In Minima Moralia – the fragmented, maddeningly difficult book of 1951 in which TW Adorno asked what kind of good life it is possible to live in a fragmented, maddeningly difficult world – the German philosopher wrote: “Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one’s fingertips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it.” Adorno was wrestling with the proper stance to be assumed by the intellectual, who could neither afford to be so removed from their milieu as to lose sight of it altogether, nor so immersed in it that they would drown in its particulars. How could a politically engaged thinker be just close, and just distant, enough?
There was no love lost between Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the subject of Lyndsey Stonebridge’s compelling and original new book. Arendt blamed him, somewhat unfairly, for failing to help their mutual friend Walter Benjamin escape the Nazis, precipitating his devastating suicide, and once proclaimed, when her husband suggested inviting Adorno for dinner, “Der kommt uns nicht ins Haus!” – “That one’s not coming into our house!” The dilemma that Adorno so brilliantly articulated, however, was also the one that Arendt faced. As German Jews of the same generation, both were steeped in the philosophical and cultural traditions of their homeland. When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, both fled to the US. Both questioned whether the traditions they had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them.
