Transatlantic negotiations on hell? [Elektronische Ressource] : W. E. B. Du Bois's visit to fascist Germany and Theodor W. Adorno's exile in the land of the culture industry / von Mark Steven Kalbus

Mark Kalbus

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Soziologie

Informations

• Publié par: johannes_gutenberg-universitat_mainz
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 80
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Transatlantic Negotiations on “Hell“?
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Visit to Fascist Germany and
Theodor W. Adorno’s Exile in the Land of the Culture Industry



Inauguraldissertation
zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades
eines Dr. phil.,
vorgelegt dem Fachbereich 05 - Philosophie und Philologie
der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz

von


Mark Steven Kalbus
aus Washington, D.C.


Mainz
2009





ii
Contents


1. Marking Out the Area of Analysis 1

2. Contextualizations 7
2.1. Diachronic Contextualization: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Age of Miracles” 7
2.2. Synchronic Contextualization: The Frankfurt School’s “Exile in Paradise” 23

3. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Visit to Fascist Germany 37
3.1. The Old World 41
3.2. Science and Technology 45
3.3. Opera 49
3.4. The Eleventh Olympiad 53
3.5. Educational Industry 57
3.6. Race Relations 58
3.7. Fascism 64
3.8. Diaspora Dispute 69

4. Adorno’s America 83
4.1. Bar Harbor = “Cronberg plus Côte d’Or” 86
4.2. American Cinema & Art 96
4.3. Family Matters 103
4.4. Animal Matters 109
4.5. Confessions 113
4.6. Citizen Adorno 117
4.7. Moral Imperatives 121
4.8. Jewish Fear 138
4.9. “Enemy Alien” 148
4.10. A Left-Hegelian in California 151
4.11. Hippo Woes 161
4.12. Theoretical Obligations 168
4.13. “Sinister Negro Bars” 186

5. Theodor W. Adorno’s Exile in the Land of the Culture Industry 192
5.1. The Universal Victory of the Enlightenment 194
5.1.1. The Positive Aspects of the Enlightenment’s Universal Victory 197
5.1.2. The Negative Aspects of the Enlightenment’s Universal Victory 201
5.1.3. Questioning the Positivist and Empiricist Hegemony 203
5.1.4. Germany’s “Economic Backwardness” 211
5.2. The Culture Industry 214
5.2.1. Advertisement and Radio 219
5.2.2. Jazz 221
5.2.3. Film 226
5.2.4. Television 228
5.2.5. Print Media and Astrology 230

6. A Comparative Assessment 238

7. Works Cited 256 1
1. Marking Out the Area of Analysis

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) and Theodor
Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) were two distinct individuals who differed
from one another in terms of skin color, place of birth, mother tongue, and
religious affiliation. What is more, Du Bois led a life of political activism
which spanned such diverse causes as Pan-Africanism, NAACP-civil rights
agitation and Marxism (he eventually joined the CPUSA in 1961), whereas
Adorno contented himself with a life of critical contemplation. At the end of it
and in the midst of the German student rebellion of the late 1960s, the latter
justified his lifelong aloofness thus: “Wer denkt, ist in aller Kritik nicht
wütend; Denken hat die Wut sublimiert” (“Resignation” 150). While ultimate
disillusionment with the United States impelled Du Bois to emigrate to the
African Gold Coast and become a citizen of Ghana at the age of 95, intellectual
and emotional affinity for his country of origin persuaded Adorno – although
he at first cautiously retained his U.S. citizenship – to return to Germany after
the downfall of the National Socialist regime.
These facts notwithstanding and more importantly, the two thinkers also
shared a certain number of crucial characteristics: Both were culturally elitist,
left-wing scholars and artists who were pervaded by intellectual European
ethnocentrism (they were both trained at German universities) and
1demonstrated a profound interest in music and musical theory . Granted, Du

1
Another interesting commonality between the two pertained to the terms arguably most
closely associated with them: The NAACP’s organ The Crisis and the critical (as opposed to
traditional) theory espoused by the members of the Institute of Social Research. The similarity
between Du Bois’s and Adorno’s lifelong commitments becomes clear when one recalls that
the words “crisis” and “critical” are etymologically related, stemming from the Greek term
krisis, which denotes “discrimination”, “decision”, “crisis” or “decisive point” (cf. OED). Thus 2
Bois was primarily a historian and novelist fond of – besides the major
German-speaking composers – the African-American musical legacy (he
especially appreciated the “Sorrow Songs”, i.e. spirituals written by slaves),
whereas Adorno was above all a philosopher and composer who held the
leading exponents of the avant-garde Neue Musik (i.e. atonal and twelve-tone
music), namely Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg, in high esteem. Yet such
minor differences do not at all obscure the fundamental and indisputable
likeness between the two.
This basic similarity is probably best underscored by an additional reference
to the fact that both Du Bois – a black American – and Adorno – a German Jew
– were members of persecuted minorities in their respective home countries
during the 1930s and 40s. Peripherally, one might remark that it is a more than
curious coincidence that both men were actually only partly members of the
aforementioned minority communities, for Du Bois had also had Huguenot and
Dutch ancestors, whereas Adorno was technically not even a Jew, since his
mother was a Catholic singer who came from a family with a Corsican and
Italian background. His father – originally a Jewish wine merchant – had
already converted to Protestantism in the year 1910. Yet such a subtle analysis
of the complexities of Du Bois’s and Adorno’s family background should not
mislead – let alone deceive – the reader: Both white supremacists in the U.S.
and German anti-Semites knew perfectly well whom they wanted to persecute,
of whom they wanted to purge society. Or, as Adorno put it in Minima
Moralia’s “Mélange”: “. . . noch die zwingendsten anthropologischen Beweise
dafür, daß die Juden keine Rasse seien, werden im Falle des Pogroms kaum

one might argue that a crisis is a decisive moment, a time calling for judgment, for praise and
rebuke, for critical thought (cf. Schweppenhäuser 19). 3
etwas daran ändern, daß die Totalitären ganz gut wissen, wen sie umbringen
wollen und wen nicht“ (183-84).
Given the fact that they had a great deal in common, a comparative analysis
of Du Bois’s visit to Germany in 1936 and Adorno’s exile in the United States
from 1938 to 1949 is bound to yield interesting results – not least because at
first sight one assumes that both National Socialism and the so-called culture
industry must have been sheer hell for men of their make-up. According to the
German scholar Rüdiger Safranski, Adorno’s three “hells” were fascism,
Stalinism, and the production of mass culture to which his colleague Max
Horkheimer and he referred to as the culture industry in their “black”, epoch-
2making Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) . Yet does that mean that his
American exile as such was unbearable? Du Bois’s “hell on earth” was clearly
color prejudice and race hatred. Not only his writings, but also his activism (he
co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
in 1909) demonstrate that from his perspective “the problem of the Twentieth
Century” was “the problem of the color-line” (Souls 1). When he was barely
twenty years old, he had already spoken of the “Hell of southern prejudice”
(“The New Fatherland”) in a Fisk University address to visiting German
educators. Yet does that necessarily mean that he experienced Germany as a
wholly abominable place? Obviously, the country was in the grip of a fascist
regime among whose National Socialist principles prominently ranked severe
hostility towards those deemed “unfit”, i.e. Jews, communists, Gypsies,
homosexuals and the mentally handicapped. People of color, however, were

2
Cf. the documentary Adorno – Der Bürger als Revolutionär by Meinhard Prill and Kurt
Schneider broadcast by the Hessischer Rundfunk in 2003.
4
not among the primary targets of fascist purges, persecution and eventual
extermination. So what was Du Bois’s attitude towards “the country of poets
and thinkers” turned fascist when he briefly returned to it in 1936?
What follows will be an attempt to answer these questions
comprehensively. It goes without saying that not only the word “hell” but also
the term ”negotiations” contained in the title of this investigation are to be
understood metaphorically. What interests me are Du Bois’s and Adorno’s
negotiations of meaning with regard to the word “hell”. These negotiations did
not take place between them, but rather between them and the readers to which
their various writings were addressed. Moreover, while the metaphor “hell”
aptly pinpoints my intention to probe subjective experience, “negotiations”
carries political connotations which perfectly underscore the historical, social
and, in particular, political emphasis of this investig