The correspondence below took place in January 2015, after 19th-Century Music published an article that tried to claim Adorno, a victim of Nazi policies, was himself a crypto-Nazi, whose thought continued a lineage from Klages and Heidegger. The response from the editorial team, led by Lawrence Kramer (who is supposed to be a bit of an expert, and also supposed to be pretty liberal), was ultimately that they thought I was angling for a publication. To be honest it hadn’t even crossed my mind, as someone who isn’t that interested in being published, and I told them on the contrary that I just thought they should put out an apology for publishing some poorly researched article whose main point was to falsely convict a victim of fascism as its perpetrator. They refused.
If you want to know why academia is today such a hostile place, where careful thinking is quickly becoming untenable, it is because of this sort of interaction, the refusal to enter into debate on which serious questions rest, the constant defensiveness, and the assumption that critics must be making their arguments for self-serving reasons. Below is the complete correspondence for anyone who is interested in reading or sharing.
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Dear Professor Kramer and the Editorial Board of 19th-Century Music,
It depresses me to have to write this letter. Your journal, more than any other publication, has promoted a critical discussion of Adorno’s 1928 essay on Schubert. The 2005 special issue, which provided an excellent translation into English and a set of materials dedicated to the essay’s interpretation, remains a crucial resource for those of us who continue to work on this text. But it is precisely for this reason that I feel moved to complain to you about the article published in this year’s Summer issue of your journal titled ‘Adorno, Schubert, and Mimesis’ by Dragana Jeremić Molnar and Aleksander Molnar.
It is possible that I am not the first to complain about your publication of this essay. And for the moment I will refrain from giving a full account of its deficiencies and errors. Needless to say such an account could be produced, and if you would be interested in it, I would not mind providing one (despite being somewhat uncomfortable with the forensic mode.) There is certainly more to say about the problems of this essay than I can here. Perhaps it will be more useful for me to say some things about the lines of argument in this essay, its use of sources, and the problems not only of how it arrives at its conclusions but also of the conclusions themselves. But I will also touch with some more precision on points at which the essay’s arguments are most egregious. For the most part, the major lines of thought in this essay are specious and deleterious, they rely on an unjustifiably selective reading of texts by Adorno, and rest on assertions which make no sense in the context of Adorno’s writing or Schubert’s music. The treatment of these texts throughout Molnar and Molnar’s essay is at best unsympathetic and at worst shows complete contempt and disregard. The authors consistently cite Adorno’s rejections of certain types of thinking but insist on not taking his objections seriously. They arrive ultimately at a bombastic indictment of Adorno – with a psychological portrait of him as a crypto-Nazi – which speaks far more of their incapabilities as readers and their possession of a fervour for sensationalism than anything that might be gleaned from the texts they discuss. Furthermore, these authors seem to pay absolutely no heed to the vast body of secondary literature that would disagree with their theses; instead the authors’ own opinions are developed at the expense of Adorno’s text, which lies distorted and degraded as a straw man. More often than not Adorno’s thoughts are transformed through this blithe labour of ignorance into their polar opposites in order that points may be scored against them. Although the article is relatively extensively footnoted, these footnotes are at no point directed toward points of dispute with the secondary literature, nor toward anything that would indicate quite how contentious (and bizarre) their opinions are in the context of current Adorno scholarship. Finally, the authors show little fluency with the theoretical material they deal with beyond Adorno, and in particular make consistent errors in their invocation of psychoanalytic terminology. All of this is directed towards the big reveal at the end of the essay, in which Adorno is accused of being attracted to the utopian dynamic of the Third Reich (p. 76). But even here the authors fail to mention, acknowledge, or footnote that their conclusions – even if they are entirely misguided – do not arise from their own research, but are mere repetitions of a dubious charge made against Adorno in the 1960s, firstly in a letter to the Frankfurt student journal Diskus from 1963, and later by Hannah Arendt.
It is slightly beyond me how material such as this made it through your editorial and peer review processes. I can see from your website that amongst your Advisory Board is Richard Leppert, who is a real expert on these matters (to whom I am also sending a copy of this letter.) It would surprise me, given his writing on this subject – although never having had any contact with him – that he would be happy for an article such as this to go to press. But it is possible too that your editorial processes too favour sensationalism over care and carefulness, thoroughness and scholarship.
I remember as a musicology undergraduate a decade ago feeling stifled by the Anglo-American musicological establishment, inflected and infected as it was then with an ever-unconscious positivism. I got used to the quiet dismissals as Marx and Freud (after my first term of study I was sent home with by my Director of Studies with a pile of Karl Popper books to read over Christmas!) I remember so clearly the urge to make the work of thinking about music insipid, this distrust of Spirit and critique. And I remember my joy when I began to discover the works of critical musicologists apart from Adorno, whose thought I was already familiar with: the groundbreaking work from 30 years earlier by the likes of Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Carl Dahlhaus. With all three authors I remember how striking and difficult the claim in their work was that thinking about philosophy, history and theory could be – or ought to be – musical; and that thinking about music was an absolutely theoretical endeavour. I also remember how their writings were disdained by a conservative musicological establishment. This is a story that no doubt you are well familiar with. In fact, there were times that I would turn to your journal as continuing in this tradition of critical musicology.
Nonetheless, it still did not come as a surprise to me a decade later to open your journal to find an article on Adorno insisting that “Marx’s social theory and Freud’s psychoanalysis were equally irrelevant to Adorno in connection with mimesis, in the contexts of both his writings on Schubert and his later mimetic theory.” (p. 55.) Nor was it surprising to read the extremely caricatured account of the influence of Marx on Adorno’s writing about music (p. 57.) leading to the idea that it hardens into a mere sociology of music devoid of metaphysical claims on aesthetics (entirely counter to what all of Adorno’s writings argue, including ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ written between his two Schubert essays), or that it grounds his “simplifications of various composers’ oeuvres.” One wonders which composers’ oeuvres are thought of here. Certainly Adorno’s opposition of Schoenberg and Stravinsky in The Philosophy of New Music can feel at times contrived, but not out of a sense of attempting to simplify the approach to the musical material through Marxian categories. And the remark simply does not stand up against Adorno’s studies on Mahler, Berg, or Beethoven. It seems we still live in these sad times in which Marx and Freud are somehow unacceptable to many musicologists. But the idea that Adorno must be rescued or cleansed of their influence, or shown to have never really been influenced by them in the first place, is always going to lead to a severe distortion of his thinking. It might be the case that without this cleansing his thought seems somewhat unpalatable to the liberal mainstream: this, from what I understand of Adorno’s writing, is intended. Much like his quip that “the Mahler-haters have understood correctly that the falling hammer of the Sixth Symphony is meant for them,” so too is much of Adorno’s own writing meant for (or directed towards resisting) its enemies.
If my complaint about this article were just that this article downplays the Marxian and Freudian aspects of Adorno’s thought then I would not bother; this has become standard in musicological approaches to Adorno. But the essay in question does show some of the more extreme consequences of such an approach to Adorno and serve as an object lesson in the sorts of problems that will arise from such an interpretation.
One of the argumentative claims that undergirds Molnar and Molnar’s essay is that “the occult [is] the lifeblood of all utopian thinking.” (p. 58) This claim is made without support, but under its rubric the authors attempt to compile a set of occultisms that they believe are at stake in Adorno’s texts. But such a claim, even if it were argumentatively justified, would require a lot of work to apply to Adorno’s thought. Molnar and Molnar obviously disdain all utopianism as un- or anti-rational. They assume that all Reason is itself cleansed of utopian intent or potential. Meanwhile they assume utopian dimension of thought amounts to little more that something which Adorno described called “wishful thinking” (a phrase he tends, as with many things he disparaged, to use in English) in his discussions of utopia. It is clear that the terms are broad here, and this is willed on the part of Molnar and Molnar because they will finally claim that there really is no adequate distinction to be made between the sort of thinking of utopia that Adorno engaged in and the utopias of, for example, a Golden Age to which we can return if we do away with decadent history, or a Germania cleansed of Jews. That Adorno himself had a great deal to say about utopian thinking is ignored by them, and that he was one of the great critics of much utopian thinking (ranging from Fascism to his critique of “integrated societies”, the phrase being borrowed from the Saint-Simonians) is also left unstated. Under Molnar and Molnar’s assertion something like Adorno’s late consideration of a state free of domination is considered as ruinous as a utopia founded on racist exclusion.
But more than this, one would think that in making such assertions on the question of occultism – particularly when the authors provide absolutely no justification for them – they might at the very least reach for Adorno’s writings on the subject. Amongst the writing he left us are not only essays with titles like ‘Thesen gegen den Okkultismus’ [‘Theses against occultism’] or the related ‘Theses Upon Art and Religion today’, but also his book-length study of occultism in ideological production, The Stars Down to Earth. It seems relatively straightforward that any accusation that Adorno was engaged in an occultist theoretical practice would refer to these works to show precisely how Adorno is misunderstanding himself. But no such discussion is provided. Instead we are left with mere assertion backed up by nothing.
The rest of their essay follows a path of attempting to show something like an occultist genealogy of Adorno’s thinking. The apparently occultist figures they will invoke are Ernst Bloch, Ludwig Klages, and Heidegger, as well as making reference to late 18th century and early 19th century Romantic philosophies. They promote these figures at the expense of trying to understand Adorno’s relationship to Marx and Marxism, Freud and Psychoanalysis, and Walter Benjamin. Each of these latter figures is undermined as a source of Adorno’s thinking in order to make a claim that he was writing in a continuing tradition of German Romanticism that was amenable to National Socialist ideology. But each of these replacements of Adorno’s sources rests, in Molnar and Molnar’s essay, on deliberately selective readings of Adorno, lack of careful research, and serious misunderstandings of Adorno’s words.
Molnar and Molnar tell us that, “If there is any trace at all of Marxism in Adorno’s writings on Schubert, then it got there only indirectly—via Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia.” (p. 57.) citing one of Adorno’s late essays on Bloch from Notes to Literature as evidence. They seem to believe that this is the sole source of Marxism in Adorno’s thought in the 1920s, but such a belief could only be sustained if they turned away not only from Adorno’s own text, but a large amount of secondary research. They fail to note the Marxian tone of elements of his Habilitationsschrift, which has been discussed by academics such as Robert Hullot-Kentor, Susan Buck-Morss, and Matt Ffytche. They fail to note letters that talk about Marxism from the 1920s, such as the one he wrote to Alban Berg in June 1925 in which he describes Lukács, a “Marxist thinker” who “has influenced me intellectually more deeply than nearly anyone else.” That said, Adorno’s Marxism is as little Lukácsian as it is Blochian – but these are subtleties that Molnar and Molnar remain blind to, insisting instead that Adorno is interested in adopting a wholesale Blochian Marxist apocalyptics – and its concomitant philosophy of history – in his Schubert essay. Bloch’s early writing, especially his discussion of music in The Spirit of Utopia, is certainly interesting. But it does suffer rather more than much of the Marxist thinking of the time from the sort of charges that Molnar and Molnar are interested in critiquing – and Bloch, in a postface to a later edition, described his work as that of “revolutionary Romanticism” and that his project was one of “revolutionary gnosis.” It is indeed true that Bloch took an interest in the Schubert essay; we know this from Benjamin’s correspondence to Adorno, which Molnar and Molnar cite. But the notion that Adorno’s essay represents a wholesale adoption of Bloch’s form of Marxism is simply wrong, and those elements that Molnar and Molnar suggest he took on are in fact elements that Adorno seems to have been most skeptical about. We know this from Adorno’s essays on Bloch, as well as the famous discussion he had with Bloch in the 1960s.
A great deal of Molnar and Molnar’s discussion of the Schubert essay, and particularly their central claim that his thinking follows that of Klages, and perhaps the Romantic strains of Heidegger, surrounds the use of the word “chthonic” [chthonisch] in its opening paragraph. They use this to imply that in Adorno’s essay there is something of the world – as Earth – that one might find in Heidegger. It is a shame that they, in being so keen to isolate this word, fail to notice that the “chthonic” in this essay exists in dialectic. Indeed, this is central to the essay’s formal character. The essay begins with an opening out on to a landscape, “over a threshold.” But in its final paragraph Adorno offers the an important antithesis to this chthonic depth. He writes: “Die Sprache dieses Schubert ist Dialekt: aber es ist ein Dialekt ohne Erde. Er hat die Konkretion der Heimat; aber es ist keine Heimat hier sondern eine erinnerte. Nirgends ist Schubert der Erde ferner, als wo er sie zitiert. In den Bildern des Todes eröffnet sie sich: im Gesicht der nächsten Nähe aber hebt Natur sich selber auf.” It is rather unfortunate that in the translation you published in 2005, this point was one of the least clearly expressed: “The language of this Schubert is dialect, but it is a dialect from nowhere. It has the flavor of the native, yet there is no such place, only a memory. He is never further away from that place than when he cites it. In these images of death the earth reveals itself: in its direct accessibility, we see the dissolution of nature itself.” This is fine and poetic but not literal, and a less poetic and more literal translation would go something like this: “The language of this Schubert is dialect: but it is a dialect without Earth. It has the concretion of a home; yet here is no home, only something remembered. Nowhere is Schubert further from the the Earth than where he cites it. In the images of death it discloses itself: faced with the closest proximity, though, Nature sublates itself.” To a careful reader the beginning and the end of the Schubert essay begin to move in two directions: if the text begins exiting a home of sorts, over a threshold [Schwelle], then this is already a strange home and a strange threshold, as it is the threshold between the years of death of Schubert and Beethoven; at the essays close we find a certain withdrawal from nature, back into a home [Heimat] But this threshold too is marked by death, the images of death in Schubert’s music, offered concretion by the music itself which dissolves the objectivity of death symbolism.
I do not mean to imply by this that Adorno’s thinking of nature, or of the chthonic, is something easy to grasp and that it is difficult to make mistakes when dealing with this philosophy. On the contrary his thinking, and his writing too, can be extremely complicated. But precisely for this reason it ought not be subjected to the most obtuse reading in which all philosophy of nature amounts to a positing of the ideology of “Blut und Boden” as Molnar and Molnar do. (p. 79) But more than this, it is not as if we are in a situation in which there is no discussion of these questions. Indeed, it has been remarked upon many times in the Adorno scholarship that the figure of “ohne Erde” is central to his thinking – there’s even a collection of critical essays out titled “Language without Soil” (a translation of “Sprache ohne Erde” which is a quotation from his essay ‘Wörter aus der Fremde’.) It seems that Molnar and Molnar make the assumption somewhere along the way that all of this is irrelevant and they are happy instead to extrapolate from a single word, regardless of its use, a highly contentious interpretation of his essay.
Molnar and Molnar’s unjustifiable claims about the influence of Klages are matched by their extremely dubious attempt to discredit any claim that these thoughts might actually be derived from Freud. They write,
“By introducing the theme of death into the analysis of Schubert’s music, Adorno wanted to forge a link with psychoanalysis. However, it is debatable whether his descriptions of Schubert’s landscapes may genuinely be associated with psychoanalysis or, specifically, with the teaching of Sigmund Freud. Adorno’s remark that psychoanalysis uses the “death symbolism” of traveling and wandering already indicates that he actually did not intend to stay faithful to Freud. At no point in his output— from the Interpretation of Dreams to the later works (The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) that theorize the death drive—does Freud treat wandering as a regular symbol for death.”
Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift on the concept of the unconscious is cited in passing by Molnar and Molnar, but were they to have actually bothered reading it they might have an idea which Freud texts Adorno was most familiar with, and what he was likely to have been thinking about when he wrote this sentence in the late-1920s. The Habilitationsschrift over and over again references Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It didn’t take me long on opening my copy to find the paragraph he almost certainly had in mind:
“Departure in dreams means dying. So, too, if a child asks where someone is who has died and whom he misses, it is common nursery usage to reply that he has gone on a journey. Once more I should like to contradict the belief that the dream symbol is derived from this evasion. The dramatist is using the same symbolic connection when he speaks of the after-life as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. Even in ordinary life it is common to speak of ‘the last journey’. Every one acquainted with ancient rituals is aware of how seriously (in the religion of Ancient Egypt, for instance) the idea is taken of a journey to the land of the dead. Many copies have survived of The Book of the Dead, which was supplied to the mummy like a Baedeker to take with him on the journey. Ever since burial-places have been separated from dwelling-places the dead person’s last journey has indeed become a reality.”
And rather unsurprisingly the passage was in lecture 10, the one on symbolism. Adorno gives all of the clues one would need to track down this passage – he tells the reader that taken psychoanalytically this will become a question of symbology (and particularly the symbology of death.) It is true that the young Adorno does not footnote his text, but he gives us some very strong clues about what the essay’s theoretical armature might consist of. He mentions “psychoanalysis” precisely at the moment at which he deals with the question of death symbols. And reading carefully together the discussion of symbols in Freud’s Introductory Lectures one discover’s quite how tightly together these two texts are bound. Indeed, it seems to me that a careful reading of these two texts together may allow us to bypass the entirety of Molnar and Molnar’s detour into the theories of Klages, which really have no support whatsoever in the text. Even if where they will finally justify this it will rest on the appearance of the figure of “mother nature” in Adorno’s essay as an apparent reference to Klages. But even here this is a symbol that also receives discussion in Freud’s Lecture 10, a few pages on from the discussion of journeys. It seems that the authors are so convinced of their textually unjustifiable claim that Adorno’s thoughts are drawn from Klages that they ignore completely the true sources of Adorno’s thinking, and indeed are turning your readers away from important philological discussions. It is true that Adorno knew his way around Klages’ thought, but all of the textual evidence points to the fact that he distrusted it enormously.
Again, it might be strictly true that Freud does not talk about “wandering” here, but what Molnar and Molnar say, and how they present it, is entirely deceptive. Incidentally, Freud does like to use the verb wandern in one extremely specific sense: he consistently uses it as a metaphor for what memory traces do in the unconscious throughout his writings, although perhaps most prominently in The Interpretation of Dreams. If one were looking for an interesting account of what is at stake in the psychoanalytic propositions of the Schubert essay, it would attempt to account for the relationship of the journey and the wandering – or their moments of identity and non-identity. What is the relation between the journey as a “symbol” which refers to archaic notions of metempsychosis, and the wandering of the memory trace in the unconscious? What does it mean for a final journey to become a wandering because it leads nowhere, or for a pleasurable hike like that imagined at the beginning of Die schöne Müllerin to become a fantastic journey in amongst a fateful and fatal landscape? How much is presaged by the ostinati of the mill and the brook? Unfortunately all of these more difficult and interesting analytic questions are passed over.
This again is hardly a surprise, since Molnar and Molnar apparently have little grasp of psychoanalysis. Throughout their article they describe modes of survival and the self-determination of the individual ego as manifestations of what they refer to as Freud’s “life instinct”. This must be one of the most bizarre and wrongheaded accounts of Freud’s metapsychology to ever appear. To read a text such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and to arrive at the conclusion that all of the ego’s struggles for ontogenetic survival (as opposed to phylogenetic reproduction) amount to manifestations of a “life instinct” is simply unjustifiable and like most of what they have to say has no basis in the text. That errors like this about such an important text have been left uncorrected in a major humanities journal really is incomprehensible.
Having shown that most of what Molnar and Molnar say in the broader movement of their arguments rest on the dubious replacement of real influences on Adorno’s thought for invented ones, it is instructive to look at this passage from pp. 64-65 of the essay in order to show very centre of Molnar and Molnar’s misreading of Adorno. They begin by quoting from Adorno’s essay ‘The Idea of Natural-History’ because it hints at his later theory of mimesis:
“It should only be stated that the concept is one that, if I translated it into standard philosophical terminology, would come closest to the concept of myth….What is meant by it is what has always been, what has always supported history and appeared in it, as fatefully arranged predetermined being.”
In his openly mythological understanding of nature, Adorno unambiguously follows the main program of not only “aesthetic fundamentalists” such as Ludwig Klages but also the early German Romantics, above all Friedrich Hölderlin, the author of “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus) and, perhaps even more, Friedrich Schlegel. Although it is true that Adorno did not mention Schlegel in “The Idea of Natural History,” what he did say clearly alludes to Schlegel’s statements that the new physics (i.e., philosophy of nature) lacks “a mythological view of nature” and therefore can be expected in the near future to be possessed by the idealist “spirit of the revolution,” which will ultimately inspire it to decode mythology as a “hieroglyphic expression of surrounding nature in this transfigured form of imagination and love.”
“Schubert,” which Adorno had written only a short while before he began mythologizing nature, may help us to understand what he considered the right artistic approach to nature. The young Adorno, as yet untouched by the issue of mimesis, recognized the lyrical as the domain of every artist’s proper approach to (mythological) nature.
This entire passage gets something crucial about Adorno’s thinking entirely backwards. Adorno’s philosophical at no point attempts, as Molnar and Molnar seem to suggest, to produce or to endorse a positive account of nature in myth. That is, Adorno is not interested in a philosophical project of mythologising nature. Rather, his concern is to develop a critique of myth’s inherent positivity and of its perpetual production. But for Adorno it was not possible to conduct this critique of myth by assuming a standpoint free of it. Indeed, his project in Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly in the discussion of mimesis there, was to show that the claims of Enlightenment to be free of myth were themselves mythic. This does not mean that Adorno thought he should give up on thinking beyond myth, nor that he was interested in producing a mythic account of nature and history. Perhaps the best critical discussion of the problems of reading Adorno as a mythic anti-rationalist to date is given in Simon Jarvis’ Adorno: A Critical Introduction. The words that Molnar and Molnar use here are deliberately slippery. We go from Adorno’s conception of “natural-history” as being akin to the concept of myth, to Molnar and Molnar’s description an “openly mythological understanding of nature”, to a thought that Adorno in 1932 “[begins] mythologising nature.” I am really not sure of why Molnar and Molnar would bother quoting from Adorno’s text when they are so willing to ignore precisely what it says, claiming through elision that in his thought we will find an identity between “nature”, “myth”, and “natural-history.” These terms are incontrovertibly not interchangeable in Adorno’s thought. Such an identity might be convenient if one were interested in presenting Adorno as an unreformed Romantic. But unfortunately for Molnar and Molnar he was not one.
Meanwhile Adorno almost certainly knew the “Oldest System-Program” text due to its unusual history, having been rediscovered by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig in the mid-1910s. But the suggestion that Adorno’s “mythological understanding of nature” follows Hölderlin without qualification is dangerous. Not only is there a great debate still about the authorship of the text (the existing copy is in Hegel’s, not Hölderlin’s, hand), but the question of what is meant by myth in Hölderlin and how one relates to it in the context of German fascism was one of the central and most complicated discussions in German comparative literature in the 20th century, with discussions of Hölderlin by Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger (not to mention others such as Celan and Szondi) all being key to the debate. Probably the best English-language discussion of this issue is Robert Savage’s Hölderlin After the Catastrophe, which really explores all the differences at stake here that are being deliberately obscured by the suggestion that Adorno’s philosophy of nature is a mere Romantic mythologisation, or that his notion of myth is identical to that of Hölderlin.
It is worth saying something here also about quite how strange the selection of Adorno’s texts is. All roads, in Molnar and Molnar’s essay, lead away from one crucial text: the letter that Adorno and his partner Gretel Karplus wrote to Walter Benjamin at the beginning of August 1935 in response to one of Benjamin’s exposés for the Passagen-werk. This is not just some obscure text; in the great industry of research that has grown up around Benjamin and Adorno’s writings in the last few decades, this letter is amongst the most commented upon. And it is important for addressing the issues that arise in Molnar and Molnar’s essay because it deals with nearly every aspect of their thesis: Adorno’s relationship to the thought of Klages, particularly with regard to his distrust of the mythologising work of theory, Adorno’s changing relationship to Marx’s texts, mythic theories of the a “golden age”, and finally also a discussion of the “Landscape” and the organic. At times it seems like the letter is not mentioned out of ignorance, but having carefully read Molnar and Molnar’s essay I suspect actually they attempt to divert the reader from it. They write in a footnote of the correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno, “their correspondence contains no direct references to the concept of the chthonic” (p. 69). It may be the case that the word “chthonisch” never gets a mention – I will have to check in the archive – but this letter certainly contains one of more extended discussions by Adorno on Hell and the Underworld in relation to 19th century culture. The argument there developed from his ideas from his Kierkegaard book in which he described the inwardness of the bourgeois individual of the 19th century as an ontology of Hell. And more than this, Adorno indicates in his Schubert essay at the moment that he figures Schubert as a psychopomp, that this is where the argument will end up developing. It is worth saying too that in all of Adorno’s writings the place where the chthonic is most extensively discussed is in his unfinished Beethoven book, which Molnar and Molnar also fail to mention, and the discussion was relatively recently brought up again in the world of musicology in Daniel Chua’s excellent essay ‘Adorno’s Metaphysics of Mourning: Beethoven’s Farewell to Adorno.’ These are simply the texts that one would expect any serious essay on these topics to address. That they are being deliberately concealed is extremely worrying.
All of this leads to a big question of why Molnar and Molnar are quite so insistent on trying to show the influence of Klages on Adorno. And the game is given away when they discuss Heidegger: this is nothing but an attempt to tarnish Adorno’s thinking by associating it with thinkers who were definitely sympathetic – for philosophical or theoretical reasons – with National Socialism. And again Molnar and Molnar are pushed into full-on falsehoods. As a journal of 19th century music you would not publish an essay in your journal which had footnotes that said things like “Richard Wagner was influenced by the theoretical writings of Eduard Hanslick.” Of course, taken in its broadest and most banal terms this statement may be true, but without qualification it would also be entirely duplicitous. And yet you are happy to publish a footnote that says “Adorno was also influenced, though less strongly, by the antimodernist thinking of Martin Heidegger.” (p. 63) This despite the fact that it is precisely on the question of modernity and modernism that Adorno would mount his most striking attacks on Heideggerian philosophy (not only in his first two lectures, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ and ‘The Idea of Natural-History’, but throughout his life culminating in the book-length The Jargon of Authenticity and most of the first half of Negative Dialectics.) There may be claims to be made about moments of similarity between Adorno’s and Heidegger’s thought, but it is certainly wrong to consider this as a matter of influence. And furthermore, Molnar and Molnar end their footnote, “Nevertheless, at that time it would not even occur to him to challenge the ontological point of view that he shared with Heidegger and from which, like Heidegger, he was trying to save whatever he could from the corpus of German Idealist philosophy.” It is unclear quite what this is supposed to mean, how Adorno’s claims to materialism in the lectures relate to Heidegger’s discussions of ontology, and how the pair relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly when Adorno would attack Heidegger as an Idealist. I suspect more than anything that Molnar and Molnar are pushing at a thought so deliberately foggy and muddled that any reader who knows no better is just forced to accept what they say about the relation and influence. But this is a truly scurrilous argumentative strategy, not least when it is placed in the article merely as a means of associating Adorno’s thinking with that of a fascist to whom, precisely on those grounds, he objected for his entire life.
Having thoroughly and selectively misread Adorno, having on dubious grounds taken the reader on a tour of theory and philosophy amenable to 1930s German fascism that Adorno was apparently influenced by despite the lack of any substantiation in the text, and having attempted to omit and undermine the real influences on Adorno’s writing of the essay, the authors arrive at the conclusion that what when one happily adopts the terminology of Klages one is able to draw a psychological portrait of Adorno as a crypto-Nazi. This portrait is furnished with the citation of a review that Adorno wrote in 1934 of the music of by a composer named Müntzel cited by Molnar and Molnar on p. 76. What is perhaps most damning in all of this is that your two authors do not even bother to name or reference the sources for the introduction of this text used to accuse Adorno of having certain crypto-Nazi sympathies. The argument – as I understand the history of it – goes all the way back to January 1963 when a student discovered the text of the Müntzel review. The text was sent alongside a letter to the Frankfurt student journal Diskus, where it was republished. Diskus also contacted Adorno to ask for a response to the letter, which he wrote. All of these texts are available in publication in Wolfgang Kraushaar’s Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung (volume 2, pp. 165-169.) A few years later the topic of the review was taken up by Hannah Arendt in a letter to Karl Jaspers, both of whom were hostile to Adorno. This is where Molnar and Molnar give the game away: the Fremdwort that makes its way into their text is “Gleichschaltung” [pulling into line, but also the process of levelling down of life and culture during the early 1930s under Nazi rule.] It appears in German in their text, just as it continues to appear in German in the translations of Arendt’s letters. One would think that a great deal of thoroughness would be needed in accusing a thinker like Adorno of effecting a Gleichschaltung – a devastating fascist policy that was enacted against him. But no care is shown here.
Ultimately most of the modern scholarship on Adorno agrees that Adorno’s response to Diskus is honest and certainly not trying to disown National Socialist tendencies in his thought (there really is no evidence that there were any!) Perhaps the most prominent source on this question is Evelyn Wilcock’s excellent essay ‘Negative Identity: Mixed German Jewish Descent as a Factor in the Reception of Theodor Adorno’ (in New German Critique, No. 81, Autumn 2000, pp. 169-187). This essay demolishes any claims that Adorno wrote what he did in this review out of any reverence for Nazism and its policies. For a more recent source you can also find a good discussion in Espen Hammer’s Adorno and the Political, pp. 49-53, which in turn references the discussion of this text and the scandal that surround it in the 1960s by Wolfgang Kraushaar and Rolf Wiggershaus. Molnar and Molnar, too busy with their prosecution of Adorno, also fail to mention the response that Adorno offered to Diskus which has now been in publication for over 15 years. Why do they not quote from it or reference it? The answer is that Adorno lays down something of a gauntlet. He admits that he had misjudged the political situation, but he says that if one looks at all of his work they would see that it stands against fascism, even if a single sentence in a single review stupidly seems to suggest that he did not. He also says that anyone who does so could not compare his work with Heidegger’s whose philosophy, he says, is fascist right into its innermost cells. Molnar and Molnar refuse this challenge by presenting just this sentence as the apparently key testimony in Adorno’s trial. And in doing so they do not acknowledge their sources, they do not reference or discuss the lengthy academic debate that surrounds this text, nor do they even nod to the history of the discussion and Adorno’s own comments on it. But in using the word ‘Gleichschaltung’ they do let us know that they are aware of this history (Arendt’s letter from which the word is lifted references the discussion in Diskus). So not only is the major claim of this essay scandalous and unsupported, it is also nothing new. And it is an argument that has been made and dealt with in various ways – including by Adorno himself – during the last 50 years. But not only have the authors not even bothered to reference the history of the arguments they are making, they present it as though it has arisen from their original research. If I did that in my PhD it would be failed immediately and I would be kicked out of the university, so I am not sure how this type of work has ended up in a journal like yours. Molnar and Molnar also imply that Adorno “welcomed the Nazi ban on “Negro jazz”” (p. 76) This is a totally outrageous reading of his sentences, which say, “The regulation that forbids the radio from broadcasting “Negro jazz” may have created a new legal situation; but artistically it has only confirmed by its verdict what was long ago decided in fact: the end of jazz music itself. For no matter what one wishes to understand by white or by Negro jazz, here there is nothing to salvage.” Adorno certainly always took more care than to jump immediately from the quaestio facti to the quaestio juris, particularly where that ethical question was one of the silencing of music by a fascist government. Molnar and Molnar consistently attempt to use all their forces of deception and bad scholarship to accuse a sufferer of the policies of Nazism of having himself instituted them. I am not interested in writing a hagiography of Adorno. It is clear that he could at times be politically naïve – most famously with regard to his interaction with the Student Movement in Germany at the very end of his life. And he admits as much with regard to this review in 1963. But this is not to say that we should not care about the politics at stake in his thinking, and that his writing should be open to being wildly misread in order to be summarily condemned.
I hope that you will be able to see from what I have written here that this is not merely a matter of academic disagreement. Instead, I have tried to demonstrate that the article is so full of errors and is so damaging to the texts that it claims to discuss that it ought never to have been published, and certainly requires and apology on the part of your journal. As may be evident I have had to put this letter together relatively hastily, and if you are unsure about the claims I am making I would suggest that you pass this on to academics specialising on Adorno. I am more than happy for you to also pass on my letter if you feel the need to do so.
Yours sincerely,
Jacob Bard-Rosenberg
Doctoral Candidate
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Dear Jacob Bard-Rosenberg,
Thanks for taking the trouble to write in such detail about the Molnars’ article on Adorno. Every so often we publish an article primarily because we think it will provoke debate, and that certainly seems to have happened in this case. But of course we’re not perfect, and that may have happened in this case as well.
You certainly marshall some serious arguments in that direction. Please be assured, though, that the text was read by two preeminent Adorno scholars, both of whom made suggestions but both of whom recommended publication. We would not have published the article otherwise.
Yours,
Lawrence Kramer
Distinguished Professor of English and Music
Fordham University
Editor, 19th Century Music
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Dear Professor Kramer,
Thank you for taking the time to read my letter and to respond to it. As you can probably imagine, though, I am somewhat disappointed by your reply. As I said in my letter, I do not consider the issues that were raised to be simple questions of academic disagreement, or disputes over matters of interpretation; rather, these are questions about scholarly standards and the publication of ideas that are both false and deceptive. For me personally, as a scholar working on Adorno, this is less of a problem – and I do appreciate the conciliatory tone of your email – but the presence of material such as the Molnars’ article, without qualification, explanation, or apology, leads to problems for others and makes our work as academics harder: When undergraduates or even MA level students turn to your journal, as I hope they do, they cannot be expected to know the intricacies of the texts that the articles deal with, and they have to be able to take some things as a matter of trust. This is particularly pertinent when we deal with texts that have not been translated (such as Adorno’s second Schubert essay, or his review of Müntzel), as many readers simply cannot turn to the original texts to check what is being said is true. Meanwhile, in today’s research environment these articles just come up on keyword searches on databases – it is not like it was years ago, when students would read articles because they were recommended to them on reading list, so even without recommendation they receive a wide audience. The presence of this material without qualification means that many students are likely to come across it without having any indication of quite how problematic it is. As I have said, as much as I appreciate your email to me, I do believe that these matters require a public response from 19th-Century Music. I have to admit that I am also rather surprised that this article would be recommended for publication by two Adorno experts. Perhaps you could also send on to them the letter that I sent to you, alongside my contact details as I would also be interested in their responses to what I have said.
Yours,
Jacob Bard-Rosenberg
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Dear Jacob Bard-Rosenberg,
19th Century Music takes its readers seriously, so I did send your messages to the Adorno experts who served as readers for the Molnars’ essay, as well as to the members of our editorial panel.
Their responses identified two separate issues.The first was the implicit question of whether the journal should publish some kind of rejoinder from you. It has been our policy for many years not to do that, and although the possibility was nonetheless considered, the decision was not to make an exception in this case. You might want to seek publication of a counter-statement elsewhere, of course. That would bring your quarrel with the Molnars into the arena you feel it transcends, that of scholarly disagreement, but it is hard to see what other arena is available. Your claim that the article contains serious misrepresentations may or may not be right, but it cannot simply be assumed to be right. Nor would we expect any of our readers (students or otherwise) to assume the rightness of any article we publish. Your own critical engagement is the kind of response we seek, whether or not we individually or collectively agree with the outcome.
On that topic, our Adorno scholars were judicious. Both noted that your original message made some valid points, but both also felt that there was a disproportion between the scope or your response and the issues to which you were responding. Neither felt that the article defamed Adorno. Both regarded it as provocative, with the potential to be productively so, without themselves necessarily agreeing with its positions. One added, of your remarks: "On some counts (for example in regard to Klages) the writer has an allergic reaction that I don’t share (Miriam Hansen showed recently that Klages had a significant influence on Benjamin, no stranger to Adorno).“ In short, your arguments struck our readers as meriting serious attention but not as counter-indicating their recommendation to publish the article.
I trust that settles the issue as far as 19th Century Music is concerned.
Lawrence Kramer
Distinguished Professor of English and Music
Fordham University
Editor, 19th Century Music
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Dear Professor Kramer,
Thank you once again for taking the time to respond to me, and I appreciate what you say. I would like to be clear though that in writing to you I have not at any point been so cynical as to have been taking up this question as a means of angling for a publication in your journal – my request was always for a response from you and your editorial team (were I to have ever written anything that I considered publishable on the question of Adorno and Schubert that I had an interest in publishing in your journal, then I would submit it to you through the normal channels, and more than this I know their are scholars with far greater expertise on these matters than myself, who could probably offer a far more interesting rebuttal of the Molnars’ essay.) Instead my interest is in these questions is merely a commitment to these texts by Adorno and Schubert’s music, their historical condition, and their transmission. This is all I care about, and why I was so concerned with your publication of the Molnars’ essay.
In terms of the response from your Adorno experts on the question of Klages: Consistently during the 1930s Benjamin showed an interest in publishing an essay on Carl Jung and Ludwig Klages in the Institut’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and consistently his approaches were all snubbed, chiefly by Adorno. One does not require Miriam Hansen’s essay to show the influence of Klages on Benjamin – it is so evident in the text of the Passagen-werk – but as I said in my original letter this is precisely a moment in Benjamin’s thought that Adorno rejects. This is evident in the letters that I have referenced. And this is the reason for an apparent "allergic reaction”: it is an attempt to represent Adorno’s thinking on this matter, while your Adorno expert repeats the sort of error that the Molnars make in suggesting influence by association with Benjamin precisely on a question upon which we have correspondence between the two thinkers that demonstrates and elaborates their disagreement.
Another part of my reason for being so harsh on the question of Klages comes from my experience of teaching in the university. If a student had handed me this essay then, for all of its apparently logical movement, I would have to fail it as it is founded on absolutely spurious philology. Academic thought ought never to amount to the erection of castles in the air however baroque or beautiful they might be.
As you say, you consider this matter settled and it seems that there is little point in me writing to you further about it. I personally don’t wish to spend much more time on the matter – I far prefer to use my energies to think and write about Adorno’s own writings than on misguided secondary literature. And I am also so distant from the musicological academy that I feel rather out of my depth here. But I will be forwarding my letter to you to a number of Adorno scholars around the world in order to ask their advice on how they think I should proceed. As you can imagine, to many of us working in the field the publication of suggestions that Adorno was sympathetic to Nazi ideology in a major humanities journal is a significant matter.
Yours, and with thanks again for the time you have taken with this,
Jacob Bard-Rosenberg