“Today for the first time, I sat in on a conversation between Fred and Jay. Naturally I didn’t say a word that we knew about the lecture; otherwise probably a report on disagreements would have ensued. We should seek that no great story is made out of it.”1 So wrote Max Horkheimer to Theodor Adorno on March 25, 1969, from Montagnola, Switzerland, where he had lived for a decade following his retirement from the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Fred in question was, of course, economist Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and collaborator, who was then generously allowing a young dissertation student from Harvard’s History Department to pick his brain about the Institute’s history. We have no record of Adorno’s response, nor is it absolutely clear what problematic lecture Horkheimer might have wanted to avoid discussing. The passage is, however, significant because it indicates that the leaders of the Frankfurt School were very much concerned about the ways in which their history might be written. By chance, it was on that very day that Adorno wrote a much less flattering letter about the would-be historian to Herbert Marcuse, which came to light many years later and led me to write a reflection on what I called, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, “the ungrateful dead.”2
Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer and Pollock seem somehow to have reached the conclusion that their history was in reasonably secure hands, and so they continued to cooperate with the historian until the dissertation became a book called The Dialectical Imagination in 1973. In what follows, I want to return to the role Horkheimer played in its creation, drawing on some twenty letters and telegrams he sent while I was preparing it. There are no major revelations in the correspondence, but revisiting it now may help illuminate the ways in which historical protagonists try to shape the stories told about them and the challenges historians may have when writing about living figures.
It will not, of course, be a surprise to learn that people prefer to be remembered fondly by posterity, but, in this case, what stands out is the highly charged context in which this historical account was undertaken. The end of the 1960s and the early 1970s was a period of extraordinary tension for the surviving members of the Institute’s inner circle, who were then trying to cope with the unanticipated turmoil unleashed at least in part by their own earlier work. The situation is accurately captured by the subtitle of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s three-volume collection of documents concerning the Frankfurt School and the German student movement: “From messages in the bottle to Molotov cocktails.”3 Although one does not want to turn what may well have been contingent events into expressions of something deeper, it is worth remembering that Adorno, Pollock and Horkheimer were all to die before the turmoil ended: Adorno in 1969, Pollock in 1971 and Horkheimer in 1973. At least the first of these deaths has often been interpreted as hastened by the stress of confrontation with students.
It is thus not surprising that they were highly cautious about cooperating in the potential framing of their history in ways that might play into the hands of contemporary critics. In fact, certain aspects of their past were then serving as sources of, or at least excuses for, critiques of their present positions. Most notably, their reluctance to endorse the more explicitly radical arguments they had made in the prewar era enraged students who had been stimulated precisely by those arguments. This reluctance was most famously captured in Jürgen Habermas’s oft-quoted remark that when he had been a student at the Institute in the 1950s, “Horkheimer was terribly afraid of us opening the chest in the basement that contained a complete series of the [Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung].”4 It was only with considerable trepidation that he permitted the reprinting of some of them in the two-volume collection edited by Alfred Schmidt as Kritische Theorie in 1968.5
What such fear demonstrates is that beyond worrying about getting their history right, they were also anxious about the uses to which it was already being put. And to compound the anxiety, they did not share a united position on precisely what the right response should be. Although in public they maintained a united front, we now know from the revealing correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse the depth of their disagreement over the student movement and the Institute’s stance toward it.6 My research trip to Frankfurt and Montagnola overlapped with the most volatile moment in that deeply vexed history, the student occupation of the Institute in late January and Adorno’s calling the police to disburse it, which embittered the relationship between Marcuse and his old colleagues. It is in fact probable that the unnamed lecture mentioned in Horkheimer’s letter was the one Marcuse was to give in Frankfurt later that spring, which, much to the chagrin of the Institute’s leaders, he had tied to a demand to speak with the students.
The nexus between theory and practice, always a problematic one, was thus further complicated by a triangulation with historical reconstruction. For in addition to the explicit conflict over the ways to translate critical theory into politically effective action, there was also an implicit tension over the proper way to narrativize the Institute’s past. When I arrived in Europe to begin my research in January 1969, I was only dimly aware of all that was at stake. In retrospect, my dimness—and here I would include the still uncertain grasp I had of many of the issues raised by the Frankfurt School’s work—was probably an advantage. As an outsider to the controversies then swirling around the Institute, neither a student nor disciple of any of the principle players, I was not identified with any one position.
I had, to be sure, already benefited from contact with several figures in the Institute’s history who were still living in America, including Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Karl August Wittfogel and Paul Lazarsfeld. And I was in contact with Felix Weil, who wrote extensive letters to me about the Institute’s early history. Although Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock were diplomatic about their relations with all of them, it was not hard to sense certain tensions. Thus, for example, in a cordial letter sent to me on November 11, 1968, in which he assured me that Horkheimer and Pollock would be happy to meet in Montagnola, Adorno explicitly wrote that Lazarsfeld “was only connected with the Institute for a relatively short time and very loosely in America.”7 Clearly, he wanted to caution me against accepting Lazarsfeld’s view of Critical Theory, which he likely assumed would be unfriendly.8 Many years later, Habermas would speculate in a conversation that Adorno’s hostile response might have been motivated by his identifying me with Löwenthal, who had provided an enormous amount of help to me in the summer of 1968. I had not realized at the time that they had had a very serious falling out, due, among other things, to disputes over Löwenthal’s being owed a pension by the Institute, but perhaps Adorno’s suspicion was fueled by the assumed link.9
In any event, when I first approached Horkheimer by letter on November 18, it generated a warm response only four days later: “You will certainly be welcome in Montagnola,” he wrote. “I suggest you let me know as soon as possible when you can be here so I can see to it that we can really talk to each other and you can use the archives.” He then added: “I am sure that you know that the Institute’s history in the USA started with Nichlos Muray Butler’s [sic] great kindness and understanding. I met him the first time a few weeks after my arrival in New York and I shall never forget what we owe to him. Needless to say that there are many things which I can tell you and even more which you may find here in our files.”10 Butler, it should be recalled, had been the autocratic president of Columbia University, a position he held for a remarkable forty-three years, and was a figure of considerable controversy. He was a prominent Republican, an early admirer of Mussolini’s Italy and a genteel anti-Semite. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for his work with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. In December 1933, he refused to bar a Nazi speaker from the Columbia campus on the grounds of free speech. And yet, only a few months later, he was open-minded enough to welcome the Institute, despite its leftist leanings, to Columbia, thus earning Horkheimer’s undying gratitude many years later.11
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