Horkheimer framed the exiled Institute as the sole guardians of advanced German theory

Evidence

Then Horkheimer appealed to Adorno’s desire to belong to a small circle with a sense of mission: Unless you have greatly changed, you are still one of the very few people from whom the Institute, and the special theoretical tasks which it is trying to undertake, can expect anything intellectually. The numbers of these people and the amount of sympathy on which they are able to count at the moment are dwindling. But for the same reasons, and to the same extent, that they are dwindling, the duty to hold on and to develop one’s own position further becomes greater. We are the only group whose existence does not depend on gradual assimilation, the only group which can maintain the relatively advanced state of theory which has been achieved in Germany and advance it even further. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 637

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the Institute’s founding self-understanding: exile as intensifying a duty to preserve a distinct theoretical position rather than assimilate.
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage crystallizes how marginalization converted into an identity of non-assimilation — the group’s theoretical purity becomes literally contingent on its dwindling numbers. This is a dense tension worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Exile concentrated both Horkheimer’s personal power and the Institute’s appeal. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 589