Nazi victory and emigration weakened Adorno’s intellectual partners while strengthening Horkheimer’s position

Evidence

For Adorno, however, it was a question of opening up Horkheimer’s Swabian Marxism' (see p. 92 above) towards a more demanding form of materialist theory. His efforts to make Benjamin, Kracauer, Sohn-Rethel and Bloch associates either of the Institute or at least of its journal, strange as they were, did not always fail through Adorno's fault alone. They showed that his old dream lived onthe dream of making the theory which he and his theological-materialist friends represented effective in the journal and at the Institute. But the victory of the Nazis and emigration had weakened the social and journalistic position of these friends and strengthened Horkheimer's, to such an extent that Adorno tended to see troublesome behaviour by Horkheimer as part of a sometimes inscrutable strategy for the long-term benefit of the Institute, while he saw troublesome behaviour on the part of Kracauer and his other intellectual partners as pieces of stupidity. It is tremendously difficult’, he wrote to Horkheimer in a letter of January 1937, to find people with whom we can genuinely collaborate, and my attempts to do so in the last six months have brought me round more and more to accepting your view that our work can only be done off our own bat, so to speak.' A few days later he wrote: My efforts to attract advanced intellectuals are not supposed to lead to the Institute becoming a madhouse.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 658

Categorization

• XREF: This power-shift dynamic inside the Frankfurt School parallels the general pattern of how exile reshaped intellectual networks and journal influence.