I had expected to meet Horkheimer in Montagnola in late March, but in the middle of the month, he took a trip to Frankfurt. So, in fact, our first personal contact came when he unexpectedly burst into a conversation I was having with Adorno in the director’s office of the Institute. It was a remarkable moment, as suddenly I was in the presence of both authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the only time I would have that experience. In a piece I later composed following Adorno’s death, I recalled that he had shown what seemed to me “deference” to his older colleague, a characterization that Gretel Adorno later disputed when I sent her a copy of the piece: “Deference is much too strong,” she wrote; “consideration would be better.”13
Whatever the adjective, it was clear to me that Horkheimer remained the senior figure in their relationship, although Adorno had long outstripped him in terms of scholarly productivity and was to exercise a much more substantial influence in subsequent years. My next contact with Horkheimer came at the end of March, when I left Frankfurt for Switzerland, staying for a month in Lugano, a short drive from the twin houses that Horkheimer and Pollock had built in the beautiful Ticino region of northern Switzerland.14 Pollock, it turned out, was a much more voluble source of information about the Institute than Horkheimer. He allowed me to tape our conversations, something that Horkheimer and Adorno had refused to do. The latter had denied my request using the metaphor of “verbal fingerprints,” which I cited in the essay I composed after his death. I later discovered, thanks to an illuminating footnote by Rolf Tiedemann to Adorno’s lectures on Kant, that he had used the same expression on other occasions to prevent transcriptions of his verbal performances, which were less precise than his carefully wrought written ones.15 As a result of Horkheimer’s similar caution, the only sound of his voice I have on tape came during one of my interviews with Pollock, when a bird call is heard outside the room and Pollock says, “aha, that is Horkheimer!”
Bird calls aside, my recollection of Horkheimer during the unrecorded interviews we did have is of a very large, imposing, always impeccably dressed figure who would lean in to emphasize a point and speak in a deliberate and measured way. He was in his mid-seventies by then and seemed to me less sprightly in conversation than Adorno or Pollock. He was warm but somewhat guarded, clearly concerned to put as positive a face as possible on the Institute’s history. As forewarned, I was not allowed to see any personal correspondence but was given access to very helpful scrapbooks of materials they had collected over the years.
Shortly after my time in Switzerland, I drove to Vienna and settled in for what I thought would be several months of writing. On a trip to Budapest, where I’d hoped to connect with Georg Lukács, I made the mistake of driving my little BMW 1600 through an intersection at the same time a large truck was going in the other direction. The result was that I only got to speak with Lukács on the telephone and spent several weeks in the Költõi Traumatological Clinic recovering from a cracked pelvis, and then another two in a Viennese hospital, before returning to America to complete my recovery. Pollock sent a letter on June 20 expressing his and Horkheimer’s concern; they also commented generously on a review I had done of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, the first publication of his work in English.16 Of some interest is Pollock’s observation, which doubtless expressed Horkheimer’s opinion as well: “In the last years of his life B[enjamin] seems to have fled into the Marxist world of thought [Gedankenwelt] as an escape from his despair. It can never be known, had he lived longer, if he would have overcome the contradictions between his work and what he had learned from Brecht and Sternberg as Marxism.”17
My next contact with Horkheimer followed the sudden death of Adorno on August 6, 1969, when I sent him a condolence letter. His secretary, G. E. Kluth, responded on August 14: “Your letter of August 8 did not yet reach Professor Horkheimer. Because of the sudden death of Professor Adorno he had to interrupt his vacation in the mountains. At the time being, he is in Frankfurt, where he attended yesterday his friend’s funeral. I telephoned briefly with Professor Horkheimer and informed him about the contents of your letter. He asked me to convey to you his deeply felt thanks. For obvious reasons he will not be able to answer you personally in the near future. He is certain to find your understanding.”18
It was in fact more than a year later that our correspondence resumed. In the interim, I sent drafts of my chapters to Pollock and Löwenthal for their respective thoughts and received carefully detailed and wonderfully helpful suggestions from both. At the same time, Pollock shared with me the increasingly troubling news of health problems he was suffering. I remember still being shocked to receive an official notice of his death on December 16, 1970, jointly issued by his widow, Carlota, and Horkheimer. Once again, I had the melancholy task of sending a message of condolence to Horkheimer, who replied in a moving letter on January 5, 1971:
I thank you for your kind words of December 23. For 60 years I had lived together with Fred Pollock. He helped me so much in every respect that I don’t know how my life may continue without his wonderful understanding. It is a true consolation to know that when you wrote about the Institut, you were aware of his decisive role when it was founded and during its history up to the moment when we left for good. You are perfectly right when you say, your work will be a real help for all those who wish that the most important period of the Institut will not be forgotten.19
I completed my dissertation late in the spring of 1971, directed by H. Stuart Hughes, who had been a friend of Franz Neumann and Marcuse from their days together in the Central European Bureau of the Office of Strategic Services.20 I sent a copy to Horkheimer, who impatiently wrote on May 2 that it had not yet arrived, adding, “I think it is very important that I can let you have my remarks, your study should be one of the decisive sources for all those interested in the Institute’s history. Should you have another copy, please send it to me by airmail.”21
A copy did finally arrive and Horkheimer shared it with Matthias Becker, who had begun writing his biography, which, alas, Becker never finished because of his untimely death in 1974 at the age of forty-one. We corresponded over the course of my research and writing, and he was enormously helpful. Becker had been able to win Horkheimer’s trust to the extent that he permitted him to tape their conversations, which were only discovered in 2008.22 On June 8, Horkheimer wrote to introduce him and included his first letter to me:
Here is a letter from Dr. Becker of Bremen who will be Professor at Bremen University when it starts functioning. He is a highly intelligent young philosopher and I had given him the first chapter of your important thesis. His remarks seem precise to me, and it is indeed a pity that the three of us can’t have a common discussion. In a recently published book of my late friend Adorno, he quoted a sentence of a review: “God dwells in the detail.” This certainly goes for descriptions like the history of the Institute.23
The letter from Becker accompanying Horkheimer’s contained several useful suggestions for changes, which were gratefully incorporated in my book, as were others he offered in three subsequent letters in 1971.24 In addition to suggestions for minor alterations in details, Becker’s letters also hint at a certain tension between Horkheimer and Felix Weil over some aspects of the Institute’s founding and early history. How to handle Weil, whose generosity had initially funded the Institute, was a perennial challenge for its leadership over the years. Becker requested that I not share with Weil all of the suggestions he had made in order to “avoid being burdened with an unforeseeable correspondence.”25 Weil, who was then teaching real estate law to American GIs at the army base in Ramstein, Germany, was in fact, an indefatigable letter