Adorno’s Kierkegaard Habilitation succeeded where Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book had failed.

Evidence

Tillich’s arrival was the opportunity for Adorno to bring the theologically inspired materialism of his friends to bear, not just on music, but on philosophy as well, and to make the academic world accessible to it. At the beginning of 1931 Adorno took his Habilitation with Tillichup to this point he was, de facto, Tillich’s research assistantwith a thesis on The Construction of the Aesthetic in Kierkegaard'. It was published in book form in 1933, with extensive revisions, as Kierkegaard: the Construction of the Aesthetic, and dedicated to my friend, Siegfried Kracauer’. Whereas Benjamin had failed, in the mid-1920s, with his book on the Trauerspiel, which was examined by Franz Schultz, a professor of German, and by the philosophers Cornelius and Horkheimer, Adorno was highly successful with his thesis, which was examined by Tillich, a theologian and philosopher, and by Horkheimer, now a social philosopher. The book owed as much to Benjamin as to Kracauer; Adorno himself said of it that it stood in a sense between Lukács and Benjamin, and attempted to use the one to correct the other. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s failed Habilitation connects back to the earlier note that personality, not rank, decided Horkheimer’s directorship. — connects to: Adorno’s Kierkegaard book failed partly because it was overshadowed by Hitler’s seizure of power — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 257
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 370

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s Kierkegaard book failed partly because it was overshadowed by Hitler’s seizure of power #contradicts (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 257