Adorno’s first Frankfurt professorship was created explicitly as restitution for Nazi injustice

Evidence

While Adorno was still in the USA, the Minister for Culture in the state of Hesse received a letter from the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy applying, on Adorno’s behalf, to have a chair established for a tenured extraordinary' professor. The faculty is making this application in consideration of the fact that such a chair can be established purely for reasons of restitution and compensation, while the chair can lapse should Professor Adorno leave this university, so that plans … to establish other chairs will not be affected.’ At the end of September, the minister appointed Adorno to the Extraordinary Chair of Philosophy and Sociology' in Frankfurt University's Faculty of Philosophy. The chair became known as the Compensation Chair’ (Wiedergutmachungslehrstuhl), even in official usagea term that lent itself to defamation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1996

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Wiedergutmachungslehrstuhl shows how even a victim’s own academic position became a stigmatizing social marker — an institutional analogue of the coded social signaling in the immodesty/complaints article, where a visible mark of identity is read by others as a target.
• XREF: Connects to broader literature on how post-war West German institutions were shaped by Allied-imposed restitution — and to the theme of compensation-as-stigma in German memory politics (e.g. work by Norbert Frei on dealing with the Nazi past). — connects to: Frankfurt’s mayor framed Horkheimer’s rectorship as restitution for Nazi-era wrongs — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1909; Even a prestigious Frankfurt chair left Adorno feeling stigmatized and dependent — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2000

Broader Connections

• Even a prestigious Frankfurt chair left Adorno feeling stigmatized and dependent #qualifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2000