp philosophical mind, using an élitist, brilliantly aphoristic language. He continually followed the principle, that the only method to write nowadays is an essayistic, non-systematic, code word analyzing method, considering the fact, that big mega-philosophies (fascism, marxism …) always tumble down after a while or seep silently, trickle away by the working process of dialectic thinkers. Since the attack against the World Trade Center in New York the understanding grows, that living in bondage with a false philosophy or a fundamentalist religion or an impudence nation (sometimes difficult to decide) nearly inevitably leads into a catastrophe. It is a maybe confusing but easily remembered coincidence, that Adorno’s birthday is on a “September Eleven” (9/11/1903), duplicating the hint at the warning that ideological instigation gives rise to an escalation of terrible disasters. Like a Noam Chomsky or a grandchild of Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard this German philosopher, co-founder of the so-called “Frankfurter Schule”, provides with ample food for thought with his dense, challenging prose. But on the other hand he very lowly uses language as a poet, describing daily life and it’s false consciousness: leading the view to Proust or Sigmund Freud, to “Golden Gate” or “Tough Babies”, to cats or mammoths, to marriage and divorce, to “L ‘inutile beauté” or “Wishful Thinking”, to “Il servo padrone” and “They, the people”: if you decide to read Adorno, you will forget the present world of violence and you will enter an inspiring galaxy of ideas. The modesty of Adorno’s working method, trying to convince linguistically only by small artful steps, this could be a comfort-rich meditation assistance for those, who live in rough political and urban scenes …