Pollock’s feigned dimness deflected all financial questioning and kept staff individually isolated

Evidence

Horkheimer’s tacticand, where necessary, Lowenthal’s as wellwas to treat regulations and figures relating to financial matters as a domain belonging to Pollock, who, they would claim, was conducting himself `like a bourgeois businessman’. Pollock, for his part, used his whole personal manner, his partly pretended and partly genuine dimness and irrationality, to make anyone putting questions abandon the attempt, or else to make their enquiries run aground. He was officially in charge of determining the level of salaries, or rather of salary cuts. His measures here affected the members of the Institute on an individual basis, and they accepted their mutual isolation in these matters, only occasionally grumbling about suspected injustices. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1088