Adorno called police on students who only wanted a discussion room

Evidence

On 31 January 1969 Adorno saw several dozen students from the window of his corner office at the Institute walking round the corner at speed and disappearing into the Institute building. He at once concluded that they intended to occupy it. The students had gone to the Sociology Department, now under `modified reoccupation’, and found it shut, so they had been looking for a room in which to hold a discussion at the Institute, without any further aims whatsoever. After Friedeburg had in vain requested the seventy-six students to leave the building, he and Adorno (who, together with the statistician Rudolf Gunzert, formed the Institute’s board) summoned the police. The police arrested and removed all seventy-six, but released all of them except Krahl the same day. Krahl was charged with breaking and entering. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2667

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the larger 1968 student movement history and Adorno’s fraught relation with protest — relates to the general narrative of the Frankfurt School’s institutional decline.