New German Critique
Commentary
On “Amorbach”
Susan H. Gillespie
Theodor W. Adorno’s nostalgic essay “Amorbach” was published in 1966. It
hovers affectionately over the author’s childhood recollections, including sev-
eral misunderstood words later revealed to mean something quite different.
(Young Adorno charmingly supposed that Anstände, hunting stands in trees,
were designed as a refuge for deer.) The essay also reveals that his first encoun-
ter with Richard Wagner’s oeuvre was through a scenery painter who invited
singers from Bayreuth to Amorbach, and that an out-of-tune guitar schooled
his ear for the dissonance he would later encounter in Arnold Schoenberg. The
writer seems to linger pleasurably over the sound of the names of relatively
unknown villages and towns, and the remembered sound of his footsteps
echoing over the cobblestones on solitary evening walks. Several of the essay’s
sixteen paragraphs, each evoking a separate subject or experience, refer to the
area’s medieval and feudal history, set in the Odenwald Mittelgebirge with its
wide vistas, wooded trails, and dark recesses.
Adorno visited Amorbach every summer as a child. The family stayed at
the Post House Inn, took long walks, and encountered the local population
in the tavern. It was an idyllic time that Theodor and Gretel later tried to
re-create on their monthlong vacations at mountain resorts, where they spent
entire days and weeks walking, eating, and relaxing.
New German Critique 127, Vol. 43, No. 1, February 2016
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-3329271 © 2016 by New German Critique, Inc.
215
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New German Critique
216 Amorbach
A delightful idyll. Yet there is an edge to it. Much of the piece’s charm
lies in the way that it suggestively evokes the harsh contradictions and realities
that, as yet, lay beyond the child’s comprehension of the world.
At the very center of the essay is a paragraph on utopia, which Adorno
experiences as an in-between place separating provincial boundaries:
Between Ottorfszell and Ernsttal ran the border between Bavaria and Baden.
It was marked by posts along the highway, which bore imposing coats of
arms and were painted in spirals in the provincial colors—the one blue and
white, the other, if my memory does not deceive me, red and yellow. Plenty
of space in between them. In it, I liked to spend time, with the excuse, which
I by no means believed, that that space belonged to neither of the two prov-
inces, was free, and I could establish my own rule there, however I wished.
This was not at all serious, but my pleasure therefore not less. Truthfully, it
could probably be ascribed to the colorful provincial insignia, whose limita-
tions I felt I had, simultaneously, also escaped. I felt something similar in
exhibitions like the “ILA,”1 in view of the innumerable flags that fluttered
harmoniously alongside each other. The feeling of the International was
innately close to me, also via the circle of people who were my parents’
guests, with names like Firino and Sidney Clifton Hall. That International
was no state of socialist unity. The promise of its eternal peace was expressed
in the celebratory ensemble of difference, as colorful as the flags and the
innocent boundary posts, which, as I remarked with astonishment, effected
no change in the landscape. The land, however, that they defined, and that I
occupied in my self-absorbed play, was a no-man’s-land. Later, in the war,
the word turned up for the destroyed space facing the two fronts. But it is a
faithful translation of the Greek term—from Aristophanes—which I under-
stood all the better, then, for the fact that I was unacquainted with it, utopia.
Utopia experienced during “self-absorbed play” (spielend mit mir selbst) sud-
denly appears in sharp contrast to world war. It is also contrasted with both the
“state of socialist unity” indicated by the East German term Einheitsstaat and
the ironically invoked “celebratory ensemble of difference” advertised by
national flags at an international trade fair. In contravention of all these
“states,” young Adorno luxuriates in the imaginative freedom of a fantasized
autarchy. The child experiences, and the adult recalls, the pleasure of ambigu-
ity, of not having to submit to or decide for either, indeed any, of the govern-
ments or adult powers that claimed authority but “effected no change in the
landscape.” In resisting the constraints and boundaries of the neighboring
1. International Air Show Berlin (Internationale Luft-Ausstellung).
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
Theodor W. Adorno 217
provinces, the landscape—we may read it as a figure for the world as experi-
enced by the happy child—persists. It also persists in memory. The second
persistence remains available even though the word Adorno uses to describe it,
“no-man’s-land,” has gained second life as the designation for the contested
terrain that separated hostile armies in “the war.” Where the free space of a
no-man’s-land between the boundary posts had been governed by childish fan-
tasy, the adult no-man’s-land in “the war” (a particular war) is subject to quite
different forces, which are unambiguously unitary, conflictual, and more
clearly defined.
Against this definition (“But . . .”), Adorno concludes the segment with
the statement that he understood the word and concept of utopia “all the better,
then, for the fact that I was unacquainted with it.” The unbound, limitless
(without, Lat. limes) freedom, which the inexperienced child knows, persists
through its translation from the Greek, but it does so not via the kind of cogni-
tion that we call understanding (Verstand). Understanding, as the text makes
clear, is the fruit of language, of the writer’s later “acquaintance” with or
knowledge (kennen) of the Greek concept of utopia. Utopia, in Adorno’s read-
ing, is experienced as prelinguistic. Yet it translates, as remembered preverbal
experience, into the present and also into (and through) language.
Elisabeth Lenk, a student of Adorno’s who spent time in Paris writing on
the surrealist movement, draws attention to Adorno’s self-description as a
“martyr for happiness.”2 The phrase stems from Adorno’s dream protocol no.
54, dated Berkeley, March 24, 1946, where it is presented as the dreamer’s last
words, barely captured on waking, in a dream that took place “in the night that
preceded the decisive quarrel [Auseinandersetzung] with Charlotte.” At the
time, Charlotte Alexander and Adorno were engaged in a love affair, of which
Adorno wrote, in a letter to a friend, that “it was as if the long-forgotten child-
hood promise of happiness had been unexpectedly, belatedly fulfilled.”3
However much the notion of Adorno as a “martyr for happiness” does
not sync with the common (though mistaken) perception of the philosopher
as the hypercritical spokesperson for the negative in negative dialectics, in
“Amorbach” we find that the very negativity of the dialectic is preserved as a
utopian vision—something that retains its value despite or perhaps because of
2. Adorno and Lenk, Briefwechsel, 18–19. The correspondence, together with new translations of
central texts on surrealism by Adorno and Walter Benjamin and other writings by Lenk and Adorno,
is now available in English (Challenge of Surrealism).
3. The dream protocol appears in Adorno, Traumprotokolle, 52. Adorno’s comment on the love
affair was made in a letter to Hermann Grab, dated October 27, 1946, and cited in Müller-Doohm,
Adorno, 303, 560n146.
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
218 Amorbach
the impossibility of ever achieving its full and permanent realization in the
adult world. This is where Adorno and the surrealists parted company. Yet
even for Adorno, utopia, to have any meaning at all, had to have been experi-
enced. There was a previous bodily experience of utopia, something noncon-
ceptual that he identified with happiness. And this nonconceptual sense trans-
lates into and across languages, even if it cannot be unambiguously or fully
expressed in them.
In Negative Dialectics, again clearly referencing Amorbach, Adorno
writes:
What metaphysical experience is, the person who disdains to see it as a copy
of supposedly religious primal experiences can most effectively imagine as
Proust did, for example as the happiness that is promised by the names of
such villages as Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Monbrunn.4 You think
that if you went there you would enter the state of fulfillment, as if it existed.
Once you really are there, the promised thing shrinks away from you, like a
rainbow. Nevertheless, you are not disappointed; you are more likely to feel
that now you are too close, and this is why you don’t see it. The difference
between the landscapes and regions that determine the image world of a
childhood is probably not all that great. What Proust discovered in Illiers is
experienced similarly, in other places, by many children from the same
social stratum. But in order for this generality, which is what is authentic in
Proust’s representation, to emerge, you must be entranced in the one place,
without a sideways glance at generality. To the child, it is self-evident that
what delights him in his favorite village is found only there and nowhere else.
He is mistaken; but his mistake creates the model of experience, of a concept
that ultimately could be that of the thing itself, not impoverishment, abstrac-
tion from the things.5
In the standard translation of this passage by E. B. Ashton, a comma is omitted
in the last sentence, so that it reads “his mistake creates the model of experi-
ence of a concept.”6 This is precisely what Adorno does not say. There is no
experience of a concept; rather, there is the “model” (Modell) of an experience,
which turns out to be common to both the experience itself and the later con-
cept, and which endows the experience and the concept with reciprocal trans-
latability.
4. The four villages are all located near Amorbach.
5. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 366. The passage, which in the Suhrkamp edition of the Gesam-
melte Schriften is titled “Happiness and Waiting in Vain” (“Glück und vergebliches Warten”), is the
fourth chapter, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” of part 3, “Models.” My translation.
6. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 373.
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Theodor W. Adorno 219
The idea of a “model of experience, of a concept that ultimately could
be . . . not . . . abstraction from the things” precisely pinpoints the paradox,
indeed aporia, buried at the center of Adorno’s charming little “Amorbach”
essay and elaborated in Negative Dialectics. The aporia concerns the transla-
tion of lived experience into thought, in a way that—and this is essential—
always leaves a remainder. The equation is never quite solvable; there is always
something left over. In effect, all translation generates a remainder. Indeed, it
lives from this remainder. In a sense, one can even say that translation, in con-
veying an experience (whether of life or the life of a text) into new language,
creates the remainder, as a remainder. In doing so, it points or lures us beyond
the actual experience or the original text. This necessary and crucial remain-
der, the scarcely graspable something that is lost and gained in every transla-
tion, is why we need translation at all, and why the translation of experience
into thought, and back again, is so poorly served by most discussions of the
limits of translatability.
In the closing sentences of Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes about the
object of critique as the relation between need (Bedürfnis, Not) and thinking
(Denken). Although the focus of this passage is on need, which is the antipode
of the happiness and freedom evoked in the Amorbach essay, Adorno’s figure
of thought is quite similar. Again, it oscillates between a fundamentally emo-
tional lived experience, on the one hand, and conceptual, abstract, or general-
izing thought, on the other.
[Need] demands its negation by thinking, must disappear in thinking if it is
to satisfy itself in a real way. It persists in this negation, represents, in the
innermost cell of the thought, what is dissimilar to it. The smallest immanent
characteristics would have relevance for the absolute, for the micrological
gaze destroys the shells of everything that, in proportion to the scale of the
subsuming general concept, is helplessly individualized. This gaze explodes
the identity of the individual thing, the deception that views it as a mere
exemplar. Thinking of this kind is in solidarity with metaphysics at the
instant of its overthrow.7
Utopia is all around us, if we only look closely—and if we are lucky enough to
have experienced true happiness at least once, perhaps in love, for a time, or in
imagination, for example of the image world of a solitary, self-absorbed child
playing in the road.
7. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 400. My translation.
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New German Critique
220 Amorbach
Amorbach
Theodor W. Adorno
Cloudman [Wolkmann]: a mountain that is the image of its name, a friendly
left-behind giant.8 Now it rests, stretching out long and broad above the town,
which it greets from the clouds.—Gotthard: the smallest peak in the surround-
ing area bears the name of the most powerful Central Alpine massif, as if it
wanted, gently, to accustom the child to consorting with mountains. Nothing
in the world could have persuaded the child that there existed no secret under-
ground passage from a cave in the ruined monastery of St. Gotthard to the
abbey at Amorbach.
Until the Napoleonic secularization, that structure had been a Benedic-
tine abbey, low-slung, unusually long, with green shutters, gently hugging the
abbey church. Apart from the entrances, it lacks any energetic markers. Nev-
ertheless, I learned from it, for the first time, what architecture is. To this day I
do not know whether the impression is simply due to the fact that it was the
abbey building that awakened me to the essence of style, or whether, in its
proportions, with their renunciation of every éclat, something is expressed that
later buildings lost. The view that it was evidently designed to exploit, a spot in
the lakeside garden, artfully concealed behind a copse of trees at the edge of
the carp-filled, congenial-smelling pond, reveals a small, visually concise seg-
ment of the abbey. Even now, the beauty whose ground I vainly seek when I
stand before the whole reemerges in this part.
On the main street, around the corner from the beloved Post House Inn,
there was an open smithy with a harshly flaming fire. Every morning I was
awakened very early by the thudding blows. I was never angry with them on
this account. They brought me the echo of things long gone. At least until the
mid-1920s, when there were already gasoline stations, the smithy remained in
existence. In Amorbach, the ancestral world of Siegfried, who by one account
is said to have been slain at the Zittenfeld Spring, deep in the forest valley,
intruded into the imaginary world of the child. The Heune Pillars below Main-
bullau are said—at least this is what I was told at the time—to date back to the
8. The original German essay appears in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 10.1:301–9. All foot-
notes are the translator’s.
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New German Critique
Theodor W. Adorno 221
barbarian invasions, named for the Huns. That would be more beautiful than
if they came from an earlier, nameless time.
The ferry across the Main River, which you have to take if you want to
go up to the Engelberg Monastery, has its specific expression in the fact that
the archaic vehicle bears no trace of intentional preservation such as character-
izes native costume societies and historical monuments. No more sober,
straightforward way to get to the other side than the vehicle from which Hagen
threw the chaplain into the Danube—the only one of the Nibelungs’ company
to be saved. The beauty of functionality has a retrospective force. The sounds
of the ferry over the water, which one silently strains to hear, are so eloquent
because they were no different thousands of years ago.
In fact, I came in contact with the sphere of Richard Wagner in Amor-
bach. The painter Max Rossmann had his studio there, attached to the abbey;
we were often his guests in the afternoon, for coffee on the terrace. Rossmann
had made decorations for Bayreuth. The actual rediscoverer of Amorbach, he
brought singers from the Festspiel ensemble there. Something of the opulent
lifestyle, with caviar and champagne, spilled over onto the Post House Inn,
whose kitchen and cellars surpassed what might have been expected from a
country inn. There is one singer I remember quite specifically. Although I can-
not have been more than ten years old, he enjoyed engaging in conversation
with me after noticing my passionate interest in music and theater. Undeterred,
he regaled the little fellow with his triumphs, including the role of Amfortas; he
pronounced the first syllable in a peculiarly elongated manner, he must perhaps
have been a Dutchman. At one and the same instant, I felt myself accepted into
the world of adults and into the world I dreamed of, not yet suspecting how
irreconcilable the two are. Those days are the source of the fact that I experi-
ence the Meistersinger measures “The bird that sang today had a finely formed
beak,”9 Rossman’s favorite passage, as Amorbach. The town is only eighty kilo-
meters from Frankfurt, but in the region of Franconia.—A picture by Ross-
mann, “The Mill at Konfort,” unfinished and in marked decay, captivated me.
My mother gave it to me as a present before I left Germany. It accompanied me
to America and back. I met Rossmann’s son again in Amorbach.
When, as a teenager, I went roaming through Amorbach in the late eve-
ning, I would hear my own footsteps echoing back to me on the cobblestones.
I did not recognize this sound again until, in 1949, returning from American
emigration, I walked through nighttime Paris at two in the morning, from the
Quai Voltaire to my hotel. The difference between Amorbach and Paris is less
9. “Dem Vogel, der da sang, dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen.”
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New German Critique
222 Amorbach
than that between Paris and New York. But the Amorbach twilight, when, as a
small child sitting on a bench halfway up the flanks of the Cloudman, I thought
I saw how, simultaneously in all the houses, the newly introduced electric light
flashed up, foreshadowed the shock that would later assail the émigré in
America. My little town had cared for me so well that it prepared me even for
its complete opposite.
When you arrive in America, all cities and towns look the same. Stan-
dardization, the product of technology and monopoly, breeds anxiety. You feel
that qualitative differences have disappeared from life in a manner that is as
real as the way it is erased, methodologically, by progressive rationality. If,
then, you find yourself back in Europe, the cities and towns here, each of which
in childhood seemed incomparable, also suddenly resemble each other; whether
through the contrast with America, which bulldozes everything else beneath it,
or perhaps rather because what once was style already possessed something of
the normalizing force that one innocently ascribes, first of all, to industry, espe-
cially the culture industry. Even Amorbach, Miltenberg, and Wertheim are not
excepted, if only, perhaps, as a consequence of the underlying tint of red sand-
stone, the geological formation of the area, which is communicated to the
houses. Nevertheless, it is only at a particular place that the experience of hap-
piness can be had, of something that is not exchangeable, even if it later proves
to be less than unique. Unjustly and justly, Amorbach, for me, remains the
archetype of all small towns, the others nothing but its imitation.
Between Ottorfszell and Ernsttal ran the border between Bavaria and
Baden. It was marked by posts along the highway, which bore imposing coats
of arms and were painted in spirals in the provincial colors—the one blue and
white, the other, if my memory does not deceive me, red and yellow. Plenty of
space in between them. In it, I liked to spend time, with the excuse, which I by
no means believed, that that space belonged to neither of the two provinces,
was free, and I could establish my own rule there, however I wished. This was
not at all serious, but my pleasure therefore not less. Truthfully, it could prob-
ably be ascribed to the colorful provincial insignia, whose limitations I felt I
had, simultaneously, also escaped. I felt something similar in exhibitions like
the “ILA,”10 in view of the innumerable flags that fluttered harmoniously
alongside each other. The feeling of the International was innately close to me,
also via the circle of people who were my parents’ guests, with names like
Firino and Sidney Clifton Hall. That International was no state of socialist
unity. The promise of its eternal peace was expressed in the celebratory ensem-
10. International Air Show Berlin (Internationale Luft-Ausstellung).
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
Theodor W. Adorno 223
ble of difference, as colorful as the flags and the innocent boundary posts,
which, as I remarked with astonishment, effected no change in the landscape.
The land, however, that they defined, and that I occupied in my self-absorbed
play, was a no-man’s-land. Later, in the war, the word turned up for the
destroyed space facing the two fronts. But it is a faithful translation of the
Greek term—from Aristophanes—which I understood all the better, then, for
the fact that I was unacquainted with it, utopia.
Better than traveling to Miltenberg on the narrow-gauge railroad, which
also had its merits, was to walk there from Amorbach over a long mountain
path. It leads through Reuenthal, a gentle village in a valley skirting Gotthard,
said to be the home of Neidhart,11 and through still lonesome Monbrunn, in
wide arcs through the forest, which seems to grow denser. In its depths are
hidden all kinds of ruined walls, finally a gate, which on account of the chill of
the wooded site is called Chatterhole. If you stride through it, you suddenly, as
abruptly as in dreams, find yourself on the loveliest of medieval marketplaces.
In the spring of 1926, Hermann Grab and I sat in the park of Löwenstein
Castle, near Klein-Heubach. My friend was then under the influence of Max
Scheler and spoke enthusiastically about feudalism, which had been capable of
bringing the castle and its surrounding properties into such harmony. At that
very moment a guard appeared, who shooed us away roughly: “The benches
are reserved for their princely lordships.”
As a schoolboy, I imagined behind the words “moral” and “chaste”
something especially indecent, probably because they were usually used for
such incidents as sex crimes, less in praise than when someone had committed
one. In any case, they had, even as its opposite, something to do with the for-
bidden sphere. Amorbach contributed a powerful association to the misunder-
standing. The bearded and dignified head palace gardener was named Chaste.
He had a daughter who appeared repellently ugly to me; but word got out that
he had molested her. As at the opera, the intervention of the kind-hearted
prince was required to put the scandal to rest. I was already quite grown up
when I discovered the truth behind my error, that “chaste” and “moral” were
indecent concepts.
Next to the small upright piano with the Mozart medallion, in the guest
room of the Post House Inn there hung a guitar. It lacked one or two strings;
the others were very out of tune. I couldn’t play the guitar, but with a single
motion strummed all the strings simultaneously and made them vibrate, intox-
icated by the dark dissonance, probably the first in my experience to be so
11. A twelfth-century lyric poet.
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224 Amorbach
multitoned, years before I knew a single note by Schoenberg. I felt the wish:
This is how one should compose, the way this guitar sounds. Later, when I
read Trackl’s verse “Sorrowful guitars tinkle on,”12 I heard no other than the
damaged one in Amorbach.
Not infrequently the Post House Inn was entered, at eleven in the morn-
ing, by a man—half peasant, half peddler—from Hambrunn, one of those
nearby Oldenwald villages that people had built on the level heights. Herkert,
as he drank his pint, with his little beard and unkempt clothing, seemed to me
to have been cast up on our shores from the peasant war I had read about in
descriptions of the life of Gottfried of Berlichingen, in a little Reclam paper-
back I had gotten from an automat at the bookstore in the Miltenberg railway
station: Miltenberg Is Burning. The many people and objects that, in the
region, still persisted from the sixteenth century never led me to think how
long ago all that was; spatial proximity became temporal proximity. But in his
shoulder bag Herkert had fresh nuts in their green outer shells. They were
bought and shelled for me. Their taste lasted a lifetime, as if the rebellious
peasants of 1525 had bequeathed them to me out of sympathy, or to diminish
my fear in confronting the dangerous shoals of time.
On Rossmann’s terrace, one afternoon, I heard wild, raucous singing
coming from the square in front of the palace mill. I caught sight of three or
four very young fellows in unseemly clothing; it was meant to be artistic. It was
explained to me that these were Wandervögel—literally migratory birds—
without my being able to form a proper image of what that meant.13 More than
the awful folksongs with, moreover, out-of-tune accompaniment on their gui-
tars, I was frightened by the sight. I by no means failed to remark that these
were not poor people like the ones who used to spend the night on the garden
benches along the Main River, but, in terms a child might use, “better people.”
It was not necessity, but some purpose I couldn’t comprehend that was respon-
sible for their presence. It filled me with the fear that I might do the same and
one day be forced to stamp noisily and vulnerably through the woods: the threat
of becoming declassed in the youth movement, long before, in it, the declassed
burghers organized themselves and set off on a great journey.
If you were to read it in a novel, it would be unendurable, like something
by writers who warm up old anecdotes as time-honored humor. But I heard it
12. Traurige Gitarren rinnen.
13. The term Wandervögel was applied to diverse youth movements that emerged in Germany
after 1890, in which young people expressed their opposition to bourgeois society by hiking, singing,
and generally going back to nature. The groups were outlawed by the National Socialists and
reemerged after World War II.
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
Theodor W. Adorno 225
firsthand; a piece of anachronistic inheritance that I received from Amorbach.
When the property’s rent officer [Rentamtman] joined his regulars’ table, his
wife used to accompany him, surely against his wishes. As soon as he had had
one too many and started carrying on in a way that was too lively for her taste,
she would rebuke him with the words: Siebenlist, control yourself!—Equally
well-attested, although more appropriately assigned to the sphere of joke
books ca. 1910, is an event from Ernsttal, a property of the Leiningen family.
There, a respectable person, the spouse of the railroad president Stapf,
appeared in a bright red summer dress. The tame boar of Ernsttal forgot its
tameness, took the loudly shrieking lady on its back, and dashed off. If I had
an emblem, it would be that beast.
Feeding of the wild boars near Breitenbach, utterly alone in the Oden-
wald heights, not far from the Hainhaus with its stone seats of the Vehm tribu-
nal [Vehmgericht], which, I had no doubt, was the very same one that con-
victed Adelheid von Weislingen, one of my first lovers from books.14 I thought,
until a few years ago, that the wild boars, many hundreds of them, were fed for
their own sake. Thus, as a child, I had imagined, in the tree stands that I was
shown in the woods of Amorbach, an arrangement designed to assist the deer,
which, when hunted too hard or suffering from the cold, would climb up the
ladders and find protection and refuge. In keeping with the German word
Anstand, which also means “propriety,” this would be only proper toward the
deer. As I was forced to learn that those airy huts are for hunters, who lie in
wait in the stands in order to shoot the deer, an informed person explained to
me that the feeding of boars in Breitenbach did not take place on behalf of the
peaceful swine, and not even just to protect the fields from ostensible devasta-
tion, but preventively, to keep the hunters’ prey alive until the latter passed
before their muskets. This sort of menacing rationality, meanwhile, did not
deter the powerful tusker who reared up out of the ferns and came toward us,
as un-gemütlich as, once upon a time, the scent of the wild boars in the forests
of Preunschen and Mörschenhardt, until we noticed that he, having evidently
arrived from more distant parts only after the general feeding, was expecting
an individual one from us. He bestowed signs of thanks on us in advance, and
trotted off disappointedly when we had nothing for him.—Inscription on the
fence: “Cleanliness and order are requested.” Imposed by whom, on whom?
Translated by Susan H. Gillespie
14. A figure from Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen, Adelheid is convicted of adultery and
murder by a Femegericht (also spelled Vehmgericht or Vehmegericht). These were medieval tribunals
that acted in secrecy and carried out harsh sentences.
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
226 Amorbach
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Rout-
ledge; New York: Seabury.
———. 1997. Negative Dialektik, Vol. 6 of Gesammelte Werke, edited by Rolf Tiedemann,
with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schutz. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
———. 2005. Traumprotokolle, edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Elisabeth Lenk. 2001. Briefwechsel, 1962–1969, edited by Elis-
abeth Lenk. Munich: text + kritik.
———. 2015. The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno
and Elisabeth Lenk, edited and translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity.
Published by Duke University Press
