Habilitation politics shaped early Frankfurt School career trajectories.

Evidence

Cornelius did not accept the thesis. After he had read the first two-thirds of it, it was clear to him that it hardly went beyond a simple repetition of what he knows from my own lectures and books, although it is embellished with a great many words'. Adorno withdrew his request’ for a Habilitation, mainly irritated by Horkheimer, whom he suspected of not having done enough for his thesis because it was not Marxist enough for him. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 332