Pollock’s pragmatic loyalty and personality complementarity enabled Horkheimer’s and the Institut’s work

Evidence

Horkheimer’s relationship to Pollock was one of the cornerstones of the Institut, and it merits some comment here. An insight into it can be gleaned from a passage in Ludwig Marcuse’s autobiography. Marcuse, no relation to Herbert, was the drama critic for a Frankfurt newspaper in the mid-twenties when Cornelius brought his two young proteges to his office. They were “an attractive man, Max Horkheimer, overflowing with warmth, and his reserved, externally austere friend, Fritz Pollock; but one also saw in him a little of what was being guarded behind the reserve.” 9 Among the qualities in Pollock to which Marcuse might have alluded was a self-effacing, unquestioning loyalty to Horkheimer, which marked their friendship for the sixty or so years of its duration until Pollock’s death in the winter of 1970. With only brief interruptions, the two remained in close proximity for all of their adult lives. Pollock took the role of the pragmatic, prudent realist, often arranging the mundane details of their lives to allow Horkheimer the maximum time for his scholarly pursuits. As a child Horkheimer was highly protected, and during his mature years Pollock often served as buffer between him and a harsh world. Horkheimer, so one observer recalled, was often moody and temperamental. Pollock, in contrast, was steady, even obsessive. The complementarity of their personalities was one of the sources of the Institut’s success. That Pollock’s own scholarly career suffered to some extent was a price he seemed willing to pay. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the human-anchor picture of the Institute after earlier chapters on funding and institutional continuity — connects to the later details in Ch. 4 (this volume) about Pollock managing Institute finances/exile arrangements. — connects to: Complementary personalities of Horkheimer and Pollock underpinned the Institut’s success — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 99

Broader Connections

• Complementary personalities of Horkheimer and Pollock underpinned the Institut’s success #corroborates (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 99