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Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Erotics of Friendship Johannes Von Moltke University of Michigan

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Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Erotics of Friendship Johannes Von Moltke University of Michigan Criticism Volume 51 | Issue 4 Article 6 2009 Teddie and Friedel: Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Erotics of Friendship Johannes von Moltke University of Michigan Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation von Moltke, Johannes (2009) "Teddie and Friedel: Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Erotics of Friendship," Criticism: Vol. 51: Iss. 4, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol51/iss4/6 TeDDIe aND My dear Teddie, my dear friend! FrIeDel: I arrived at noon today all TheoDor W. torn, wrapped up. Now I aDorNo, want to write straight away. SIegFrIeD During these two days, I again KracaUer, aND felt such an agonizing love for you that it seems to me as if I The eroTIcS oF could not endure alone. Sev- FrIeNDShIP ered from you, my existence Johannes von Moltke is stale, I don’t know how this can go on.1 The letter is dated 5 april 1923 “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch and, under the letterhead of the mich”: Briefwechsel 1923–1966 by prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung (was Theodor W. adorno and Siegfried this written surreptitiously at the Kracauer, volume 7 of Briefe und office?!), its sender—Friedel— Briefwechsel, by Theodor W. ador- implores Teddie to “please read no, edited by Wolfgang Schopf. alone!” (B 9, emphasis in original). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, So tortured, so steamy is this love 2008. Pp. 772. 52.50 euros, cloth; letter that Friedel asks Teddie to 32.00 euros, paper. destroy it: “[I]n any case, no word of it, this is secret, who could be al- lowed to see me thus in my true gestalt?” (B 11). Fortunately for us, Teddie nei- ther destroyed this extraordinary confession nor lost it in the tumul- tuous decades that followed. Pre- served in the Theodor W. adorno archive in Frankfurt, the letter now stands as the first in a corre- spondence that spanned almost half a century and fills some seven hundred pages in the recently pub- lished and meticulously annotated Briefwechsel (correspondence) be- tween Theodor W. adorno and Siegfried Kracauer: Teddie and Friedel. These two key figures in the history of critical Theory had Criticism, Fall 2009, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 683–694. ISSN: 0011-1589. 683 © 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309. 684 johaNNeS VoN MolTKe met through a mutual friend to- started out as a leading cultural ward the end of World War I. In critic during the years of the Wei- adorno’s understated recollection mar republic, when he worked for from the early 1960s, “an intensive the influential Frankfurter Zeitung, contact sprang up between” the editing its cultural section and two men after that initial meeting.2 supplying regular film reviews This contact would influence their alongside important essays (later respective distinguished careers as collected in The Mass Ornament7). two of the leading intellectuals of While he also managed to publish the twentieth century. a book on sociology and an auto- Both men have achieved a mea- biographical novel entitled Ginster sure of fame in the fields of philos- during these years, his stature ophy and cultural studies, though among intellectuals of his day was during their lifetimes the younger cemented by the influence he quickly came to outshine his men- wielded at the Frankfurter Zeitung: tor. Theodor adorno (1903–69), it was journalistic first and schol- the philosopher, was a member of arly second (though the lasting rel- the original Institute for Social re- evance of Kracauer’s work resides, search in Frankfurt and New York perhaps, in his ability to undo that city. Together with Max hork- opposition itself).8 The Nazi sei- heimer, he became the institute’s zure of power forced Kracauer director after its return to ger- into exile, first in Paris—where he many in 1949. adorno’s talent and completed but did not publish a his enormous productivity are second novel entitled Georg (more clearly in evidence throughout on this later), and published a “so- these letters: with evident satisfac- cial biography” of Jacques offen- tion he reports concluding multi- bach. The latter earned him severe ple major works, simultaneously criticism from adorno for what he embarking on new projects and considered its undialectical method publishing at a frenzied pace— and lack of attention to the formal, from his early monograph on aesthetic aspects of offenbach’s Kierkegaard3 through the famous music. In 1941, Kracauer managed Dialectic of Enlightenment4 to his to escape europe via lisbon and reckoning with heidegger in The made his way to New York, where Jargon of Authenticity5 and his long- he would cobble together a living gestating philosophical summa, and a career by publishing journal Negative Dialectics,6 not to mention articles and securing grants to sup- the numerous anthologies of his port his work at the Museum of own essays that began to be pub- Modern art (MoMa) film library. lished regularly after his return to The latter would eventually lead to germany. Siegfried Kracauer (1889– the publication of the first of his 1966), on the other hand, had two best-known works, From Ca- ON aDorNo aND KracaUer’S BRiEFWEChsEl 685 ligari to hitler: A Psychological his- also affected their writing, and the tory of the German Film,9 which times during which this horizon is would be followed, about a decade lost from view in the exchange of later, by Theory of Film: The Re- petty formalities, or obscured by demption of Physical Reality;10 the bitterness of mutual recrimina- though both of these books have tions merely prove its enduring also received their share of criti- relevance ex negativo. Indeed, Frie- cism, they were innovative and del’s “first” letter not only inti- pathbreaking in their time, and re- mates the bonds that connect the main central to film studies curri- two men until their deaths in 1966 cula to this day. Kracauer’s final and 1969, respectively; it also spells book on historiography, which re- out the terms, indeed the erotics, of mained incomplete when he died the uneven, or “troubled” friend- unexpectedly of pneumonia in ship that will emerge:13 1966, was published posthumously as history: The last Things Before My condition is ghastly. I fear the last.11 so terribly the evanescence of that which is most dear to * * * me, what appears to me as the meaning or fulfillment of Voluminous though it is, this cor- my existence. Do you believe respondence remains incomplete, in the eternal duration of our since for unknown reasons many friendship? It would always of Kracauer’s letters in particular need to be presence, living have been lost. In other words, presence, and how could that Kracauer’s missive of 5 april 1923, be? I tremble out of fear for composed upon his return from a its endurance, you are 19, two-day sojourn with adorno in I am 34. You are taking a the aptly named southwestern turn, you need to traverse the town of amorbach, could hardly world, at 19 one cannot vouch have been the first letter exchanged for oneself, not even you. In between the two friends.12 Nor other words, it will break into can it be considered characteristic, pieces, and there I shall lie. pars pro toto, of the correspondence are you not much more con- whose tone would shift drastically sistent [geschlossen] than I? I and repeatedly over the following am an abyss and like a young decades. and yet, this letter sets up boy I lack a foothold. Never a utopian horizon of love— will I become a mature man, whether romantic, platonic, sexual, I know not what to do. (B 9) and/or intellectual—that inevita- bly affects the reading of all subse- love reverses the positions: Kra- quent exchanges; undoubtedly, it cauer, the older man and adorno’s 686 johaNNeS VoN MolTKe erstwhile mentor, becomes a flail- ing—and without knowing ing young boy and imputes to his anything about me—that I adolescent friend the maturity was homosexual and absent (consistency [Geschlossenheit]) of with a distant friend; and adulthood that he (Kracauer) will this at a moment when I never attain. The resulting insecu- was thinking of you very in- rity on Kracauer’s part, which sets tensely. In other words, I be- the tone for the letter, would per- lieve I am fanatically faithful sist in various forms—whether as to you, much more faithful the gnawing uncertainty about the than I would have thought relationship with adorno (which to be, since I was, after all, the latter names in subsequent let- beholden to your sugges- ters as based on a lack of trust); or, tion that it was now all over. in later years, as the apparent need (B 54) to control his own image, to rectify and limit the ways in which When adorno does report a bud- adorno (and others, by extension) ding affair to Kracauer from Vi- could read his works. enna the following month, The homosocial dimension of misogynist aspersions regarding this friendship, too, is sounded in the “literati girl” (literatenmäd- the first letter: the way in which chen) in question are coupled with the relationship between adorno the assurance that “she knows of us and Kracauer is triangulated, in- [i.e., Teddie and Friedel] and our tersected by women who simulta- bonds [Gebundenheit] what she, as neously sustain and threaten its a woman, can know—the fact that dynamic: “I must also tell you that she obstinately subsumes me under your report about your relation- §175 for this cannot be avoided” ship with gretel did pain me (B 88).
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