Adorno Made Easy

A certain twentiet-century Puritanism regards biography askance, as at best a guilty pleasure. Adorno wasn't consistently of that view, though he would probably have thought his own career rather light on biographical interest. The parts that matter—friendships with Berg and Schoenberg, Brecht and Mann, Scholem and Benjamin, affiliation with the Frankfurt School, exile during the Hitler years, post war return to the Cold War DDR, friction with student protesters in Spring '68—are by now folklore, for which the documentation can be found in the work of Martin Jay, Susan Buck Morse, Rolf Wiggershaus, and others.

But if you've been waiting for a biography of Adorno, it would seem a good time: in the past year, two of them, originally from Germany, have appeared in English. The first of them to appear here, Lorenz Jäger's Adorno: A Political Biography, is just what we don't want: a glib, journalistic culture wars screed. (Think Dinesh D'Souza commissioned to do a "political biography" of Fredric Jameson.) The other, Stephan Müller Doohm's Adorno: A Biography is more like it, an academic door stopper at three times the length of the Jäger, with 122 pages of notes, 30 of bibliography, 32 of index, and a back cover blurb from Martin Jay. The author has interviewed virtually everyone living who knew Adorno, from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Jürgen Habermas and Rolf Tiedemann; he approaches his subject with a due respect for Adorno's brilliance and importance; and he has saturated himself in Adorno's work, friendships, and milieu. And yet—is this the Adorno biography we've waited for? I'm inclined to think not.

"Not," indeed, seems the rubric, the sign of negation, under which to characterize this book. The book is not an intellectual overview or critique or even introduction to Adorno's work and his milieu: not, that is to say, the kind of help with intellectually challenging material one finds in Martin Jay's history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination, or his short introduction to Adorno.

It is not any addition to Wiggershaus's institutional history of the Frankfurt School, with details of the planning, composition, publication and reception of the group's (or even Adorno's own) principal works, the problems of funding, housing, and otherwise maintaining the group through the great events of a turbulent and vicious historical period.

It is not a tell-all, though it mentions several love affairs, and hints at leaving others veiled in a decent obscurity. That Adorno, lifelong, was something of a womanizer, apparently with the forgiving indulgence of his wife Gretel, was news to me—but the details, usually even the very names of the paramours, are kept discreetly under wraps. I'm not one for dish, and if I were, Adorno wouldn't be where I'd go looking for it, but if a biography is going to say this much, it should say more. Not that the names matter, but some sense of Adorno's erotic character would be worth having if the evidence is sufficiently detailed to allow any inferences.

It is not a "literary" biography, in the sense of aspiring to any literary quality of its own. You might expect some scenes to be set pieces: say, Adorno's first meeting with Walter Benjamin—but no; when Benjamin first appears in the narrative, it is in the pluperfect: Adorno "had become friendly" with him already. The where and the when, each man's first impressions of the other, the stages by which they came to trust and indeed love one another: all that is presented here as fait accompli rather than emerging drama. When Adorno proposes to Gretel Karplus, Müller Doohm steps out of the book's chronological time to sum up the marriage in advance, thus pre empting its narrative potential as the book goes on. Nor is Adorno's career set in the context of such traumatic historical events as the March 1938 Anschluss, the Hitler Stalin pact, the Korean War, the uprisings in the GDR (1953) and Hungary (1956), Khruschev's...