Kafka studies

Kafka Studies, the Culture Industry, and the Concept of Shame:Improper Remarks between Moral Philosophy and Philosophyof HistoryTiedemann, Rolf.Krapp, Peter.

Cultural Critique, 60, Spring 2005, pp. 245-258 (Article)

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Cultural Critique 60Spring 2005Copyright 2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota

KAFKA STUDIES, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY,AND THE CONCEPT OF SHAME: IMPROPERREMARKS BETWEEN MORAL PHILOSOPHYAND PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORYTRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY PETER KRAPP

Rolf Tiedemann

In memory of J. Hellmut Freund

Shame, shame, shamethat is human history!

Nietzsche

The case of Max Brod versus Franz Kafka has been closed for agood while, and the verdict passed in the late twenties of the pastcentury is only vaguely remembered: a kind of acquittal on thegrounds of a guilty verdict. A mediocre but highly productive writerand journalist had been stricken, as it were, with the friendship of aproducer of completely incommensurable workswhose impor-tance he recognized earlier than everyone else, but whose content hehardly understood, as his many attempts at interpretation demon-strate. Kafka must have taken a diabolical pleasure in leaving histruly monstrous estate to this friend, on condition of having it de-stroyed after reading. But then something remarkable happened: theman who wrote novels entitled The Woman for Whom One Yearns, TheWoman Who Does Not Disappoint, or Living with a Goddess (and whichread just like that) rose to the task, refused to follow the testamentaryinstructions and instead published, in quick succession, The Trial, TheCastle, and Missing, a fragment which Brod retitled Amerikaa title asjustiWed as the German title was: Der Verschollene.1 With these edi-tions and other Kafka texts, above all the Collected Works publishedbetween 1935 and 1937, Max Brod became one of the great editors of

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the twentieth century and changed literary history, and not just ofthat century. Once books by Jews could no longer appear in Ger-many, Brod published the last two volumes of the Collected Works inPrague and Wnally brought the estate to safety in Palestine. Almostforgotten in the country in whose language it had been written, it wasthanks to Brods effort alone that Kafkas work found the reception itdeserved in the United States and France, a reception that foundedKafkas worldwide fame.

In the beginning, Brod was not spared the accusation of disre-gard for Kafkas last will, although it had seemed odd even then;although he was a protg of Ehm Welk, who was then not unknownin literary circles, Brods efforts were remembered only in Walter Ben-jamins polemic dismissal.2 After the publication of the Kafka biog-raphy in 1937, Benjamin turned into Brods most relentless critic.3

Indeed Brods hardly symbolic but very literal attempts to promotehis friend to sainthood were not to be taken seriously; it is no co-incidence that such hagiographical material can Wrst be found inBrods kitsch novel that appeared, not long after Kafkas death,under the title Magic Empire of Love: here a minor Wgure named Gartais portrayed as a saint for our times, and Kafka is as easily recog-nized in the portrait as his name is barely encrypted in the Wction.Benjamins critical annihilation of the biographer Brod, not to speakof the self-destruction of Brod as novelist, has nevertheless left Brodthe editor unharmed, and so it should be. It was only in the Wfties,after Kafka was read again in Germany (again thanks to Brod), thatBrods editorial work was questioned by renowned philologists likeBeissner, Martini, Uyttersprot, or Gerhard Kaiser. There was of courseno objection to the demand for a historical-critical edition of theworks in the interest of academic study, but Brod had edited Kafkanot for philologists and literature professors but for readers. Heneeded to win over readers before academia could come to Kafka;Kafka was practically unknown at the time of his death, but Brodspushed him into the bright light of public attention, with all hisdarkness. Even if it turns out that the critical edition based on man-uscripts, by Pasley and his coeditors, is no harder to read than Brodsversion with his normalizations and elisions, one cannot demand acritical edition at any time, let alone a historical-critical edition (forwhich the facsimile edition by Reuss and Staengle will provide the

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necessary materials), least of all in the beginning.4 Every responsi-ble edition of a literary work must steer its own course between diplo-matic rendering of the manuscript and the expectations of readeraccesseven these two new editions do nothing but that. Only re-sentment or arrogance would deny that Brods Kafka text is still theauthentic one, despite its orthographic deviations and emendationsof punctuation. What remains is the problem of ordering the partsof handwritten texts; one can admit that Pasleys sequence of chap-ters and fragments of The Trial is superior to Brods, yet one canhardly claim the same of the Posthumous Writings and Fragments.Brods attempt to offer a uniWed text that eases reader access wasmore than honorable; it was reasonable.

That was more or less the situation, and even academics agreed,with the exception of some facsimile fetishists, that Brod had beenjustiWed on that basis, when in 1993 someone threw a stone into theglass house of Kafka studies and caused some confusion. It waslaunched by Milan Kundera, the novelist who wrote in Czech andthen, after his emigration, in French, and who had the chutzpah toclaim he could have written The Trial and The Castle if Kafka hadnot happened to get there Wrst. In 1993, the philological outsiderKundera published an extended essay with Gallimard, Les Testamentstrahis, which was translated into German the next year and startedsort of a new trial against Brod: not just against the executor ofKafkas estate but also against the translator of the libretti to LeosJanceks operas.5 This trial, however, would satisfy no proceduralrules; rather, in it Kundera totally confused the roles of prosecutionand defense and never accedes to that of the judge, a position whichhe nevertheless claims. One could call it Kunderas Kafkaesque trialagainst Brod, were it not such a corny joke. Kundera cannot sayclearly what he accuses Brod of, but it is exactly this indecision, thisambiguity that touches in some ways on Kafkas traits, that makesKunderas criticism peculiarly unsettling. Because Brod had pub-lished everything, indiscriminately, Kundera charges him withunforgivable indiscretions, with treason against Kafka, for havingpublished even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letterKafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod,anyone but its addressee could eventually read. . . . He betrayed hisfriend. He acted against his friends wishes, against the meaning

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and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew inthe man.6 It goes without saying that Kundera cannot sustain thisaccusation; he has to resort to the supporting construction of a divi-sion between autobiographical material including diaries and letters,on the one hand, and novels and stories, on the other, a construc-tion that seems almost Jesuitical in comparison with the rest of hisargument and that is useless for Kafkas work: With regard to theunWnished prose, I readily concede that it would put any executorin a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varyingsigniWcance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greaterthan these.7 Kundera would not want to do without Kafkas nov-els, since he wished to have written them himself; ratheralthoughhe never says so directlyhe would forego the publication of incom-plete writings of varying signiWcance like the texts of the volumesBrod titled Preparations for a Country Wedding and Description of aStruggle.8 The publication of Kafkas diaries and letters, as Kunderacharges vehemently, demonstrated a lack of shame and, in Kun-deras view, is a capital crime.

We are only following Kundera if we leave the realm of philolog-ical criticism or ethics and look around in the philosophy of history:

Shame is one of the key notions of the Modern Era, the individualis-tic period that is imperceptibly receding from us these days; shame:an epidermal instinct to defend ones personal life; to require a cur-tain over the window; to insist that a letter addressed to A not be readby B. One of the elementary situations in the passage to adulthood,one of the prime conXicts with parents, is the claim to a drawer forletters and notebooks, the claim to a drawer with a key: we enter adult-hood through the rebellion of shame.9

Modernity and shame are elusive concepts, hard to pin down; onemay be reminded of Odradek: both are extraordinarily mobile andimpossible to catch. Since the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, theculture war at the turn of the eighteenth century in France over thevalidity of the aesthetic model of antiquity, there must have beenas many determinations of modernity and antiquity as authorsaddressing themselves to the question; the deWnition of modernityas waxing individualism seems as familiar as measuring that indi-vidualism in terms of realized or withheld shame is unsurprising.How Kundera got there is easy enough: I said to myself, the writer

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who emigrated in 1975 from a surveillance-riddled Czechoslova-kia to France, that when it becomes the custom and the rule todivulge another persons private life, we are entering a time whenthe highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the indi-vidual.10 Yet one hesitates to make shame the constitutive index ofany kind of individualism or to see it as a modern phenomenon; onthe contrary, it is one of the oldest topics of philosophy and poetry.So as not to begin with Adam and Evethe reference to Genesis3:7 is obvious enough and can be found in Thomas Mann, whoseJoseph is supposed to have brought the concept of shame to Egypt,as well as in Max Schelers posthumously published phenomeno-logical study on shamesufWce it to refer instead to the prophetsand the psalmists, as well as to Greek antiquity.11 According to hisbook The Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism, written shortlybefore his death, Hermann Cohen thought he had detected a trans-lation error in the reports in scripture about idolatry: It is neitherdestruction nor embarrassment, but the feeling of shame which theprophet makes the touchstone of self-knowledge.12 And even moreexplicitly: This shame is the symptom of veracity. . . . Idolatry hassuppressed it. Veracity is as much an effect as a cause of true wor-ship.13 But the objectivity and dignity of the concept of shame werelost in translation. When it comes to Greek antiquity, sufWce it to citethe statement that shame is the great Greek category, in a quotefrom Adorno to which we will return.14 Originally the Greeks seemto have considered both shame and the almost synonymously usedtimidity (Aidos and Aischun), a feeling of awe with which man en-countered the numinous but which can be found in secularized formalready in Homer as a form of respect for parents or royals; yet Aidoswas also, as my teacher Bruno Snell taught, respect and considera-tion for equals and thus touched upon courtly politeness.15

Plato juxtaposed Aidos and Dike, shame and justice, both in theearly Protagoras and in the late Sophistes and thus emphasized thespecial meaning of shame in the context of his totalitarian, utopianstate; according to the Protagoras, Zeus himself passed the law thatwhoever is incapable of appropriating shame and justice should beput to death as a threat to the state.16 Phaedruss speech in the Sym-posion is somewhat less bloody: The feeling of shame about humil-iation and the zealous pursuit of dignity and beautywithout these



neither a state nor a person can achieve great and good things.17

Evidently Plato considered the category of shame something worthstriving fora virtueyet it was already relativized by Aristotle,who did not count it, with justice, among the proper virtues butrather included it with the affects.18 However, both Aristotle andPlato treated shame only in relation to societya society based onslavery and which did not know the modern concept of the indi-vidual. Shame was one of the imperatives that determine all actionin the Polis. The turn from Polis to individualism only began inthe two decades after Aristotles death, that short but mysteriousperiod, as Isaiah Berlin called it, when the Stoa developed.19 Stoicsstrived for virtue alone to achieve individual happiness, Eudaimo-nia; thus whatever was not virtue was neither good nor bad, as Kanthas it: a moral medium and as such indifferent. It was therefore nowonder that the category of shame was minimized in Stoicism asthe Wrst philosophy centered on the individual, since it was a socialphenomenon that presupposed the existence of the other. This soonchanged, above all under the inXuence of early Christianity. Shameturned from a relation to public events more and more into an innerexperience of an autonomous being. Spinoza characteristically onlyknows the affect of shame as tristitia, as a listlessness connectedwith the idea of an action of our own that we imagine being criti-cized by others.20 The ideas of correct and incorrect living appearreduced to the emotions of joy and listlessness, and they, as merelysubjective, increasingly replaced an objective, generally binding ruleset. The concept of shame found a new home in anthropology andpsychology. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century we onlyencounter it peripherally in philosophy, but one Wnds it all the morefrequentlywithout much substance or contentin the everydayculture of pietism and Biedermeier. If shame had once formed one ofthe essential categories in the moral sphere, it soon turned into thesentimental moralizing of the petit bourgeois as you Wnd it for instancein Stifters novels. This functional transformation of the phenome-non of shame predicates the path of bourgeois society in the sameway it constitutes a prerequisite for the epidermic reaction Kun-dera talks about. A deWnition Wend might see in shame one of theconditions of civilization; in the good old days one could still, withBreton and Benjamin, see the overcoming of privacy, the life in

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a glass house as a revolutionary virtue: undeniably Kundera isright in asserting that the end of civilized society begins with theliquidation of shame, with life in a glass house, once this recom-mendation became an order.21

What Kundera expresses as a revolt of shame and claims formodern individualism did not possess the character of a revolt somuch as it was a constituent for this development itself: the grad-ual growth of private life understood in opposition to public life; inGrimms dictionary we Wnd an early reference for Privatleben in thesixteenth century, while the idea itself is indeed as old as Stoicism.Nevertheless the individualistic epoch Kundera addresses is muchyounger; one might think of how Flaubert claims for Madame Bovary,and Tolstoy for Anna Karenina, the collapses of a private sphere thatcoincides with the bourgeois catastrophe. What poor Max Brod, aseditor, did with Kafka seems to provide a shoddy example for thedisintegration of this sphere. In recent philology since Lachmann,shame was present above all as censorship by bourgeois conform-ism, such as the concealment, in the Weimar Goethe edition, of so-called obscene words behind diacritic marks; Kundera accuses Brod offollowing this tradition when he allegedly tried to suppress Kafkasvisits to the brothel. Yet modern individualism is not founded essen-tially on the individual sensitivity to shame, and doubtless this indi-vidualism has for the most part been lost in the meantime, and withit the concept and substance of what Kunderalike Karl Krausbefore himcalled private life. Just like shame and in the end every-thing under the sun, private life has its dialectic. While the bour-geois establishment of a private sphere in the end results in aprivation, insofar as the laws of production impose themselves in itas sheer pursuit of self-interest, Kraus (who demanded from soci-ety the right to an undisturbed private nervous existence) onlyanticipated social demands from the point of view of the individ-ual, as Benjamin recognized. 22 What Kundera envisions as a worldwithout privacy, and without any shame about breaching it, is noth-ing but the culture industry with its cult of prominence: already inthe forties of the past century, Leo Lwenthal devoted a study ofundiminished actuality to its corresponding fashions of biography.23

Adorno and Horkheimer experienced the shamelessness of the cul-ture industry already in their California exile and conceptualized it



in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.24 This concept denotes the regres-sion of art to a commodity; it unites disparate elements: it unitesthe memory of works of art that bear out their own rules, workswhose effect was external if they claimed any such effect at all, witha practice that generates cultural commodities for their calculatedeffects, tailor-made for mass consumption and geared to attractthis consumption to a large extent by themselves.25 In the Hegelianterms Adorno preferred: while culture, works of art above all, in-tended the in-itself, mechanically produced commodities only standin for something. While Karl Kraus defended private life at the turnof the twentieth century against its sullying by journalism, forAdorno the press was succeeded by the monopoly of a culture indus-try he experienced in Hollywood B-movies and soap operas, in hitparades and horoscopesa culture industry that now surpassesitself in afternoon talk shows and in the Big Brother exhibitionismof reality television, wherever individuals have long been labor-ing systematically and successfully toward their own extinction.26

What Kundera still considered ordained by state power is nowa-days served up in complete openness by an economy that pushed40 million cellular phones into the German market alone, thus forc-ing even those who wish to opt out of techno-fashion to participatein the private life of their fellow citizens everywherein the shop-ping mall, in the elevator, on trains, and even in the street. Cultureindustry is the pseudodemocratic way to spread the intimacy ofothers around, as Kundera puts it; by the same token it is alreadythe preliminary decision over survival or disappearance of the indi-vidual. Nobody wants to talk about the culture industry anymore,but whatever now occupies the place of its nameWrst, with Enzens-berger, a universalized and abstractly diluted consciousness indus-try and now that which as entertainment industry winks andadmits that it has nothing to do anymore with cultureonly testi-Wes to the continued dominion of the same old culture industry:The effrontery of the rhetorical question, What do people want?lies in the fact that it is addressedas if to reXective individualsto those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of thisindividuality.27 One of the contemporary forms of the culture indus-try is catering to a frenzy for biography, a new biographic fashion.

When Kafkas Trial was dragged onto the stage by Andr Gide,

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Adorno objected: among all the galloping illiteracy, he at leastshould not have forgotten that a medium is no accident for artworksthat truly are works of art. Adaptations should be left to the Cul-ture Industry.28 The same should go for works of philosophy or artin their relation to the biography of their authors. Once one learnsto take the works seriously, one will not seek to replace their criticalstudy with what Nietzsche already wrote about his times accli-mated to the biographical pest.29 The culture-industrial biograph-ism completes itself in the recent biographical turn, in the keyholeperspective of the returned pest that serv[es] up to people what isnone of their business, and withholds from them or distorts ideo-logically what should be their business.30 According to Adorno, theold biographism his friend Lwenthal analyzed around 1940 demon-strated that the concept of life itself as a meaningful unity unfold-ing by itself has no further reality, just as that of the individual. . . .Life itself, in a very abstract shape, has become ideology, and it isexactly this abstraction, distinguishing it from older, fuller concep-tions of life, which makes it practicable.31 It is not least the conceptof shame that once contributed to the meaningful unity of lifeand thus to its substance; the shamelessness of the contemporarybiographical renaissance reduces works of art as well as those ofphilosophy to the abstract level of gossip about the objectively irrel-evant private life of artists or thinkers. On his one hundredth an-niversary, culture-industrial analphabetism did not even spare theone who coined the term culture industry half a century earlier.If one wanted to search for an up-to-date example of the guidingimage Adorno loved so morbidly, one might identify it readily inthe Adorno-year ofWcially announced by his hometown, admin-istered by political staff and a department of Leisure and Culture.32

It was not rare for Adorno to quote Theodor Haeckers sentimentregarding the ignominy of the ofWcialand yet in the end he didnot escape it himself. What is being planned and administered,Wngered and spun, to the lesser glory of Adorno, is the becominginvisible of Adornos work, which wanted the opposite of all that.Instead of continuing the edition of his unpublished oeuvre, theythrew themselves with high hopes into the business of biographicalmatter of any and all quality. From Adornos diaries, a philistinevoyeur dug up hardly deviant sexual acts in order to publish them



in a space or, as it is called nowadays, in a format that everybodyknew was going to be replicated a hundred thousand times the fol-lowing week by the magazine Der Spiegel.33 Not long before hisdeath, Adorno was asked whom he wanted to write his biographyhe responded: One cannot write my biography, I have no biogra-phy, my biography is my work. On this topic, Detlev Claussenfound in Freud the invaluable sentence, biographical truth is un-available, and if it was available, one would have no need for it.34

The untruth of the biographical is so much easier to adapt and touse: there are the biographies and monographs for the anniversary;the letters to his parents, to publishers, and Austrian aristocrats (inone case blatantly hunting for customers for his unpublished cor-respondence); photo albums from Adorno in Amorbach to Adorno inFrankfurt; and collected anecdotes and memories that remain on thelevel of the talk show, even when this most recent incarnation ofKierkegaardian chatter is bound between the covers of a book.35 Ina late novel, Kundera treats the imagineers who have replaced theideologists; biographism is the kind of imagology where the sug-gestive power of images has taken over much of the discourse tiedto language in much the same way easily accessible biographicalmaterial replaces the labor of grappling with the demanding con-cepts of a work.36 The belief in images in the culture industry is rem-iniscent of the idolatry of scripture, against which Cohen pittedshame as a symptom of veracity. To excavate Adornos work frombeneath the culture-industry image-rubble of the Adorno year willtake more than another year of the sort of philology for which shameis no foreign word.

What Kundera and Adorno share is that they implicitly reha-bilitate shame by using it as if it were an obligingly objective cate-gory, however powerless it may appear. In allusion to the Czechsecret service who taped the conversations between the writer JanProchazka and a friend in 1968 and later broadcast them on theradio in order to discredit the dissidents, one of Kunderas charac-ters offers the following reXection:

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio,what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentrationcamp? Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express

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how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a worldin which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Bru-tality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispens-able) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliterationof privacy.37

After Auschwitz and Majdanek, one can hardly keep talking aboutconcentration camps in this naive manner.38 It is nevertheless surelycorrect that the liquidation of privacy is one of the premises thatmade those German concentration camps possible at all. This liqui-dation stems from the fundamental contradiction in the relation ofindividual and society that characterizes the modern era to anincreasing degree, and nowhere has this been developed more insis-tently than in Adornos thought; whether one agreed with him ornot, he was reputed to stand for individualism against collectivismof any origin, and yet nobody insisted more on the dialectical natureof individualism:

The more unfettered the individual pursues its own interests, the moreit loses sight of the formation of a social organization that protectsthose interests. The individual prepares the way for its own subjuga-tion, as it were, by its unfettered liberation.39

The inextinguishable existence of the camps also forces one to con-ceptualize shame differently. When Horkheimer contributed to theDialectic of Enlightenment he coauthored with Adorno his experiencethat people are marked more and more by early emotional as wellas intellectual deformity, Adorno felt compelled to add to this empir-ical observation a theoretical explication:

The hardened individual represents something better only when com-pared to a hardened society, not absolutely. It holds on to the shameof what the collective again and again does to the individual, and ofwhat comes to fruition when there are no individuals any more.40

The concept of shame underwent a historical-philosophical trans-formation; today it no longer denotes an individual matter but asocial phenomenon, as it had already in Plato, albeit in a differentsense. In the Negative Dialectics, perhaps Adornos crowning achieve-ment, he wrote: Shame commands philosophy never to forget GeorgSimmels insightthat it is astonishing how little human suffering



is noticed in the history of philosophy.41 And in the Aesthetic The-ory, his last, incomplete work, Celans poetry reminds him of theshame of art faced with a suffering that is withdrawn from experi-ence as well as from sublimation.42 It is the shame of the survivorAdorno referred to, the shame of those who survived wrongly andaccidentally, as he never tired of emphasizingthe shame of thosewho inevitably fail to comprehend what happened, let alone to ex-tract meaning from it; only shame remains, as a moral minimum.While the painter Titorelli, always selling the same pastoral land-scape as new and raising his head to smile shamelessly into thevoid in the middle of The Trial, anticipates something like the alle-gory of the coming culture industry, the functional transformationof shame by the camps and by human suffering is sensed almostprophetically near the mysterious end of the novel, when someonekilled like a dog appears as if his shame could survive him.43

Benjamin called Kafkas noblest gesture the shame that survivesJosef K.: shame, the most intimate human gesture, is by the sametoken the most demanding social gesture. On its highest level, shameis not shame before the others but shame for them.44 In this perfectopposite of the shameless commerce of the culture industry, shamereconstitutes in the individual affect the public virtue for which itsubstitutes.

Notes

All translations from German are mine unless otherwise marked.Trans.1. Corngold glosses this as The boy who was never again heard from.

See Stanley Corngold, Adornos Notes on Kafka: A Critical Reconstruction,Monatshefte 94, no. 1 (2002): 26.Trans.

2. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1972), 46668.

3. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1972), 52629.

4. The S. Fischer Verlag began publishing the critical edition by MalcolmPasley in 1982; see Malcolm Pasley, The Act of Writing and the Text: The Genesisof Kafkas Manuscripts, in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Sicle,edited by Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken, 1989), 20020. The historical-critical edition by Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle is published by Stroemfeld,beginning in 1995, as a historical-critical edition of all manuscripts, prints, andtypescripts, (Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe smtlicher Handschriften, Drucke

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und Typoskripte), drawing on black-and-white facsimiles of the Oxford archiveof Kafkas estate. See Roland Reuss, Zur Kritischen Edition von Der Process imRahmen der Historisch-Kritischen Franz Kafka-Ausgabe, in Franz Kafka-Hefte 1,edited by Roland Reu and Peter Staengle (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1997). And in 2001,Fischer continued the feud by announcing the publication of color reproductionsof Kafkas manuscripts.Trans.

5. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (New York:Perennial, 1996).Trans.

6. Ibid., 2627. Ibid.8. Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (written circa 19061909)

and Beschreibung eines Kampfes (circa 19041911). See Franz Kafka, WeddingPreparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings (London: Seckerand Warburg, 1973).Trans.

9. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, 25758.10. Ibid., 260.11. In the original note, Tiedemann refers to a number of German Bible

translations (Leopold Zunz, 1835; Einheitsbersetzung, 1980; Buber, 1997; Luther1534 and 1545) for psalm 97, which states that idolaters and worshippers ofimages are put to shame.Trans.

12. Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums(Cologne: Melzer, 1959), 64.

13. Ibid., 486.14. Theodor W. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 4, no. 7 (Frankfurt am

Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 378.15. Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung des europis-

chen Geistes bei den Griechen (Gttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1980), 233.16. Plato, Protagoras 322 D. (Benjamin Jowetts translation renders this as

he who has no part in reverence and justice shall be put to death, for he is aplague of the state. See http://classics.mit.edu/Plato.Trans.)

17. Plato, Symposion 178 D. (Again Jowetts translation renders this as thesense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals everdo any good or great work.Trans.)

18. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1128b: Shame should not be described asa virtue; for it is more like passion than a state of character.

19. Isaiah Berlin, Wirklichkeitssinn. Ideengeschichtliche Untersuchungen, editedby Henry Hardy (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1998), 292.

20. Spinoza, Ethica III: Affectuum DeWnitiones XXXI (Indianapolis, IN:Hackett, 1982).

21. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1977), 1024.

22. Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedeman et al., 20volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 197086), 11:636.

23. Leo Lwenthal, Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 231.



24. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment:Philosophical Fragments. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).Trans.

25. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 10, no. 1: 337.26. See Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational

Culture (London: Routledge, 2001).27. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:167.Trans.28. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 10, no. 1:276.29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Smtliche Werke, vol. 1, Stuttgart: Krner, 1964), 818.30. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 8:534.31. Leo Lwenthal, Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 158.32. Frankfurt am Main, Dezernat Kultur und Freizeit.Trans.33. One infamous example, which will entirely sufWce, is the diary entry

New York, 16. Oktober 1949 in Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie, edited by theAdorno Archive (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 203.Trans.

34. Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein letztes Genie (Frankfurt: Fischer,2003), 17.

35. Among further volumes marketed on the occasion of the anniversarywere Theodor W. Adorno: Kindheit in Amorbach. Bilder und Erinnerungen, edited byReinhard Pabst (Frankfurt: Insel, 2003); Theodor W. Adorno Briefe an die Eltern.19391951, edited by Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,2003); Lorenz Jger, Adorno. Eine politische Biographie (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003); Stefan Mller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt: Suhr-kamp, 2003); and So mte ich ein Engel und kein Autor sein. Adorno und seineFrankfurter Verleger. Der Briefwechsel mit Peter Suhrkamp und Siegfried Unseld(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).Trans.

36. Kundera, Immortality (New York: Perennial, 1999).37. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Perennial 1999),

13637.38. The sentence from the Unbearable Lightness of Being is awful: only a

philistine would confuse the reXection of a Wctional character with the opinionsof the novelist; however, the novelist obviously counts this autobiographicalmorsel, which is repeated in his other books as well, among their true claims.Kunderas novels strive unmistakably to inscribe themselves in the tradition ofthe philosophical novel, commingling essayistic and reXective passages with thenarrative ones after the model of Musil and Thomas Mann.

39. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 20, no.1:288.40. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:277.41. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:156. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics

(London: Continuum, 1983).42. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 7:477. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans-

lated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).43. Kafka, Der Proce. Roman in der Fassung der Handschrift, edited by

Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990), 312.44. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 1269.

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