Dream Notes E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

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

Seitenzahl: 166

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

"Dreams are as black as death."
—Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of them although in the event no more than a few appeared in his lifetime.

Dream Notes offers a selection of Adornos writings on dreams that span the last twenty-five years of his life. Readers of Adorno who are accustomed to high-powered reflections on philosophy, music and culture may well find them disconcerting: they provide an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of his inner desires, guilt feelings and anxieties. Brothel scenes, torture and executions figure prominently. They are presented straightforwardly, at face value. No attempt is made to interpret them, to relate them to the events of his life, to psychoanalyse them, or to establish any connections with the principal themes of his philosophy.

Are they fiction, autobiography or an attempt to capture a pre-rational, quasi-mythic state of consciousness? No clear answer can be given. Taken together they provide a highly consistent picture of a dimension of experience that is normally ignored, one that rounds out and deepens our knowledge of Adorno while retaining something of the enigmatic quality that energized his own thought.

Leseprobe

Dream Notes

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Dream Notes

Edited by CHRISTOPH GÖDDE and HENRI LONITZ

Afterword by JAN PHILIPP REEMTSMA

Translated by

RODNEY LIVINGSTONE

polity

First published in German as Traumprotokolle and copyright ©Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2005

This English translation © Polity Press, 2007

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-9461-0

Text design by Peter Ducker

— Contents —

Editorial Foreword

Dream Notes

Afterword by Jan Philipp Reemtsma

Index

Editorial Foreword

Early in January 1956, Adorno noted down two ideas about dreams that testify to his particular interest in a central theory of dreams and the interconnectedness of his own dreams. ‘Certain dream experiences lead me to believe that the individual experiences his own death as a cosmic catastrophe.’ And, ‘Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are “ours”, but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit “the same world”. The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.’ This second reflection was followed by the dream that he wrote down from memory on 9 January 1956. The idea that dreams are connected by certain motifs is what induced him to select a number of them for publication. This selection did not appear while Adorno was still alive, but Rolf Tiedemann included it in Volume 20 of the Gesammelte Schriften. It is based on a typescript preceded by Adorno’s own preliminary comment: ‘These Dream Notes, which have been chosen from a much larger collection, are authentic. I wrote them all down immediately on waking and in preparing them for publication have only corrected the most obvious linguistic lapses.’ ‘A much larger collection’ refers not just to the great number of dreams recorded in the notebooks, but also to a bundle of papers that were then copied by Gretel Adorno with diplomatic accuracy. The present volume adds to the dream notes already published by drawing on the copies existing in typescript. A comparison between the copies and original typescripts confirms that Adorno’s alterations were largely confined to correcting the linguistic mistakes that arose from the haste with which he recorded the dreams and also from changing the names of people either to their initials or to periphrases such as ‘my friend ’ or ‘my doctor’. For example, he replaced Rudolf Kolisch’s nickname ‘Rudi’ with his surname. On the other hand, he retained the names where he believed the content was harmless. Apart from obvious typing mistakes, Gretel Adorno’s copies were not further edited and have been reproduced in full. A few errors in transcription have been corrected, as have the dates of the dreams given in the Gesammelte Schriften as 1 February 1942 and 22 May 1942 [which have now been changed to January 1942 and 22 May 1941 respectively]. A few names were made anonymous in the copies; in one case Eduard was replaced by his surname Steuermann. The notes to the dreams have been added by the translator. The notes to the Afterword are by Jan Philipp Reemtsma except where indicated.

Dreams are as black as death.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

— Dream Notes —

Frankfurt, January 1934

In my dream, I was travelling with G. in a large, very comfortable bus down from Pontresina to the Lower Engadine. The bus was quite full and there was no lack of people I knew: the much travelled illustrator Miss P. and an old professor in industry and his wife were among them. However, the bus did not travel along the Engadine road, but went somewhere near my home town: between Königstein and Kronberg.1 On a large bend the bus went too far onto the right side of the road and one of its front wheels became suspended over a ditch for what seemed to me to be a very long time. ‘I have seen this happen before’, said the much travelled illustrator in the tone of someone who knew what she was talking about. ‘The bus will go on like this for a bit and will then turn over and we shall all be dead.’ That same moment the bus plunged over the side. Suddenly, I came to and found myself standing up, facing G.; both of us were unharmed. I realized I was crying as I said, ‘I would so like to have kept on being alive with you.’ Only then did I notice that my body was completely smashed up. At the moment of death, I awoke.