Adorno in America

by David Jenemann

“For those inclined to dismiss Adorno’s take on America as the uncomprehending condescension of a mandarin elitist, David Jenemann’s splendid new book will come as a rude awakening. Exploiting a wealth of new sources, he persuasively shows the depth of Adorno’s engagement with the culture industry and the complexity of his reaction to it.” —Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno was one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and between 1938 and 1953 he lived in exile in the United States. In the first in-depth account of this period of Adorno’s life, David Jenemann examines Adorno’s confrontation with the burgeoning American “culture industry” and casts new light on Adorno’s writings about the mass media. Contrary to the widely held belief—even among his defenders—that Adorno was disconnected from America and disdained its culture, Jenemann reveals that Adorno was an active and engaged participant in cultural and intellectual life during these years. From the time he first arrived in New York in 1938 to work for the Princeton Radio Research Project, exploring the impact of radio on American society and the maturing marketing strategies of the national radio networks, Adorno was dedicated to understanding the technological and social influence of popular art in the United States. Adorno carried these interests with him to Hollywood, where he and Max Horkheimer attempted to make a film for their Studies in Prejudice Project and where he befriended Thomas Mann and helped him craft his famous novel Doctor Faustus . Shuttling between insightful readings of Adorno’s theories and a rich body of archival materials—including unpublished writings and FBI files—Jenemann paints a portrait of Adorno’s years in New York and Los Angeles and tells the cultural history of an America coming to grips with its rapidly evolving mass culture. Adorno in America eloquently and persuasively argues for a more complicated, more intimate relationship between Adorno and American society than has ever been previously acknowledged. What emerges is not only an image of an intellectual in exile, but ultimately a rediscovery of Adorno as a potent defender of a vital and intelligent democracy. David Jenemann is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, 20th Century, Music

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Matthew Linton · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Jenemann's "Adorno in America" is a corrective work which attempts to recast Adorno as a pro-American, forward-thinking aesthetician instead of the elitist traditional European philosopher he often portrayed as being. "Adorno in America" is one of many new books on Adorno which attempt to grapple with his ideas in the context of his biography of which Lorenz Jaeger's impressive biography of Adorno's political beliefs is the most successful.

Regrettably, "Adorno in America" is neither a convincing corrective nor an insightful piece of historical or theoretical scholarship. Instead, it reads like a collection of loosely connected essays on different mediums Adorno studied in the United States (radio, television, comics, etc.) and why Adorno's understanding of those mediums was ahead of its time. Jenemann's fails to prove why Adorno was a revolutionary thinker in any of these mediums or even why well-regarded works penned by Adorno, most famously the essay collection "The Culture Industry", were significant to later developments in media studies. Most significantly, Jenemann fails to connect his argument about Adorno's innovative understanding of 20th century media technologies to why Adorno was positively influenced by his American experience. Though Jenemann provides ample evidence to support the argument that Adorno was impressed by American democracy and its freedoms, he does not account for Adorno's return to Germany after the war, instead claiming Adorno did everything to maintain his American citizenship after his return to Germany. Finally, Jenemann does not adequately address the most controversial of Adorno's aesthetic opinions: his condemnation of jazz. Jazz, as a uniquely American musical form, was entirely rejected by Adorno, yet Jenemann fails to address why that was so and what that meant for Adorno's criticism of the American music scene and for that matter American culture more generally.

On a positive note, this is a well-researched and ambitious book which, while flawed, addresses an important and fascinating topic the intellectual migration from Europe to the United States during World War II. The documents Jenemann FOIAed will further research on how intellectual immigrants were perceived by the American government and how that changed at the dawn of the Cold War. I would not recommend this book to anyone, but the most invested Adorno scholars and intellectual historians. It is both a theoretically challenging and flawed portrayal of Adorno which must be read in the context of other works on Adorno and the Institute of Social Research.

[José · Rating 3 out of 5]

ta bien

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Theodor Adorno's criticism of the individual American's blind eye to being over stimulated by advertising and the effects - as translated positively by David Jenneman.

This is a great book on Adorno's thought if you want to get an idea of what he's about without reading too much of his own work.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it funnier that Horkheimer signed off his telegrams "Alright" or that the FBI, while investigating his potentially 'subversive' activities, gave him "Alright" as an alias?


OR, that they also knew him as 'Harkheimer'?

Too soon to tell.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read a few chapters from a professor's copy. Seems readers of Adorno need to read this in order to understand what he did for work while living in America.