FWD: Theodor L. W. Adorno, born September 11th, 1903

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno 
lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the 
last 
two. He was the only son of a wealthy wine merchant of assimilated Jewish 
background and an accomplished musician of Italian Catholic descent. 
Adorno studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and music 
composition with Alban Berg. He completed his Habilitationsschrift on 
Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian 
socialist Paul Tillich. After just two years as a university instructor 
(Privatdozent), he was expelled by the Nazis, along with other professors 
of Jewish heritage or on the political left. A few years later he turned his 
father's Jewish surname into a middle initial and adopted "Adorno," the 
maternal surname by which he is best known. 
Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he resided 
in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several 
books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of 
Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of Modern Music, 
The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima 
Moralia. From these years come his provocative critiques of popular culture 
and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a 
position 
in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a 
leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social 
Research. Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 
1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930. It 
provided the hub to what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School. 
Adorno became the Institute's director in 1958. From the 1950s stem In 
Search of Wagner, Adorno's ideology-critique of the Nazi's favorite 
composer; Prisms, a collection of social and cultural studies; Against 
Epistemology, an anti-foundationalist critique of Husserlian phenomenology; 
and the first volume of Notes to Literature, a collection of essays in 
literary 
criticism. 
Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno's life. A 
leading figure in the "positivism dispute" in German sociology, Adorno was a 
key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning 

rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These 
controversies 
did not prevent him from publishing numerous volumes of music criticism, 
two more volumes of Notes to Literature, books on Hegel and on 
existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology and in aesthetics. 
Negative Dialectics, Adorno's magnum opus on epistemology and 
metaphysics, appeared in 1966. Aesthetic Theory, the other magnum opus 
on which he had worked throughout the 1960s, appeared posthumously in 
1970. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack on August 6, 1969, one 
month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday. 
</ZITAT>

aus:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/



kwp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030909/da2d9027/attachment.html>