Teddie and Friedel: Theodor W. Adorno, , and the Erotics of Friendship

Johannes von Moltke

Criticism, Volume 51, Number 4, Fall 2010, pp. 683-694 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crt/summary/v051/51.4.von-moltke.html

Access Provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor at 02/26/11 3:33PM GMT 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). 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 . 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). The two men’s relation- greatly. Not the fact that you had ships with their future wives, Lili this relationship, but only that you Ehrenreich (Kracauer) and Gretel walked by my side for so long Karplus (Adorno), grow and be- without me knowing about it” come objects of the correspondence (B 9). Little surprise, then, that the only under mutual recrimina- two explicit references to homo- tions—that is, jealousy; even after sexuality in the correspondence relations have normalized and ventriloquize female voices: on 19 greetings from and to the wives at May 1925, Adorno writes from Vi- the close of the letters have become enna that routinized, the homosocial taceat mulier of the earlier letters per- a very intelligent young lady dures. explained to me with deter- mination at our second meet- * * * ON ADORNO AND KRACAUER’S BRIEFWECHSEL 687

The friendship between Adorno for all his openness, Kracauer and Kracauer has been a matter of “lacked freedom in his relation to public record at least since Febru- the object?” (CR 161, 166). If we ary 1964, when Adorno delivered a reverse Adorno’s sublimation of radio address in honor of Kracau- the erotic dimension so obvious in er’s 75th birthday and noted at the the letters (whereas in the radio ad- outset that he considered himself dress the “relation to the object” is qualified to sketch for a postwar explicitly couched “in Hegelian German audience the “objective terms”), and if we reinstate the love idea of Kracauer’s spiritual charac- object as the one toward which ter” for the simple reason that “he Kracauer ostensibly lacks freedom, and I have been friends since I was then the subject that emerges from a young man.”14 Rereading Ador- Adorno’s portrait is none other no’s well-known essay now along- than the helpless, suffering lover of side the correspondence, one the early letters. cannot help but think that, in Lest this appear too fanciful or drafting the talk, Adorno himself romantic a psychologization of also poured over those letters that Adorno’s “objective idea of Kra- survived in his possession. Seen in cauer’s spiritual character,” we this light, some of Adorno’s assess- need only turn to the end of the ments of Kracauer’s “spiritual article, where Adorno himself ex- character” take on personal over- plicitly marshals Freud to psycho- tones that help to explain the pro- analyze his friend’s “fixation on foundly ambivalent effect of the childhood” (CR 177). While this is generally well-intentioned lauda- doubtless a productive notion tion. For all its praise, genuine through which to consider Kra- spirit of friendship, and manifest cauer’s intellectual method, with desire to make the exile and erst- its insistence on the material phe- while mentor known in his home nomena overlooked by routinized, country, “The Curious Realist: On adult perception, one would be Siegfried Kracauer” is laced not hard-pressed to locate the fixation only with substantive criticism of on childhood as a persistent motif Kracauer’s work but also with in Kracauer’s published writings, barbs that appear as barely veiled as Adorno suggests. It does occur, ad hominem attacks when one however, in the early letters, where holds them up to the intimacy of Kracauer bares himself—skinless, the early letters. How else to inter- shamefully—to Adorno, who pret Adorno’s claim that Kracauer, would lift his friend’s despair at “a man with no skin,” had an “al- “never becoming a mature man” most boundless capacity for suffer- from its confessional, intimate con- ing”? That Kracauer was helplessly text and put it to public and point- “reactive” in many respects? That, edly ambivalent use by claiming, 688 JOHANNES VON MOLTKE with Freud, that “it is precisely the his years in French exile, the epon- adult who is infantile” (CR 177). ymous and autobiographically in- Designed to theorize Kracauer’s flected protagonist falls in love quizzical but ultimately affirma- with the much younger Fred, tive gaze at the material world, his whom in particularly sentimental capacity for thinking “with an eye moments he calls Freddie (as in that is astonished almost to help- Teddie—here composited with lessness but then suddenly flashes Friedel, to boot) and with whom into illumination” (CR 163), the he at one point undertakes a jour- motif of childhood and the infan- ney to the town of Sulzbach (as in tile gaze implicitly impugns the Amorbach).16 The passage describ- friend for failing to grow up and ing the trip, its agonizing confes- let go of the (love) object. In an- sions and rapprochements in and other instance of the reversals that out of bed, now reads like a pre- characterize this relationship—but quel to the correspondence, the ex- veiled behind the intellectualized position for the story that begins to motif of childhood—Adorno, who unfold with the first extant letter of came to know Kracauer at the 5 April 1923. (Little wonder, then, height of adolescence, takes the lat- that the Briefwechsel at times reads ter to task for his inability to dis- like a novel.) tance himself from the object. From the moment the two char- Kracauer’s shortcoming, in Ador- acters meet at some train station, the no’s eyes, is his failure to encounter novel constructs a scenario of desire, the object not through the bonds of focalized through the protagonist (adolescent) love but with the os- Georg, who “with enormous excite- tensible freedom afforded by the ment imagined particular scenes” folds of friendship between mar- while contemplating his friend’s ried men.15 rather formal appearance and de- meanor in the train compartment: * * * [T]heir evening walks, the act While Adorno’s text has become a of locking the door to their standard reference for Kracauer room, getting undressed, con- scholarship and the intellectual versations in bed—[he] let his history of the Frankfurt school mind rest on images of inti- more generally, it is less widely macy and anticipated possi- known that Kracauer, too, strove bilities that he did not pursue to publicize the relationship with any further, however. How Adorno—albeit in a differently, much more pleasurable to feel because fictionally, coded form. In them only as possibilities and his posthumously published novel postpone their potential ma- Georg, which he completed during terialization into the distance. ON ADORNO AND KRACAUER’S BRIEFWECHSEL 689

Consequently, he was happy spondence across periods of es- about Fred’s self-conscious- trangement and great proximity ness and took care not to dis- for the rest of his life. It is, as I have rupt it. (G 349) suggested, a correspondence with great caesurae—some temporal, as But, of course, this desirous sce- in the apparent two-year gap be- nario cannot be sustained, and the tween March 1939 and 1941, and events at the small Black Forest re- some emotional, as in the notice- sort during the ensuing week un- able chill that pervades the letters fold as a painful disillusionment:17 as both men gravitate toward their the friends sleep in separate rooms, future wives during the mid-1920s. and Fred feels suffocated by the And, of course, there are the pro- rotting foliage that seems to ac- found intellectual disagreements company their relationship as a that Martin Jay has chronicled,19 motif throughout the novel. Rather including a falling-out after Ador- than continue the discussions and no’s radical redaction of a text on readings that had bound the two propaganda that Kracauer had friends, Fred now announces a composed at the behest of the Insti- materialist wish to “earn money as tute for Social Research for publi- quickly as possible” (G 354), and he cation in its journal (he would begins to flirt with the female withdraw the text, accusing Adorno guests at the hotel. When the two of having “not edited my manu- men finally do end up in bed to- script but used it as the basis for a gether one night, Fred uses the work of your own” [B 398]); dis- moment of greatest intimacy as the putes about the use of concepts occasion to confess an affair with a central to the elaboration of Criti- woman, Margot, which he had kept cal Theory, such as “ideology,” or secret from Georg. In the novel, the “utopia;”20 or the testy discussion two men somehow bridge the re- of “The Curious Realist” after maining two days until their depar- Kracauer had received the printed ture and return to their hometown version in October 1964. And yet, estranged. The following morning, the balance of the correspondence Georg returns to the newspaper for is suffused with a profound friend- which he works. ship, evident in the way both will Where Kracauer then penned a share generously the details of letter, his alter ego continues the their lives apart (in Frankfurt discussion with “Freddie” in an in- and during the early 1930s, ner monologue on his next busi- or in New York City and Frank- ness trip; but whereas Georg furt after Adorno’s remigration in eventually “liquidates the relation- 1949 until Kracauer’s death in ship” with Freddie,18 Friedel holds 1966), in discussions of mutual onto Teddie, continuing the corre- dedications of their works,21 or in 690 JOHANNES VON MOLTKE the way Adorno patiently wields Adorno, Kracauer closes by em- his growing influence in postwar phasizing how much he Germany to help Kracauer find a publisher and recognition in his look[s] forward to seeing home country. you, the more time elapses, On some occasions, though, the the closer does the Seeheimer steady friendship is punctuated by Straße appear to me—noth- a less (self-)protective, more direct ing can change that. We both tone that allows its patently erotic send greetings to Gretel, origin to flash into illumination. and please accept Lili’s and Some of these are moments of in- my greetings yourself. Un- tense insecurity, unguarded for til soon, Teddie—if all goes once as in the desperate letter that well, which nobody can say. Kracauer sends on the eve of (B 427) his embarkation for America. Adorno, already in New York, had Other, less urgent, moments of re- worked tirelessly and creatively to newed intimacy tend to be birth- help secure the necessary assurances days, Kracauer’s protectiveness of for Kracauer’s emigration, appris- his own chronological exterritori- ing Kracauer of his options in nu- ality notwithstanding. On 7 Feb- merous letters to France. Now, on ruary 1949, presumably still from 28 March 1941, Kracauer writes to California, Adorno writes to Kra- “Mr. Teddie Adorno” from Lisbon, cauer in New York: c/o Wagons-Lits Cook: Dear Friedel, tomorrow is Dear Teddie, these words are your birthday and, if I’m not just to tell you that we hope to badly mistaken, it is your sail with the Nyassa on April sixtieth. For this festive day, 15. . . . It is terrible to arrive I wish you all the very best. as we will—after 8 years of As arbitrary as such caesurae an existence that doesn’t de- may be by any standards of serve the name. I have grown nature, they do have a great older, also within myself. symbolic power within the Now comes the last station, human realm. . . . Let me the last chance, which I must therefore join you in spirit and not gamble away, lest every- celebrate with you with all thing be lost . . . I will arrive a my heart, in faithful knowl- poor man, poorer than I have edge of a thirty-year-long ever been. friendship. There are two wishes I have for you above Referring to the house in which he all. The first: that a solution had come to know the young can be found that finally lets ON ADORNO AND KRACAUER’S BRIEFWECHSEL 691

you rise above all material thetic in its place. So: I wish uncertainty. The second: that you everything good, loving, you have the opportunity to and beautiful all the way bring home everything that into the pianissimo of oldest has matured in your spiri- age. With the most heartfelt tual existence. I can think of greeting to you and Lili, also no other person for whom it from Gretel, your old Teddie. would be more apt if his de- (B 442) cisive achievements came in old age, after sixty—there is a Five days later, Kracauer responds reason why you always used in kind: to say that August was your favorite month. And more Dear Teddie: I was so touched than anything, what gives me by your letter. And it did ar- the hope that you will find rive on the day itself; I found the fulfillment of that which it at home in the evening. you have “steadily meant” What a great joy for me— by your very existence, is the and for Lili, as well. As if I unforced nature of every- had not known, I was newly thing you have produced, overwhelmed at the fact of your receptivity to experience our thirty-year-old friend- without the overhasty drive ship and the old images to finish. Only too well do I that we drafted of ourselves, know how much this fulfill- which contained so much ment depends on that of my truth. I thought of the days in first wish for a dignified ma- Oberrad [their old Frankfurt terial basis, without the fear neighborhood], of our read- of how to go on. But I believe ing of Nietzsche and count- that there is something in less things, small and large, the rhythm of your life that from those years in which we will allow the externals and were still very young, young the internal finally to meet; enough in any case to know after all, you, too, have been of transitoriness only what guided by this belief yourself. one knows of many things. Please forgive me if I speak a I am truly grateful to you bit more ceremoniously than for your memory [Gedenken] is customary between us—I and for your words, which blame the strong feeling that conjured up the encapsulated befalls me in view of this day, life of the past. It is a consola- as well as the absence of that tion to know that you know quotidian empirical [pres- and preserve within yourself ence] that could put the pa- what we shared. That gives 692 JOHANNES VON MOLTKE

me a feeling of home [Ge- in 1925 and stayed at the borgenheit], of not-being-lost, Vesuvio. Incredibly much has for now. And thus I know of changed since then, the tri- you. (B 444) umph of cleanliness and order is unstoppable. But more than Such openly and unguardedly pa- that, what impresses itself thetic reminiscences bring into re- upon me is how life literally lief the persistent importance of rushes by—I feel as though the early, erotically charged years the days here, in Capri and of Kracauer and Adorno’s friend- Positano, had been yesterday, ship. But, as I have hoped to sug- so clearly do I still see every- gest, that importance transcended thing before my inner eye— the intimacy of letters exchanged I even still know my way and preserved among friends, and around the city entirely—and found an outlet in their published meanwhile, without know- work, even if only posthumously. ing how, one has grown Kracauer returned to those years old. Here’s wishing that we when writing Georg in Paris in the haven’t truly aged. With much early 1930s, and Adorno picked up fondness, to Lili as well, yours, the thread again in Germany with Teddie. (B 719) “The Curious Realist” another thirty years later. In doing so, both Kracauer would respond with authors would mine the begin- only one more letter, which he de- nings of their relationship and the scribes apologetically in closing as letters of those years for their linger- merely a “sign of life.” It would be ing passion, as the bedrock of their Friedel’s last after almost half a friendship and as the intimate foil on century of letters exchanged with which to project each other’s image, Teddie. its fictional or its “objective idea,” re- spectively, for a reading public. If it —University of Michigan weren’t already poignant enough, Adorno’s penultimate missive to Kracauer—a postcard dated 7 Octo- ber 1966, from Naples—picks out NOTES the early threads from a tapestry that time, age, love, and friendship have 1. Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, Der Riß der Welt geht auch woven: durch mich”: Briefwechsel 1923–1966 [“The rupture of the world passes Dear Friedel, here again through me, too”: Correspondence for the first time since 1929, 1923–1966], volume 7 of Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel I recollect with great emo- [Letters and correspondence], ed. tion how we were here Wolfgang Schopf (Frankfurt am Main: ON ADORNO AND KRACAUER’S BRIEFWECHSEL 693

Suhrkamp, 2008), 9; hereafter cited German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton parenthetically in the text as B. All University Press, 1947). translations are my own. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Curious The Redemption of Physical Reality Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer” (1964), (New York: Oxford University Press, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in 1960). “Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer,” 11. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last New German Critique, no. 54 (1991): Things before the Last (New York: 159–77, quotation on 160. Oxford University Press, 1969). 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: The 12. Decades later, Adorno would write Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. upon his return from another visit to Robert Hullot-Kentor (1966; repr., Amorbach, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). First German edition: [T]he old Amorbach that you, Kierkegaard: Zur Konstruktion des too, are familiar with, where we Ästhetischen (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. spent a few long overdue days of B. Mohr, 1933). vacation and where so little has changed that for the first time 4. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. I experienced something like a Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: feeling of home [Heimat], to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. extent that such a thing still ex- Edmund Jephcott (1972; repr., ists, and should be allowed to ex- Stanford, CA: Stanford University ist, at all. (letter, 17 October 1950, Press, 2002). First German edition: B 452) Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 13. Long before its publication, Martin Jay 1947). scoured the correspondence between Adorno and Kracauer in the archive. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of First published in Salmagundi Authenticity, trans. Kurt Tarnowski magazine in 1978, the resulting article and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: now appears as “Adorno and Kra- Northwestern University Press, 1973). cauer: Notes on a Troubled Friend- First German edition: Der Jargon der ship,” in Martin Jay’s Permanent Exiles: Eigentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Suhrkamp, 1964). Germany to America (New York: 6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Columbia University Press, 1986), Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New 217–36. Where Jay’s reading of the York: Seabury Press, 1973). First letters emphasizes their manifest German edition: Negative Dialektik importance for intellectual history, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). with a particular focus on the years around 1930, 1960, and 1964, my aim 7. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass here is to foreground the erotics of this Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. lifelong friendship. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). First 14. The address was published, in barely German edition: Das Ornament der revised form, as “Der wunderliche Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Realist” in Neue deutsche Hefte in 1964 Suhrkamp, 1963). and soon included in the third volume of Adorno’s Noten zur Literatur 8. Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster: Von ihm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965); selbst geschrieben [Ginster: Written by English version: “The Curious Realist: himself] (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928). On Siegfried Kracauer,” in Notes to 9. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Literature (New York: Columbia Hitler: A Psychological History of the University Press, 1992), 2:57–75. Prior 694 JOHANNES VON MOLTKE

to the publication of the latter in 21. Adorno dedicated his Kierkegaard to English, the essay appeared in New Kracauer; Kracauer dedicated The German Critique 54 (1991) as “The Mass Ornament to Adorno, and it Curious Realist” (cf. note 2), from would appear that no article, book, or which I quote here (159) (hereafter reprint crossed the Atlantic without a cited parenthetically in the text as CR). meaningful handwritten dedication on At Kracauer’s insistent bidding not to the title page. disclose his age, Adorno and the radio station made no mention of the birthday that occasioned the address. This issue takes up multiple letters that again betray a profound insecurity on Kracauer’s part, formulated as “the deep-seated need to live exterritori- ally—both as regards the intellectual climate and in relation to chronological time” (letter, 8 November 1963, B 621). For more on this aspect of the exchange, see Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer.” 15. For a differently angled discussion of the role of friendship in Kracauer’s work, which predates the publication of the correspondence, see Gerhard Richter, “Siegfried Kracauer and the Folds of Friendship,” German Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1997): 233–46. 16. Siegfried Kracauer, Georg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973; reprinted in Werke, ed. Inka Mülder Bach and Ingrid Belke [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004], 7:257–516); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as G. The novel was completed in 1934 during Kracauer’s exile in Paris. 17. Kracauer describes the novel itself as one of disillusionment in an “Analysis of my Novel,” written in 1934 and intended for prospective publishers (see Werke, 7:603–5). 18. Ibid., 605. 19. See Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer.” 20. For the latter, see also Kracauer’s notes on his “Talk with Teddie” (12 August 1960). A facsimile of its first page is included in B 734; the full text will be included in Affinities: Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, 1941– 1966, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).