Adorno judged postwar European intellectual culture inferior to America’s for critical analysis.

Evidence

Adorno now saw clearly some negative aspects which he had overlooked or suppressed in his initial enthusiasm. He recognized above all the illusory quality attaching not only to German democracy and German politics, but to everything in Germany, and not only Germany but the whole of Europe, since it was no longer politically independent. He sensed in Germany what he and Horkheimer had diagnosed since the end of the war: the conflict between two total tickets, from which there is no longer any escape'. Expressing himself more vehemently than in his article A Resurrection of Culture in Germany?’, published in May 1950 in the Frankfurter Hefte, Adorno told Horkheimer that the students’ intellectual passion, which was so attractive, also had a certain quality of substitute gratification, of Talmud school. The seductive intellectual climate disguised the fact that people were responding more to the novelty Horkheimer and Adorno were offering than to the real intentions lying behind it. Apart from security, which is so immensely important for our productiveness', Germany had little to offer. Thinking here has simply remained far behind ours, and has not been through the critique of ontology. And what you once declared is truethat over there [the USA] is a better place to analyse society than here in this colony.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1742

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘two total tickets’ language echoes the critique of administered society developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which earlier chapters traced. — connects to: Adorno paradoxically hoped more for post-Hitler Germany than for the USA — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1645; Adorno’s outsider status in America sharpened rather than disabled his critical output — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 594; European intellectuals saw postwar Germany as preferable to America for intellectual life

Broader Connections

• European intellectuals saw postwar Germany as preferable to America for intellectual life #contradicts (0.82)
• Adorno’s outsider status in America sharpened rather than disabled his critical output #contradicts (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 594