Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany expecting greater practical impact.

Evidence

“It is amazing,” he wrote Lowenthal in February, “how deep and lasting an experience [of the Institut] was created in the minds of many European intellectuals up to 1933. This experience has not been discredited through the period of the Third Reich. It is now our duty to corroborate and deepen it in the future.” … Horkheimer’s lecturing virtuosity - Everett Hughes, who was a visiting professor in Frankfurt during those years, remembers him as the finest German speaker he had ever heard 8 - and his personal warmth in seminars quickly won him a sizable student following. Once established, Horkheimer and those who went with him never regretted having chosen the path of resettlement so few other emigres were to follow. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 848 (#expands, via linked claim)

The decision to return to Germany was hardly motivated by simple subjective needs, by homesickness, as little as I can deny that. There was also an objective reason. That is language. Not merely because one can never express as exactly in a new language what one means, with all the nuances and the rhythms of the train of thought, as in one’s own. Rather, the German language has a special elective affinity JWahlverwandischaftJ to philosophy, and, to be sure, to its speculative moment.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 851 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer returned to Germany because German is uniquely suited to speculative philosophy — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 851; German students’ warm reception confirmed the Institute’s decision to return — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 848; Horkheimer’s logic implied the USA carried a greater fascist potential than Germany. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1546

Broader Connections

• German students’ warm reception confirmed the Institute’s decision to return #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 848
• Horkheimer returned to Germany because German is uniquely suited to speculative philosophy #qualifies (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 851