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== Career Within the Frankfurt School == |
== Career Within the Frankfurt School == |
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===Stenography=== |
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==== ''Dialectic of Enlightenment''==== |
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Gretel Adorno assisted her husband Adorno and his intellectual partner [[Max Horkheimer]] in developing the manuscript for [[Dialectic of Enlightenment]]. Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged her in the foreword to that work: "In the extension of our theory and the accompanying mutual experiences Gretel Adorno has been a precious helper." <ref name= "Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer">Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. ''Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.'' Trans. John Cumming. London & New York: UP, 2010. </ref>{{rp|x}} |
Gretel Adorno assisted her husband Adorno and his intellectual partner [[Max Horkheimer]] in developing the manuscript for [[Dialectic of Enlightenment]]. Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged her in the foreword to that work: "In the extension of our theory and the accompanying mutual experiences Gretel Adorno has been a precious helper." <ref name= "Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer">Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. ''Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.'' Trans. John Cumming. London & New York: UP, 2010. </ref>{{rp|x}} |
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==== ''Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis'' ==== |
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Reissued by [[Verso]] in 2011 as ''Towards a New Manifesto'', this work was a series of recorded improvised conversations in 1956 between Adorno and Horkheimer, which was to be a contemporary version of [[Karl Marx]] and [[Freidrich Engels]]'s ''The Communist Manifesto''. Gretel remarkably was able to take down what Martin Jay describes as a "highly abstract conversation developing at breakneck speed". |
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===Secretarial Work for Adorno=== |
===Secretarial Work for Adorno=== |
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Gretel Adorno née Karplus
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|---|---|
| Born | 10 June 1902 |
| Died | 16 July 1993 |
| Spouse | Theodor W. Adorno (m. 1937-1969) |
Main interests | Frankfurt School, critical theory, philosophy |
Gretel Adorno (born Margarete Karplus in Berlin 10 June 1902; died 16 July 1993 in Frankfurt) was a German chemist and intellectual figure within the Frankfurt Schoolofcritical theory. She was married to the philosopher, sociologist, composer, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (m. 1937–1969), who was one of the founding members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt) which became the home of the Frankfurt School.
Gretel Karplus was the granddaughter of the Viennese industrialist Gottlieb Karplus, and the daughter of Joseph and Amalie Karplus. She had one sister, Liselotte; they would both go on to receive doctorates. The Karplus' childhood home was situated in Prinzenallee, near the Tiergarten in Berlin.[1]: 55
She obtained her doctoral degree in Chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, which she attended between 1921-1925, after the successful completion of her dissertation entitled "On the Influence of Calcium-hydrate on Cetane" on August 4, 1925, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Wilhelm Schlenk. [2]: 58 She was just 23 at the time she received her promotion to Doctor of Philosophy. She also completed doctoral coursework in two additional minors, Physics and Philsophy, with cum laude across all three subjects.
The Adornos wed in 1937, after more than fourteen years of courtship. That courtship was for a significant amount of time conducted over long-distance; Karplus confided in their close mutual friend, Walter Benjamin, that this separation was the cause of much long-term emotional strain upon her.[3]
Adorno had at least two affairs with other women during more than forty years of marriage to Gretel, including a long-term affair with Charlotte Alexander during their years in Los Angeles,[1] as well as an encounter with a woman known as "Carol" which is detailed in a diary entry. [4] Not only did he write about these affairs as well as his sexual fantasies about other women in his dream notes, diary, and in letters to his mother; Gretel Adorno herself was involved in typing out various documents of this nature.[4] Some feminist critics have cast aspersions on Adorno's writings and thoughts about gender due to his interactions with women and his relationship with Gretel.
In her university days Berlin and prior to meeting Adorno, Gretel Adorno was already acquainted with many influential German intellectuals of the twenties, including Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht.
Notably, she was close friends with the German Jewish philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, whom she introduced to her then suitor, Theodor Adorno, in 1923, who at that time was a university student at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Karplus' only sibling, Liselotte, became the second wife of Benjamin's cousin, Egon Wissing. [1]: 55
The letters between Gretel Adorno and Benjamin suggest that their friendship was not only personal, but also professional. She often assisted him by critiquing drafts of his work, including his large project, Passagenarbeit (The Arcades Project). This work had led to professional tensions between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, due to the former's concerns over Bertolt Brecht's increasing influence over Benjamin's thinking, which Adorno believed betrayed his waning commitment to negative theology. Gretel Adorno wrote personally to Benjamin in 1934 regarding her "great reservations" towards Brecht's "often palpable lack of clarity," advising Benjamin to be cautious in that intellectual friendship. [3] After Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, Gretel and Theodor Adorno worked to secure the publication of his works with Suhrkamp Verlag.[5]
After obtaining her doctorate, Karplus became the junior partner managing a leather factory in Berlin.
Gretel Adorno assisted her husband Adorno and his intellectual partner Max Horkheimer in developing the manuscript for Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged her in the foreword to that work: "In the extension of our theory and the accompanying mutual experiences Gretel Adorno has been a precious helper." [6]: x
Reissued by Verso in 2011 as Towards a New Manifesto, this work was a series of recorded improvised conversations in 1956 between Adorno and Horkheimer, which was to be a contemporary version of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Gretel remarkably was able to take down what Martin Jay describes as a "highly abstract conversation developing at breakneck speed".
Her assistance in recording and editing the verbal and written drafts of Dialectic of Enlightenment was neither the first nor the last time she worked alongside Adorno and Horkheimer in their intellectual activities. From 1937, the year that Gretel married Adorno, she assisted on almost all initial drafts of Adorno's works, which were dictated to her and taken down in shorthand.[7]: 160
Gretel was involved in all of her husband's intellectual endeavours. Whilst they in the United States during World War II, Adorno for the most part refused to write in English, which meant that Gretel was required to translate his works into English.[8]: 117
When Theodor Adorno died suddenly in 1969 without having finalised the manuscript of Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Adorno's former student Rolf Tiedemann took up the task of bringing that document to completion and publication. They discuss in the Editor's Afterword how『Adorno’s metaphor for works of art applies literally to the last philosophical text on which he worked: ‘The fragment is the intrusion of death into the work. While destroying it, it removes the stain of semblance.’ The text of Aesthetic Theory, as it was in August 1969, which the editors present here as faithfully as possible, is the text of a work in progress; this is not the form in which Adorno would have published this book. Several days before his death he wrote in a letter than the final version ‘still needed a desperate effort’ but that ‘basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of the substance of the book.’ Of this substance, according to Adorno, ‘essentially everything is, as one says, all there.'』[9]
For much of her life, Gretel Adorno suffered from acute chronic health issues that doctors were unable to accurately diagnose; they are frequently mentioned in both her letters to Benjamin, and Adorno's letters to his parents.[10] These issues often left her immobilised for days and at times weeks on end.
