Adorno felt shame at surviving while others suffered and pursued an ethic of unobtrusiveness

Evidence

Adorno saw the only responsible course' in this situation as being to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’. The responsible course lay, equally, in an attempt to find a method of presentation which would express one’s own entanglement `in this speed, crowding, density and still, on the other hand, contingency’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1693

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘lived experience’ strand of early critical theory and to Primo Levi/Survivor guilt literature. — connects to: Adorno felt Europe’s survival amid postwar ruin kindled hope in humane persistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1730; Even a prestigious Frankfurt chair left Adorno feeling stigmatized and dependent — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2000
• DEEPTHINKING: The phrase ‘the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’ condenses the survivor’s predicament into an ethic — unusually dense for a memoir-historical source.