Adorno wrote an approvingly accommodating review of a National Socialist choral work in 1933-34

Evidence

Adorno wrote this in Oxford. In April 1933 he had cancelled his university courses in Germany for the approaching summer semester, on the grounds that he wanted to complete an extended academic project'. In July the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy informed him that, following a ministerial decree, those who had taken sabbatical leave during the summer semester, or had not made use of their authorization to teach, would not be included in the lecture list for the winter semester either.’ In September the ministry withdrew his authorization to teach. Convinced that the whole charade would soon be over, Adorno was hoping for a post as music critic with the liberal newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung, in Berlin. But the paper was closed down in April 1934. Adorno still believed in the possibility of hibernating through everything that was going on, and in one of his music reviews, which were published increasingly rarely, he produced an example of political opportunism. He wrote a review of Herbert Muntzel’s The Banner of the Persecuted: A Cycle for Male Choir after the Volume of Poems of the Same Title by Baldur von Schirach which was published in the respected music journal Die Musik. At that point the journal had not yet been fully forced into line. Adorno emphasizedapprovinglythe fact that this cycle was marked out as consciously National Socialist by its choice of Schirach's poems' and that it called for the image of a new Romanticism’, `perhaps of the type which Goebbels has defined as “Romantic Realism”’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 634

Categorization

• SHARE: The ugliness of Adorno the arch-critic of authoritarianism praising a work set to Baldur von Schirach’s poems, and later claiming it involved ‘no concessions’, would fascinate anyone into intellectual biography.
• QUESTION: Whether this review was pure survival strategy, career calculation, or genuinely ambiguous aesthetic judgment is worth chasing in Adorno scholarship.