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“The Hope That Earthly Horror Does Not Possess the Last Word”: Max Horkheimer and The Dialectical Imagination

The title of this chapter cites a remarkable admission from the preface Horkheimer graciously provided for the first edition of my history of the Frankfurt School, which appeared shortly before his death in 1973. It acknowledges that the long-standing Marxist insistence on the scientific validity of its theories is insufficient to motivate the yearnings that fueled its critique of capitalist oppression. However, one construes the alternative—the precise word in Horkheimer’s German draft was “metaphysical,” which he reconsidered in vetting my translation—it raises the question once again of the implicit normative basis of Critical Theory, a question that haunts its evolving history. This chapter recounts the enabling interaction, albeit at times delicate, I had with Horkheimer while writing the dissertation that became The Dialectical Imagination. It recalls, among other things, his unease with two possible explanations for the Frankfurt School’s dogged insistence on critique: their experience as exiles and the legacy of their (for the most part) Jewish backgrounds. Neither one, he impressed upon me (with the fervent concurrence of Felix Weil, the Institute’s major benefactor), should be stressed as sources of their critical distance from conventional academic and political assumptions. Although I appreciated the reasons for his resistance—and indeed, as the final chapter of this book shows, the fears he and Weil had about the dangers of foregrounding the Jewish identity of their colleagues were, alas, justified—I was unwilling to forego at least conjecturing about the contextual matrix out of which their ideas developed.

“Today for the first time, I sat in on a conversation between Fred and Jay. Naturally I didn’t say a word that we knew about the lecture; otherwise probably a report on disagreements would have ensued. We should seek that no great story is made out of it.”¹ So wrote Max Horkheimer to Theodor Adorno on March 25, 1969, from Montagnola, Switzerland, where he had lived for a decade following his retirement from the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Fred in question was, of course, economist Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and collaborator, who was then generously allowing a young dissertation student from Harvard’s History Department to pick his brain about the Institute’s history. We have no record of Adorno’s response, nor is it absolutely clear what problematic lecture Horkheimer might have wanted to avoid discussing. The passage is, however, significant because it indicates that the leaders of the Frankfurt School were very much concerned about the ways in which their history might be written. By chance, it was on that very day that Adorno wrote a much less flattering letter about the would-be historian to Herbert Marcuse, which came to light many years later and led me to write a reflection on what I called, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, “the ungrateful dead.”²

Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer and Pollock seem somehow to have reached the conclusion that their history was in reasonably secure hands, and so they continued to cooperate with the historian until the dissertation became a book called The Dialectical Imagination in 1973. In what follows, I want to return to the role Horkheimer played in its creation, drawing on some twenty letters and telegrams he sent while I was preparing it. There are no major revelations in the correspondence, but revisiting it now may help illuminate the ways in which historical protagonists try to shape the stories told about them and the challenges historians may have when writing about living figures.

It will not, of course, be a surprise to learn that people prefer to be remembered fondly by posterity, but, in this case, what stands out is the highly charged context in which this historical account was undertaken. The end of the 1960s and the early 1970s was a period of extraordinary tension for the surviving members of the Institute’s inner circle, who were then trying to cope with the unanticipated turmoil unleashed at least in part by their own earlier work. The situation is accurately captured by the subtitle of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s three-volume collection of documents concerning the Frankfurt School and the German student movement: “From messages in the bottle to Molotov cocktails.”³ Although one does not want to turn what may well have been contingent events into expressions of something deeper, it is worth remembering that Adorno, Pollock and Horkheimer were all to die before the turmoil ended: Adorno in 1969, Pollock in 1971 and Horkheimer in 1973. At least the first of these deaths has often been interpreted as hastened by the stress of confrontation with students.

It is thus not surprising that they were highly cautious about cooperating in the potential framing of their history in ways that might play into the hands of contemporary critics. In fact, certain aspects of their past were then serving as sources of, or at least excuses for, critiques of their present positions. Most notably, their reluctance to endorse the more explicitly radical arguments they had made in the prewar era enraged students who had been stimulated precisely by those arguments. This reluctance was most famously captured in Jürgen Habermas’s oft-quoted remark that when he had been a student at the Institute in the 1950s, “Horkheimer was terribly afraid of us opening the chest in the basement that contained a complete series of the [Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung].”⁴ It was only with considerable trepidation that he permitted the reprinting of some of them in the two-volume collection edited by Alfred Schmidt as Kritische Theorie in 1968.⁵

What such fear demonstrates is that beyond worrying about getting their history right, they were also anxious about the uses to which it was already being put. And to compound the anxiety, they did not share a united position on precisely what the right response should be. Although in public they maintained a united front, we now know from the revealing correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse the depth of their disagreement over the student movement and the Institute’s stance toward it.⁶ My research trip to Frankfurt and Montagnola overlapped with the most volatile moment in that deeply vexed history, the student occupation of the Institute in late January and Adorno’s calling the police to disburse it, which embittered the relationship between Marcuse and his old colleagues. It is in fact probable that the unnamed lecture mentioned in Horkheimer’s letter was the one Marcuse was to give in Frankfurt later that spring, which, much to the chagrin of the Institute’s leaders, he had tied to a demand to speak with the students.

The nexus between theory and practice, always a problematic one, was thus further complicated by a triangulation with historical reconstruction. For in addition to the explicit conflict over the ways to translate critical theory into politically effective action, there was also an implicit tension over the proper way to narrativize the Institute’s past. When I arrived in Europe to begin my research in January 1969, I was only dimly aware of all that was at stake. In retrospect, my dimness—and here I would include the still uncertain grasp I had of many of the issues raised by the Frankfurt School’s work—was probably an advantage. As an outsider to the controversies then swirling around the Institute, neither a student nor disciple of any of the principle players, I was not identified with any one position.

I had, to be sure, already benefited from contact with several figures in the Institute’s history who were still living in America, including Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Karl August Wittfogel and Paul Lazarsfeld. And I was in contact with Felix Weil, who wrote extensive letters to me about the Institute’s early history. Although Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock were diplomatic about their relations with all of them, it was not hard to sense certain tensions. Thus, for example, in a cordial letter sent to me on November 11, 1968, in which he assured me that Horkheimer and Pollock would be happy to meet in Montagnola, Adorno explicitly wrote that Lazarsfeld “was only connected with the Institute for a relatively short time and very loosely in America.”⁷ Clearly, he wanted to caution me against accepting Lazarsfeld’s view of Critical Theory, which he likely assumed would be unfriendly.⁸ Many years later, Habermas would speculate in a conversation that Adorno’s hostile response might have been motivated by his identifying me with Löwenthal, who had provided an enormous amount of help to me in the summer of 1968. I had not realized at the time that they had had a very serious falling out, due, among other things, to disputes over Löwenthal’s being owed a pension by the Institute, but perhaps Adorno’s suspicion was fueled by the assumed link.⁹

In any event, when I first approached Horkheimer by letter on November 18, it generated a warm response only four days later: “You will certainly be welcome in Montagnola,” he wrote. “I suggest you let me know as soon as possible when you can be here so I can see to it that we can really talk to each other and you can use the archives.” He then added: “I am sure that you know that the Institute’s history in the USA started with Nichlos Muray Butler’s [sic] great kindness and understanding. I met him the first time a few weeks after my arrival in New York and I shall never forget what we owe to him. Needless to say that there are many things which I can tell you and even more which you may find here in our files.”¹⁰ Butler, it should be recalled, had been the autocratic president of Columbia University, a position he held for a remarkable forty-three years, and was a figure of considerable controversy. He was a prominent Republican, an early admirer of Mussolini’s Italy and a genteel anti-Semite. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for his work with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. In December 1933, he refused to bar a Nazi speaker from the Columbia campus on the grounds of free speech. And yet, only a few months later, he was open-minded enough to welcome the Institute, despite its leftist leanings, to Columbia, thus earning Horkheimer’s undying gratitude many years later.¹¹

I provided Horkheimer a schedule of my planned visit, and he responded warmly on December 11, 1968, albeit with one qualification. Adorno had informed me that the Institute’s materials were in Pollock’s possession, but Horkheimer said that Pollock had told him “the files concerning the Institute as such being at his disposal are very few. Most of the files in the archive contain personal correspondence which during the lifetime of the authors should not be made public. You will have mostly to rely on printed materials. Therefore, the larger part of the information you will need will be given in your conversations with Professors Adorno, Pollock and myself.”¹² Those conversations began with several meetings in Frankfurt in January and February with Adorno, when I also had a chance to speak with Habermas, Alfred Schmidt and Albrecht Wellmer.

I had expected to meet Horkheimer in Montagnola in late March, but in the middle of the month, he took a trip to Frankfurt. So, in fact, our first personal contact came when he unexpectedly burst into a conversation I was having with Adorno in the director’s office of the Institute. It was a remarkable moment, as suddenly I was in the presence of both authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the only time I would have that experience. In a piece I later composed following Adorno’s death, I recalled that he had shown what seemed to me “deference” to his older colleague, a characterization that Gretel Adorno later disputed when I sent her a copy of the piece: “Deference is much too strong,” she wrote; “consideration would be better.”¹³

Whatever the adjective, it was clear to me that Horkheimer remained the senior figure in their relationship, although Adorno had long outstripped him in terms of scholarly productivity and was to exercise a much more substantial influence in subsequent years. My next contact with Horkheimer came at the end of March, when I left Frankfurt for Switzerland, staying for a month in Lugano, a short drive from the twin houses that Horkheimer and Pollock had built in the beautiful Ticino region of northern Switzerland.¹⁴ Pollock, it turned out, was a much more voluble source of information about the Institute than Horkheimer. He allowed me to tape our conversations, something that Horkheimer and Adorno had refused to do. The latter had denied my request using the metaphor of “verbal fingerprints,” which I cited in the essay I composed after his death. I later discovered, thanks to an illuminating footnote by Rolf Tiedemann to Adorno’s lectures on Kant, that he had used the same expression on other occasions to prevent transcriptions of his verbal performances, which were less precise than his carefully wrought written ones.¹⁵ As a result of Horkheimer’s similar caution, the only sound of his voice I have on tape came during one of my interviews with Pollock, when a bird call is heard outside the room and Pollock says, “aha, that is Horkheimer!”

Bird calls aside, my recollection of Horkheimer during the unrecorded interviews we did have is of a very large, imposing, always impeccably dressed figure who would lean in to emphasize a point and speak in a deliberate and measured way. He was in his mid-seventies by then and seemed to me less sprightly in conversation than Adorno or Pollock. He was warm but somewhat guarded, clearly concerned to put as positive a face as possible on the Institute’s history. As forewarned, I was not allowed to see any personal correspondence but was given access to very helpful scrapbooks of materials they had collected over the years.

Shortly after my time in Switzerland, I drove to Vienna and settled in for what I thought would be several months of writing. On a trip to Budapest, where I’d hoped to connect with Georg Lukács, I made the mistake of driving my little BMW 1600 through an intersection at the same time a large truck was going in the other direction. The result was that I only got to speak with Lukács on the telephone and spent several weeks in the Költõi Traumatological Clinic recovering from a cracked pelvis, and then another two in a Viennese hospital, before returning to America to complete my recovery. Pollock sent a letter on June 20 expressing his and Horkheimer’s concern; they also commented generously on a review I had done of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, the first publication of his work in English.¹⁶ Of some interest is Pollock’s observation, which doubtless expressed Horkheimer’s opinion as well: “In the last years of his life B[enjamin] seems to have fled into the Marxist world of thought [Gedankenwelt] as an escape from his despair. It can never be known, had he lived longer, if he would have overcome the contradictions between his work and what he had learned from Brecht and Sternberg as Marxism.”¹⁷

My next contact with Horkheimer followed the sudden death of Adorno on August 6, 1969, when I sent him a condolence letter. His secretary, G. E. Kluth, responded on August 14: “Your letter of August 8 did not yet reach Professor Horkheimer. Because of the sudden death of Professor Adorno he had to interrupt his vacation in the mountains. At the time being, he is in Frankfurt, where he attended yesterday his friend’s funeral. I telephoned briefly with Professor Horkheimer and informed him about the contents of your letter. He asked me to convey to you his deeply felt thanks. For obvious reasons he will not be able to answer you personally in the near future. He is certain to find your understanding.”¹⁸

It was in fact more than a year later that our correspondence resumed. In the interim, I sent drafts of my chapters to Pollock and Löwenthal for their respective thoughts and received carefully detailed and wonderfully helpful suggestions from both. At the same time, Pollock shared with me the increasingly troubling news of health problems he was suffering. I remember still being shocked to receive an official notice of his death on December 16, 1970, jointly issued by his widow, Carlota, and Horkheimer. Once again, I had the melancholy task of sending a message of condolence to Horkheimer, who replied in a moving letter on January 5, 1971:

I thank you for your kind words of December 23. For 60 years I had lived together with Fred Pollock. He helped me so much in every respect that I don’t know how my life may continue without his wonderful understanding. It is a true consolation to know that when you wrote about the Institut, you were aware of his decisive role when it was founded and during its history up to the moment when we left for good. You are perfectly right when you say, your work will be a real help for all those who wish that the most important period of the Institut will not be forgotten.¹⁹

I completed my dissertation late in the spring of 1971, directed by H. Stuart Hughes, who had been a friend of Franz Neumann and Marcuse from their days together in the Central European Bureau of the Office of Strategic Services.²⁰ I sent a copy to Horkheimer, who impatiently wrote on May 2 that it had not yet arrived, adding, “I think it is very important that I can let you have my remarks, your study should be one of the decisive sources for all those interested in the Institute’s history. Should you have another copy, please send it to me by airmail.”²¹

A copy did finally arrive and Horkheimer shared it with Matthias Becker, who had begun writing his biography, which, alas, Becker never finished because of his untimely death in 1974 at the age of forty-one. We corresponded over the course of my research and writing, and he was enormously helpful. Becker had been able to win Horkheimer’s trust to the extent that he permitted him to tape their conversations, which were only discovered in 2008.²² On June 8, Horkheimer wrote to introduce him and included his first letter to me:

Here is a letter from Dr. Becker of Bremen who will be Professor at Bremen University when it starts functioning. He is a highly intelligent young philosopher and I had given him the first chapter of your important thesis. His remarks seem precise to me, and it is indeed a pity that the three of us can’t have a common discussion. In a recently published book of my late friend Adorno, he quoted a sentence of a review: “God dwells in the detail.” This certainly goes for descriptions like the history of the Institute.²³

The letter from Becker accompanying Horkheimer’s contained several useful suggestions for changes, which were gratefully incorporated in my book, as were others he offered in three subsequent letters in 1971.²⁴ In addition to suggestions for minor alterations in details, Becker’s letters also hint at a certain tension between Horkheimer and Felix Weil over some aspects of the Institute’s founding and early history. How to handle Weil, whose generosity had initially funded the Institute, was a perennial challenge for its leadership over the years. Becker requested that I not share with Weil all of the suggestions he had made in order to “avoid being burdened with an unforeseeable correspondence.”²⁵ Weil, who was then teaching real estate law to American GIs at the army base in Ramstein, Germany, was in fact, an indefatigable letter writer, but, from my historian’s point of view, this was a great blessing. He responded quickly and with great eagerness to my questions and to drafts of my chapters.

Two issues in particular most exercised him and were also of concern to Horkheimer, with whom he frequently telephoned as my project developed. Both were of some importance. The first concerned the role that the Jewish background of most of the Institute’s members might have played in their development. This is, of course, an enormously complex and sensitive matter that has received frequent treatment in the Frankfurt School literature.²⁶ Much depends on which figures are stressed, which periods in their lives, the definition of what it means to be Jewish—religious, ethnic, cultural—as well as the intangible issue of influence itself. In light of crude anti-Semitic denigrations of Critical Theory as an expression of something sinister to be deplored in the legacy of Judaism—a denigration that, alas, continues to this day²⁷—it is fully understandable that both Horkheimer and Weil wanted to avoid being reduced to whatever version of Jewishness might be held responsible for their ideas. Like Freud, who was famously anxious to avoid the same reproach, they were very wary of such a simplistic reduction. Even though Löwenthal and Fromm had gone through periods of serious religious commitment during their association with the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, and Benjamin, abetted by his friendship with Gershom Scholem, had drawn on theological motifs in his work, the Institute in the 1920s had maintained a strongly materialist—that is, essentially Marxist—orientation.

There was, however, a subtle difference in the acknowledgment of the residual importance of their Jewish origins between Horkheimer and Weil. Although conceding that the Institute had always been especially sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism, Weil was adamant that he and his colleagues had long since left any trace of a meaningful Jewish heritage, understood in religious or other terms. To suggest that something else still mattered, he argued, was to fall into the trap of accepting racist definitions of Jewish identity. Horkheimer, for his part, had come to acknowledge in contrast at least a certain link between Critical Theory’s refusal to picture utopia and the Jewish prohibition on picturing God, the famous Bilderverbot. When he had returned to Germany after the war, he increasingly identified as a Jew, so much so that a headline of an interview with him in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland in 1952 was titled “The Jewish Rector and his German University.”²⁸

When I pointed this out to Weil, he replied impatiently:

You refer to Horkheimer’s stressing his Jewishness as Rektor of the university. You seem not to know that then he even, on the high holidays, attended synagogue services (but not of the orthodox kind, just the reform-liberal one). But, as he told me, he did this not as a late Believer, but as an ostentatious act of a political nature … anyway you cannot project back into the 20s what the old Horkheimer of the 60s said or is now saying (including the “other” and the Bilderverbot, where I can’t follow him at all).²⁹

The issue was also raised in Horkheimer’s letter to me of July 10, 1971, in which he wondered what I had meant by the “ethnic origins” of the members of the School. Whatever response I made—my own letters were not preserved—seemed to placate him, as on July 23, he responded:

Many thanks for your letter of July 15 and especially for what you said about the positive relations between the Critical Theory and the Bilderverbot. I myself frequently pointed to this connection. What a pity that we cannot talk personally about the significance of the materialistic as well as the theological elements in the development of the Frankfurter Schule.³⁰

I ultimately veered closer to Horkheimer than Weil in my account, but I also remained convinced that, however much fuel it might give to anti-Semitic critics of Critical Theory, it was impossible to ignore the volatile and rapidly evolving situation of German Jews in the Weimar era in making sense of the Frankfurt School’s origins and perhaps its intellectual investments as well. I felt some vindication when I read in Leo Löwenthal’s autobiographical interviews with Helmut Dubiel the following admission: “However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish traditions, which were codeterminative.”³¹

On the other sensitive issue that arose, Weil and Horkheimer were firmly united. The dissertation had lacked a snappy title, so when I looked for one for the book, I returned to the essay I had written for Midstream in 1969 after Adorno’s death, which had been called “The Permanent Exile of Theodor Adorno.” Although Marcuse and Löwenthal were in favor, both Weil and Horkheimer had grave misgivings about calling the book Permanent Exiles. When I floated it as a possibility, Horkheimer responded in January 1972, that it “seems to me problematic, as it doesn’t apply to a number of our members, Theodor W. Adorno, Fred Pollock and myself. Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse made America their home.”³² When I wrote back explaining that I had meant it metaphorically to suggest the even before their actual emigration, Institute members had been anxious to avoid co-optation and after the war, Critical Theory had maintained its distance from any real “homecoming,” Horkheimer was not placated. On March 5, he sent an urgent telegram that read “title still seems misleading to me,” backed up by a letter sent the same day, which is worth extensively quoting:

The idea that during “the period from 1923 to 1950” the Institute’s members had been obsessed by “the fear of co-optation and integration” is certainly not precise. As long as [Carl] Grūnberg was the director this surely was not the case, and after I had been appointed up to our emigration several of us definitely were non-conformists in some ways but no “Exiles.” During our stay in America most of us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany. Otherwise our relations to conservative people like President Butler would have never been what they were, nor would Franz Neumann have spent so much time in West-Berlin to help organizing [sic] the university, nor had I returned to Frankfurt to do about the same there and in addition to rebuild the Institute with American and German public funds.³³

Weil was no less distressed by the initial idea for a title, which he and Horkheimer had discussed by phone, and let me know more explicitly why it was not only imprecise, but also, in his eyes, dangerous:

Here is why I consider this title fundamentally wrong and damaging: especially because of the reinforcement of misunderstanding you give by your insistence on saying, or broadly hinting at, the influence the so-called joint ethnic origins of our group is supposed to have had on our way of thinking, the “Exiles” title will lend retroactively to justify all the attacks our enemies launched against the Institute and the Frankfurt School, to wit, that we as rootless outsiders had no business or justification to instill “undeutsche Gedanken” [un-German thoughts] = subversive feelings into German students.³⁴

Clearly, I had unintentionally entered a minefield by assuming that the status of “permanent exile” would be more a badge of honor than a source of reproach, but I could now better understand the source of their anxiety. There were—and continue to be—criticisms from the nationalist right of the allegedly baleful influence of returning émigrés on postwar German culture.³⁵ Whereas I thought, perhaps naively, that slanders against “rootless cosmopolitans” were things of the past, Horkheimer and Weil still felt their sting and were determined not to let my book give ammunition to their purveyors. Ironically, such charges anticipated a comparable critique of the emigres’ influence on American culture later leveled by xenophobic cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom.³⁶

Hoping to dissuade me, Horkheimer and Weil offered a few alternatives, ranging from the pedestrian “The Early Stages of Critical Theory” to the melodramatic “Rebels with a Cause.” Finally, I hit on the title that the book ultimately bore, which I derived consciously from two earlier works—C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—and unconsciously from a passage in Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, which I had read a number of years earlier.³⁷ Later, someone casually mentioned to me that source, and I had a chance to publicly credit Brown in the preface to a later book, a collection of my essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America, which I titled Permanent Exiles.³⁸ In any event, both Horkheimer and Weil were pleased with the new choice, and as I ultimately got to use both titles, I was also happy with the outcome.

Much of our wrangling over the title played out against the backdrop of one final episode in the story of Horkheimer’s role in the book: the writing of the preface he graciously provided. Despite my concern that having such a preface might leave the impression that the book was somehow a “court history,” I thought it worth mulling over the possibility shortly after the dissertation was completed. Horkheimer replied cautiously in a letter of July 23, 1971, asking if I would be satisfied with a two-page preface without an imminent deadline. A succession of illnesses was making it hard for him to concentrate on his work, but my positive answer had encouraged him to try. On August 31, 1971, at the end of a letter that dealt primarily with details of Paul Tillich’s role in the Institute’s early years and some uncertainty over the existence of a Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt before the migration, he added, “I hope my little preface, which I intend to write at a time when I am not overburdened as during these weeks, will not disappoint you too much.”³⁹

On December 12, 1971, I received a letter from Matthias Becker with Horkheimer’s promised preface. “During his serious illness of the past weeks,” Becker wrote, “he was greatly concerned to make the deadline he had promised. We are a bit late, but I think that you will be very satisfied with his introductory words.”⁴⁰ Needless to say I was not only grateful, but also deeply moved by the gesture. I translated the text and sent it to Montagnola for any emendations Horkheimer might want to make. With a few minor changes, the preface appeared when the book was finally published in the spring of 1973. Perhaps the most meaningful change appeared in the second thoughts he had about the moving sentence from which I have taken the title of this chapter. In German, it reads, “Die Sehnsucht danach, dass die Gruel auf Erden nicht die letzte Gültigkeit besässen, ist freilich ein metaphysischer Wunsch.” Looking at my translation, Horkheimer changed “metaphysical” to “non-scientific,” but he left standing the formulation “the hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word.”⁴¹

These were not themselves the last words I received from Horkheimer. In addition to the dispute over the title, he responded generously to an essay I published in 1972 called “The Frankfurt School in Exile” and wrote of his impatience for the publication of the book, which he hoped would coincide with the imminent English translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Finally, on March 10, 1973, he informed me that two copies of the book had arrived and that he found them “beautiful and [was] happy with them.” The last words of that final letter, after he requested I send him the reviews, were simply ones of friendship: “How are you? Are you well in Berkeley; will you be coming any time soon back to Europe?”⁴²

Four months later, on July 7, 1973, Horkheimer died in a hospital in Nuremberg at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bern, Switzerland. Shortly after his death, I was sent a copy of a photograph, one of the last taken of him, in which he was dressed impeccably, as always, in a three-piece suit, and reading a copy of The Dialectical Imagination. There can be few more moving images for a historian than one that shows the hero of your narrative, nearing the end of life and apparently finding some solace in your attempt to make sense of it. During the period I knew Max Horkheimer, he lost his closest friends, Adorno and Pollock, as well as his much-beloved wife, Maidon, who died in October of 1969. He was in many ways a diminished figure, beset by illness and wary of the ways in which his legacy was being read by critics on both ends of the political spectrum.

I was enormously fortunate to have had an opportunity to be the first to provide a general history of that legacy and even more fortunate to win Horkheimer’s trust in so doing. Although it was always clear that he was invested in my telling it in a way that redounded to his credit, I never felt coerced into bending the evidence to paint a rosier picture than the documents afforded. I can fully appreciate the anxieties he—and Felix Weil—felt about reducing their thought to an expression of some ill-defined Jewish spirit or even the experience of Weimar Jewry, although I would also still hope that a nonreductive analysis of that dimension of their story can prove illuminating. As for the dispute over my proposed title, the outcome was favorable for everyone. The alternative rightly emphasized their thought rather than their lives, and I ultimately got to use Permanent Exiles for a collection about a more disparate group of émigrés who did not share a common intellectual position.

What is perhaps most moving is the fact that, more than four decades after Horkheimer’s death and the publication of The Dialectical Imagination, the message bottles thrown into the sea by the Frankfurt School continue to wash up on unexpected shores, to be opened by new generations of readers who find in them inspiration for the development of a twenty-first-century critical theory. Whether metaphysical or non-scientific, the wish that such a theory may help us to diminish the cruelties of a world still a long way from the utopia yearned for by the Frankfurt School remains very much alive today.