Correspondence 1943-1955 E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 289

Beschreibung

In December 1945 Thomas Mann wrote a famous letter to Adorno in which he formulated the principle of montage adopted in his novel Doctor Faustus. The writer expressly invited the philosopher to consider, with me, how such a work and I mean Leverkhns work could more or less be practically realized. Their close collaboration on questions concerning the character of the fictional composers putatively late works (Adorno produced specific sketches which are included as an appendix to the present volume) effectively laid the basis for a further exchange of letters. The ensuing correspondence between the two men documents a rare encounter of creative tension between literary tradition and aesthetic modernism which would be sustained right up until the novelists death in 1955. In the letters, Thomas Mann openly acknowledged his fascinated reading of Adornos Minima Moralia and commented in detail on the Essay on Wagner, which he was as eager to read as the one in the Book of Revelation consumes a book which tastes as sweet as honey. Adorno in turn offered detailed observations upon and frequently enthusiastic commendations of Manns later writings, such as The Holy Sinner, The Betrayed One and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Their correspondence also touches upon issues of great personal significance, notably the sensitive discussion of the problems of returning from exile to postwar Germany. The letters are extensively annotated and offer the reader detailed notes concerning the writings, events and personalities referred or alluded to in the correspondence.

Leseprobe

Correspondence 1943–1955

THEODOR W. ADORNO AND THOMAS MANN

Correspondence1943–1955

Edited by Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher Translated by Nicholas Walker

polity

First published in German as Briefwechsel: 1943–1955 of Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann and © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2002.

This English translation © Polity Press, 2006.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9501-3

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The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Contents

Editors’ Note

Correspondence 1943–1955

Appendix: Adorno’s Notes and Sketches for Doctor Faustus

Index

Editors’ Note

Thomas Mann’s correspondence with Theodor W. Adorno was preceded and effectively prompted by his reading the philosopher’s work. In July 1943, while he was working on chapter 7 of his novel Doctor Faustus, Mann was also studying Adorno’s manuscript on ‘Schönberg and Progress’. ‘I encountered an artistic and sociological critique of our current situation of the most subtle, progressive and profound kind, and one which displayed a striking affinity to the central conception of my own work, to the very “composition” in which I was then immersed and involved. The matter was soon decided. “This is my man” ’ (Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, GWXI, p. 172). The relationship between tradition and avant-garde culture, the constellation of modernity and the past, defines the force- field of Mann’s novel as well as that of Adorno’s investigations of the dialectic of technological progress in music. These representatives of two different generations, with significantly different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds in each case, recognized a remarkable closeness to one another that subsequently led, over and beyond their specifically literary and musical collaboration, to a periodically renewed exchange of letters that touched repeatedly on broader social and political issues as well.

Adorno’s manuscript on Schoenberg provided the initial stimulus for a rapidly developing social and intellectual relationship between the philosopher and the writer. Personal invitations and mutual visits led to detailed discussions concerning both the composition of the whole novel and very specific musical details, such as those involved in Wendell Kretzschmar’s lectures on Beethoven in chapter 8 of the book. On 30 December 1945, when his narrative was approaching the subject of Adrian Leverkühn’s late works, Mann wrote his famous letter on ‘the principle of montage’ in Doctor Faustus, explicitly inviting Adorno to ‘consider, with me, how such a work – and I mean Leverkühn’s work – could more or less be practically realized’. Adorno, having already examined the manuscript of the novel up to this point in the narrative, proceeded to sketch examples of Leverkühn’s final compositions, which Mann then ‘versified’, as he put it, developing and incorporating these ideas into the body of the novel – ideas which, as models of Adorno’s ‘exact imagination’, give the lie to any blank or abstract opposition between the original sketch and the finished novel. In a letter to Erika Mann of 19 April 1962, Adorno described the nature of his collaboration with the writer in the following way:

Finally, a word concerning Leverkühn’s musical compositions. It turned out that T. M. had already chosen the titles for most of the works in question which he immediately communicated to me; I then set about thinking them out in detail. I think it was only with the Brentano songs that we did not proceed in this fashion, and in this case I didn’t go beyond giving some general musical suggestions. As for the rest, it was extremely straightforward: I thought about the problems exactly as I would have done as a composer actually confronted with the task of writing such works, just as someone, like Berg for example, would generally prepare a plan before setting to work. I noted down the relevant considerations, and still possess a number of these sketches, before proceeding to elaborate them as if there were not merely preparatory outlines, but descriptions of real pieces of music. T. M. would then contribute his own part. Many things would be changed in the course of our discussions, whether it was a matter of developing the overall conception of the novel more concretely through the description of specific musical details, or of emphasizing alternative aspects and features of the narrative, as in the chapter on the Devil, or whether finally, and this is the most important point, it was a question of cutting a number of things precisely because the work in hand was a novel rather than a musical guide book. I do not believe that his conception of these afternoon discussions, of which I naturally possess the clearest and most precise recollection, would have differed in any way whatsoever from my own.

Even more than Thomas Mann, who was fascinated by the ‘striking affinity’ between the aesthetic ground-plan of his novel and Adorno’s avant-garde aesthetic, Adorno himself must have regarded this effective collaboration as an epitome of his own utopian conception of knowledge – namely the construction of a concrete form of understanding that successfully reconciles the conceptual and the intuitive moments of experience through an activity of productive imagination.

Although relatively few of the letters exchanged between Mann and Adorno belong precisely to the period in which Doctor Faustus was actually completed, their active collaboration with regard to the putative compositions of the novel’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn nonetheless formed the basis and point of departure for their subsequent correspondence as well. Mann would later report back to Adorno about his ‘fascinated reading’ of Minima Moralia and respond in detail to the Essay on Wagner,a work which he confessed he was as eager to read as ‘the one in the Book of Revelation who consumes a book which tastes “as sweet as honey” ’. Adorno in turn communicated his own detailed comments upon, and enthusiastic support for, Mann’s later novels such as The Holy Sinner, The Black Swan and The Confessions of Felix Krull – the last work being particularly close to Adorno’s heart. The letters also addressed extremely private concerns of great personal significance to both of them, as in the candid and carefully considered discussion of the difficulties involved in returning to Europe after the end of the war. Although they were destined never to meet again in person after the autumn of 1949, when Adorno returned to Germany, their continuing correspondence testifies to their persisting mutual concern for and interest in one another. Adorno always remained faithful to his personal encounter with Mann, something which he himself described in his letter of 3 June 1945 on commemoration of the writer’s seventieth birthday as ‘a moment of realized utopia’.

The editors of the present volume have benefited from the opportunity of consulting the transcription of, and a provisional and incomplete commentary upon, Thomas Mann’s letters prepared by Prof. Dr Hans Wysling and Beatrice Trummer in the early 1990s. The current editors remain responsible for any errors in this edition of the correspondence.

At present the original letters from Adorno to Mann are preserved in the Thomas Mann Archive in Zurich. The original letters from Mann to Adorno are preserved in the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt. In a number of cases, where Adorno’s letters have not survived in the Mann Archive, the transcription has been based upon the carbon copies of the originals in the Adorno Archive. The same procedure has been employed for the transcription of the texts printed in the Appendix.

All of the surviving letters and cards have been printed here complete in chronological sequence. The Appendix contains Adorno’s notes and comments on the Arietta theme from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 111, preserved in the Thomas Mann Archive in Zurich, and his notes and sketches for the putative compositions of Adrian Leverkühn mentioned or described in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus.

For the German edition the punctuation and orthography of the originals was generally maintained throughout. A few obvious and insignificant typing errors in the originals have been appropriately corrected without comment for the transcription. Editors’ additions have been enclosed in square brackets. Emphases in the original letters, indicated by underlining or spaced print, have been rendered throughout by italics in the transcription. The letterheads and concluding sections of the originals have also been reproduced as closely as possible in the printed text. The passages in Thomas Mann’s diary entries which the author underlined in red when preparing the text of The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus are here also underlined. The brace brackets ( {…} ) in the passage on the ‘Apocalipsis’ cited in note 10 of Letter 5 enclose words or phrases which Mann included in the published text of The Story of a Novel.

The annotations to the letters provide further information concerning the individuals, writings and specific events which are mentioned or alluded to in the correspondence. These annotations are simply intended to clarify certain references and to provide some assistance to the contemporary reader, and do not attempt to supply a detailed running commentary to the correspondence or to provide a substantive contribution to the current state of research on the subject. For this reason, we have not supplied further references to the relevant secondary literature or taken specific account of related correspondence with third parties, such as that between Adorno and Erika Mann for example. It appeared to us more helpful not only to provide specific sources and references for the often detailed discussion of the literary and theoretical writings of the two correspondents, but also to clarify the discussion in question by citation from the relevant writings where appropriate. Similarly we have provided details of Thomas Mann’s correspondence with other parties if it serves to illuminate the background and context of his letters to Adorno, as in the case of Thomas Mann’s controversy with Arnold Schoenberg.

Information concerning the original textual sources for this edition of the correspondence, and reference to prior publication, in part or whole, of the same material where relevant, has been provided at the end of each letter immediately before the annotations. The following abbreviations have been employed:

O: Original

Ms: Manuscript

Ts: Typescript

Fp: First published

Pp: Part published

The following abbreviations have been employed in the annotations with reference to the writings of Adorno and to the works, diaries and letters of Thomas Mann:

GS[1–20]: Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz, vols. 1–20, Frankfurt am Main, 1970–86.

GW[I–XIII]: Thomas Mann: Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, 2nd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Tagebücher: Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (1918–1922; 1931–1943) and Inge Jens (1944–1955), Frankfurt am Main, 1977–95.

Briefe II: Thomas Mann, Briefe 1937–1947, ed. Erika Mann, Frankfurt am Main, 1963.

Briefe III: Thomas Mann, Briefe 1948–1955, ed. Erika Mann, Frankfurt am Main, 1965.

DüD: Dichter über ihre Dichtungen, ed. Rudolf Hirsch and Werner Vordtriede, Vol. 14/III: Thomas Mann, Teil III: 1944–1955, ed. Hans Wysling in collaboration with Marianne Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1981.

The editors would also like to express their gratitude to the following individuals for their considerable assistance in the course of preparing this edition: Peter Cahn, Michael Maaser, Elisabeth Matthias, Veró van de Sand, Peter Stocker and, at the Thomas Mann Archive, Rosamerie Primault, Katrin Bedenig and Cornelia Bernini.

Correspondence 1943–1955

1  THOMAS MANN TO THEODOR W. ADORNO

PACIFIC PALISADES, 5.10.1943

THOMAS MANN

1550

SAN REMO DRIVE

PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA

5.X.43

Dear Dr Adorno,

Once again many thanks for yesterday’s splendid evening.1 Lest it should get mislaid, I also enclose your article2 – very stimulating reading and extremely important for the figure of Kretzschmar who, in typically musical-historical fashion, had never advanced beyond the perspective which ‘absolutizes the personality’;3 yet he, if anyone, should be able to appreciate how the proximity of death and greatness produces a certain objectivism (with a tendency towards the conventional) where the sovereignly subjective passes over into the mythic. So do not be too surprised if Kretschmar now starts to incorporate such thoughts into his own perorations!4 I am not worried about montage in this connection,5 and never really have been. What belongs in the book must go into it, and will be properly absorbed in the process.

I also wanted to ask if you could write out for me, in very simple form, the arietta theme of the variation movement,6 and could identify the particular note that is added to the final repetitions and thus creates the remarkably consoling and humane effect at the close.

Was it also in the same movement7 that the melody consists in the chordal texture rather than in the repeated unchanging upper notes? And which was the note that was repeated four times over alternating chords?

I need this degree of musical intimacy and characteristic detail, and can only acquire it from a remarkable connoisseur like yourself.

Heartfelt greetings from both of us,

Yours,

Thomas Mann

SOURCE: O: MS with printed letterhead; Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main. Fp: DüD, p. 15.

1  Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno probably first met one another in 1942 or 1943 at the home of Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and his wife, Maidon (1887–1969), who on settling in California found themselves living in the vicinity of the Manns. The earliest direct evidence of personal acquaintance is to be found in Adorno’s letter to his parents on 29 March 1943: ‘This evening at Max’s with a couple of celebrities including Thomas Mann accompanied by his gracious wife.’ They seem to have got to know one another more closely only after Mann had begun work on his novel Doctor Faustus in the summer of 1943. At the beginning of July 1943, when Mann was working on the fourth chapter, Adorno showed him a book by Julius Bahl, Eingebung und Tat im musikalischen Schaffen (Leipzig, 1939) [Act and Inspiration in Musical Composition], and this became one of Mann’s sources for the novel. But what proved decisive for their very close subsequent collaboration was the first part of Adorno’s own Philosophy of the New Music, which Mann received in manuscript on 21 July 1943 and read at once (typescript in the Thomas Mann Archive, Zurich). In his diary entry for 26 July Mann writes: ‘Just finished Adorno’s text. Further reflections on how to proceed with Adrian.’ On completing the eighth chapter, in which Adrian Leverkühn attends Wendell Kretzschmar’s first two lectures (on Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata, op. 111, and on ‘Beethoven and the Fugue’), Mann records an ‘invitation to Dr Adorno, for whom I should like to recite chapter VIII’ (Mann, Tagebücher 1940–1943, p. 629). On 27 September he read the entire chapter to Adorno and subsequently took careful note of the latter’s critical comments and observations in revising the text. On 4 October Mann was invited to dinner at the Adornos. He noted in his diary: ‘7.15. Dinner at Adorno’s home. After coffee showed the three-page insertion concerning the piano. Playing of Beethoven’s sonata op. 111. Parallels in op. 31, 2. Easy piano pieces for Adrian. Much talk of music’ (ibid., p. 634). Mann was occupied repeatedly with revisions to chapter 8 until the end of the year. In addition he made use of Adorno’s essay ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’, also mentioned in this letter. On 5 January 1944 Adorno was once again invited to dinner at the Manns: ‘Afterwards op. 111 played again, with inscription of the performer’s name’ (Tagebücher 1944–1946, p. 5). Kretschmar now scans the motif from the arietta theme of the second movement of op. 111 – as a first expression of thanks for Adorno’s assistance – not merely with ‘Him-melsblau’ [heav-en’s blue] or ‘Lie-besleid’ [lov-er’s pain], as in the original version, but also with ‘Wie-sengrund’ [mead-ow-land]. (See Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Harmondsworth, 1968, ch. 8, p. 56.) There was another meeting between Mann and Adorno, at the home of Berthold (1885–1953) and Salka (1889–1978) Viertel on 23 January 1944, at which ‘the musical problematic of the novel’ was also discussed. On this occasion Adorno drew Mann’s attention to Willi Reich’s volume on Alban Berg (Vienna, 1937) to which Adorno had contributed several essays, and which became in turn an important source for the novel. This effectively marks the end of the first phase of their active collaboration. Nonetheless, Thomas Mann’s diary records numerous further meetings. And Adorno’s texts on Alban Berg, Wagner and Kierkegaard, the beginnings of Minima Moralia, and especially the section of the Philosophy of the New Music, which was devoted specifically to Schoenberg, continued to accompany Mann’s own work on Doctor Faustus. They essentially form the basis for the collaboration which was renewed in the winter of 1945–6 and lasted until the completion of Mann’s novel (see Letter 5, below), and which constitutes a major theme of the correspondence itself.

2  See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Spätstil Beethovens’, Der Auftakt, 17 (5/6) (1937), pp. 65–7; GS17, pp. 13–17. English translation: ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, in T. W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2002), pp. 564–6.

3  Thomas Mann is probably alluding to the essay ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, where Adorno writes: ‘The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble that of fruit. They are, for the most part, not rounded, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth. The standard view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, of “personality”, that breaks through all rounded form for the sake of self-expression, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its own suffering, and disdaining sensuous charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the liberated spirit. The late works are thereby relegated to the margins of art where they come to resemble documents. And indeed discussions of the late Beethoven rarely fail to allude to biography and fate’ (GS17, p. 13; English translation: ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, ibid., p. 564).

4  Wendell Kretschmar’s lectures as related in chapter 8 of Doctor Faustus, in particular his remarks on ‘Beethoven’s condition in the year 1820’. See Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, GWVI, pp. 71–4; English translation: Doctor Faustus, chapter 8, pp. 53–5.

5  See Mann’s further remarks on this subject in Letter 5 below.

6  On 6 October Adorno sent Thomas Mann a handwritten copy of the ‘arietta theme’ from the second and concluding movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 111, with relevant explanatory comments, just as Mann had requested in his letter (see Appendix, pp. 120–1). These materials are preserved in the Thomas Mann Archive.

7  Thomas Mann is probably alluding to the frequent repetition of the ‘d’ at the beginning of the second movement of op. 111; but it is also possible that he is thinking of the exposition section of the first movement of Sonata op. 31, no. 2, which Adorno had also played for him on the same evening.

2  THOMAS MANN TO THEODOR W. ADORNO

PACIFIC PALISADES, 27.9.1944

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

WASHINGTON

THE CONSULTANT IN GERMANIC LITERATURE

Pacif. Palisades, 27.IX.44

Dear Dr Adorno,

I have been sent the enclosed lecture by Dr Albersheim1 which I have read with cautious interest. It made a strong impression at the Music Congress, and they are saying it will earn the author a chair in musicology. You will understand that I should be extraordinarily interested to hear your own opinion upon the matter (and I do not mean concerning the chair).

I am studying your work on Wagner2 before embarking on the ‘Fragments’.3 The section on phantasmagoria, ‘semblance’ and ‘diminution’ is what has most delighted me so far.4 Lohengrin as a tiny fairy prince (with the pianissimo trumpet representing the horn) is wonderful.5

Yours,

Thomas Mann

SOURCE: O: MS with printed letterhead; Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main. Pp: DüD, p. 29.

1  Alfred Neumann (1895–1952) had sent Thomas Mann a lecture by the Viennese pianist and musicologist Gerhard Albersheim (1902–1996), entitled ‘Contemporary Music in the Light of the History of Musical Art’. Albersheim, who had emigrated in 1939, had been teaching at the University of Southern California since 1940. It was there that he delivered the lecture in question, on 15 September at the Institute of Contemporary Music. Nothing further is known of the ‘Music Congress’ mentioned in the letter. A copy of the lecture is included among the preparatory materials for Doctor Faustus in the Thomas Mann Archive in Munich.

2  Four chapters of Adorno’s book on Wagner (the first, the sixth and the last two) had already appeared in 1939 under the title ‘Fragments on Wagner’, in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8 (1939), pp. 1–49; the book edition of Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner, written in London and New York in 1938–9, appeared only in 1952 (GS13, pp. 7–148); English translation: In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone (London and New York, 1991).

3  See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Fragmente, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1944. This was the original mimeograph version of the authors’ Dialectic of Enlightenment; the first book edition appeared in 1947, published by Querido Verlag of Amsterdam; now in GS3, pp. 7–296.

4  Mann is referring to the beginning of the sixth chapter of Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner (entitled ‘Phantasmagoria’); see GS13, p. 82f.; English translation: In Search of Wagner, p. 85f.

5  ‘The technique of diminishing the sound by eliminating the bass also confers the quality of phantasmagoria on a passage in Lohengrin, one which, less obviously than in Tristan, determines the character of the whole work. It is Elsa’s vision in which she conjures up the knight and thus launches the entire action. Her description of the knight resembles the picture of Oberon: the inward Lohengrin is a tiny fairy prince. “Arrayed in shining armour a knight was approaching, more virtuous and pure than any I had yet seen, a golden horn at his hip and leaning on his sword. Thus was this worthy knight sent to me from heaven” [Lohengrin, act 1, scene 1]. Such bass notes as occur are given once more to ethereal instruments such as the bass clarinets or the harp. The sound of the bass clarinets, which is particularly transparent, never descends below middle c. The horn referred to in the text is envisaged as a diminished scale in the music by a trumpet in pianissimo’ (GS13, p. 83; English translation: In Search of Wagner, pp. 86–7).

3  THOMAS MANN TO THEODOR W. ADORNO

PACIFIC PALISADES, 13.12.1944

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

WASHINGTON

THE CONSULTANT IN GERMANIC LITERATURE

Pacif. Palisades, 13 Dec. 44

My dear Dr Adorno,

Here is the letter1 which I am about to despatch to President KleinSmid. I hope I have done it properly, and I think he may wish to get in touch with me personally about the matter. But he will certainly be able to make some enquiries in the relevant musical circles.

I must also thank you for the essay on ‘Spengler Today’,2 an extremely perceptive and well-informed piece of work – like everything else you write. The often silly parody of Nietzsche and the infantile romanticism that is always so ready to glorify beasts of prey could perhaps be brought out even more strongly. But your critique is very just. You have evoked everything really well: what is both captivating and repellent about him, what looks so attractive and traditional at first sight, the Goethe, the Schopenhauer, but also the aspect of the threatening School Master.

Respectfully yours,

Thomas Mann

SOURCE: O: MS with printed letterhead; Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Frankfurt am Main.

1  Adorno had asked Thomas Mann if he would write a letter of recommendation for Eduard Steuermann (see Letter 11, note 9). It had become clear that the University of Southern California was intending to expand its ‘musical department’ and that Steuermann might therefore be able to obtain a teaching position there. On 13 December Thomas Mann wrote, in English, to Rufus Bernard von KleinSmid (1875–1964), who was president of the university between 1921 and 1947:

Dear Mr President:

You can hardly believe how interested I, as an old music lover, was in the news of the intended considerable enlargement of the musical department of your university. This is a change of great importance for the cultural and especially the musical life of this coast. That such plans can be conceived and executed during a great war, demanding all the energies of the nation, is a proof of the vitality of this country of which I am now a citizen.

Please take it as a sign of my deep interest if I want to direct your attention to a man who, in my opinion, would be a real asset to the newly enlarged institute. I am speaking of the pianist Eduard Steuermann, a musician of the first order, who combines an extraordinary productive and reproductive gift with a decided and proven pedagogical talent. His great ability, and especially his educational prowess, were early recognized in Europe, and he was offered a professorship at the Vienna Academy which, however, he refused in order to go to America.

A pupil of Busoni and later of Arnold Schoenberg, Steuermann belongs to a modern and even radically modern generation and school of musicians. Perhaps in music, more than in any other art, radical progressiveness may be combined with the most devoted and faithful loyalty to the old and classical tradition, in the same way, Steuermann is an artist of the profoundest and most thorough classical education, and as a teacher makes this also a prerequisite for any progressive venture. He is known as the editor of the best edition of Brahms’ piano pieces, with which he was commissioned by the Universal Edition. He is not only one of the best known interpreters of modern music, but also of Beethoven and Brahms piano compositions.

I am telling you all this, dear Mr President, because I know that, although in Europe this artist would have an assured and brilliant career ahead of him, Steuermann is not the man to push and cleverly recommend himself. I hardly believe that he will approach you of his own volition in order to apply for a position with your future institute. And this is the reason why I give you all these data which you can easily verify and complete through an inquiry in musical circles. I would not have written to you if I did not believe to be serving the university as well as a great artist with these lines.

Steuermann, who had been living in New York since 1937, and whose sister Salka Viertel had made her home in Santa Monica into something of a social focus for the emigrant community, did not move to California after all.

2  Mann is referring to an essay which Adorno originally presented as a lecture in 1937, but which was published in 1941 in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (IX, 2, pp. 305–25). (After the outbreak of war the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was published in New York under this English title.) See ‘Spengler nach dem Untergang’, now in GS10.1, pp. 47–71; for the passages to which Mann alludes specifically, see esp. pp. 52f., 62f. and 69. (English translation: ‘Spengler after the Decline’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (London, 1969), pp. 57f., 64f. and 70.)

4  THEODOR W. ADORNO TO THOMAS MANN

LOS ANGELES, 3.6.1945

3 June 1945

316 So. Kenter Ave.

Los Angeles 24

My dear and esteemed Dr Mann,

I feel the most profound need to impart to you all of my best wishes and fairest hopes for your seventieth birthday.1 This moment, which finds you as it does completely absorbed in uninterrupted work and self-forgetful productivity, has crept up upon us with such stealth that it is hard to believe how many years have passed already and it seems improper even to allude to them. It is as if such congratulations, inevitably implying a sort of caesura, might wrongly disturb the unfolding course of your spiritual experience, an experience that regards nothing as alien to itself, tolerates nothing imposed upon it from without, and expresses what is most human about us through a kind of mémoire involontaire.2 But you will forgive me if an observer may permit himself something which your silent and tireless work so strenuously denies itself – pausing here, therefore, to give thanks and to express the hope that this caesura remains imperceptible to you, especially as this current celebration of your seventieth birthday cannot fail to strike anyone remotely familiar with your writings as anything other than a kind of subtle, wary and ironic artistic device in its own right. Who after all, one might ask, has ever stayed more faithful to the utopia of youth, to the dream of a world unspoilt by ends and purposes, for all your unremitting emphasis upon maturity and responsibility? Can your entire oeuvre be described as anything but a unique fusion of the early and the late, as a single determinate negation of the normal and average life that lies between the two? Is not even this your seventieth birthday the authentic counterpoint to little Hanno’s evening at the opera?3 I know that I can only give full expression to my personal gratitude by confessing that the resonance of your words and the character of your imaginative creations impressed themselves so strongly upon me during the years in which I ceased to be a child that I could no longer begin to separate these impressions from the loves and friendships belonging to those years. You have addressed the life which precedes all art, and thereby vouchsafed the fundamental experience of art itself. This spiritual and biological proximity itself complements something else that has also touched me very deeply. When I was able to meet you here in person, upon this remote western coast, I had the feeling that I was only now, for the first time, actually encountering that German tradition from which I have received everything – including the strength to resist the tradition. This feeling, together with the happiness it grants – a theologian would speak here of a blessing – is something that I shall never forget. There was one occasion – it was in Kampen in the summer of 19214 – when I followed on behind you for a good way, unnoticed, as you walked, and imagined what it would be like if you were to turn and speak to me. That you have indeed truly spoken to me now, after twenty years, is a moment of realized utopia that is rarely vouchsafed to any human being.

I had wished to honour this caesura with a couple of new little songs,5 but in the event my troubled brain has not allowed me to do so. Hopefully I shall make good this omission in future. Much closer to my heart today is simply this – that your grief for the wretched state of the world shall not deter the joyful completion of your own work on Leverkühn, something of which I wait impatiently to hear.

With the profoundest respect,

Yours, T. W. Adorno

SOURCE: O: MS; Thomas Mann Archive, Zurich. Fp: Frankfurter Adorno Blätter I (1992), p. 28f.

1  Thomas Mann celebrated his birthday in New York on 6 June 1945.

2  The phenomenon of spontaneous and unbidden memory as described in the work of Marcel Proust (1871–1922), whose ideas were strongly influenced here by Henri Bergson (1859–1941).

3  Adorno is alluding to the performance of Fidelio, mentioned in chapter 8 of part VIII, not that of Lohengrin, referred to in chapter 2 of part XI, in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks. English translation: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. by H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth, 1957), p. 405f.

4  During a summer trip between 7 August and 13 September 1921, Thomas Mann spent some time in Sylt (23–31 August). Nothing further is known about Adorno’s stay in Kampen that is documented for the period between the end of August and the beginning of September 1921.

5  In fact Adorno composed no more songs after completing the Four Songs to Texts by Stefan George, op. 7, in 1944.

5  THOMAS MANN TO THEODOR W. ADORNO

PACIFIC PALISADES, 30/31.12.1945

THOMAS MANN

1550

SAN REMO DRIVE

PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA

30 Dec. 1945

Dear Dr Adorno,

I should just like to say something about the manuscript I recently left with you and which I imagine you may be about to read.1 In writing to you I certainly do not feel I am interrupting my work in any way.

I am quite excited that this strange and perhaps impossible work (what there is of it) is in your hands. For in the states of weariness which increasingly assail me I often wonder whether I should not abandon the whole thing, and your own view of the matter will not be without influence upon whether I persevere or not.

The aspect with regard to which I should principally be grateful to receive some detailed comment is the principle of montage which peculiarly, perhaps outrageously, pervades the entire book – explicitly so and without the slightest concealment. Only recently I have been struck by this again in a half amusing, half uncanny fashion when I came to describe a critical illness in the life of my hero. For I incorporated Nietzsche’s actual symptoms2 word for word, just as they are described in his letters, along with details of his prescribed diet etc., straight into the book. I simply pasted them in, so to speak, for anyone to recognize. I have followed the same principle with the motif of Tchaikovsky’s invisible admirer and lover, Madame von Meck, whom he never met, indeed expressly avoided meeting in the flesh.3 I paste this familiar historical material in and allow the edges to blur, dropping it into the text as a mythical theme there for anyone to pick up. (For Leverkühn the relationship is a way of circumventing the devil’s proscription of love, the commandment enjoining coldness.)

Or to take another example – towards the end of the book I obviously introduce the theme, complete with actual quotations, from Shakespeare’s sonnets: the triangle where the friend sends his friend to woo the beloved on his behalf – and the friend ends up ‘wooing for himself’.4 Of course, I also transform the material: Adrian kills the friend whom he loves since the resulting involvement with the woman in question exposes him in the end to an act of murderous jealousy (Innes Rodde). Nonetheless, this does little to alter the bold and thievish character of my borrowings.