It takes place that night; Adorno shows up and among the audience in the large, well-filled auditorium he sees at least three women with whom he has been romantically involved, a few others with whom he’d like to be. He’s expecting to give a lecture but the stage has a row of chairs behind a long table, microphones for half a dozen participants. Nobody bothered to tell him anything, explain what was wanted. There are many faces he doesn’t recognise, faces who appear not to recognise him.
A young fellow comes and shakes him by the hand, introduces himself as chairman for the evening, journalist on one of the left-wing newspapers. Can’t be any older than thirty, thinning hair and thick-rimmed glasses, an earnest demeanour that gives him the air of someone in fancy dress. Other participants materialise; a lecturer Adorno knows, a writer, a woman who’s apparently a film-maker, people from the margins of Frankfurt’s intelligentsia. Such eclecticism mirrors only the most unfortunate aspect of Benjamin’s endeavour. Adorno foresees a talk on Benjamin’s use of hashish.
Eventually it gets going; they all have ten minutes to make whatever claim they can on the public’s attention. The film-maker is planning a work based on Benjamin’s life; this is the first that Adorno has heard of the project, which strikes him as tasteless and banal, the epitome of everything to which Benjamin stood in opposition. The lecturer then uses his ration of time to speak about the student protests and police violence, asking what Benjamin would have thought of it and reaching no conclusion more illuminating than that Walter would have been as upset about it as everyone else in the room. He was, that is to say, one of us, an emblem like those Baroque images he discussed so penetratingly, whose captions can signify anything we want them to.
The writer’s offering is strangest and most outrageous of alclass="underline" a story about Walter, a fictional depiction of the man Adorno knew personally, as though he were some legendary hero. This, thinks Adorno, is the limit point of historical sentimentalism; his gorge is rising even before he hears the first words of the story, the introduction is bad enough. Benjamin, the writer explains, was fascinated by the figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and his theory that there are other worlds like our own, but with altered histories. Sheer nonsense, Adorno mutters to himself, barely concealing his words; Benjamin’s interest was a small and characteristically eccentric part of a far larger analysis of the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. And so, the writer continues, in a way that is I hope faithful to Benjamin’s insights, I have imagined how it might have been otherwise, if Benjamin had not died while fleeing from the Gestapo, but had instead escaped.
Adorno pushes back his seat, about to leave. The chairman stares at him, alarmed, and waves him to remain, a gesture that is both a request and a command. Adorno manages not to listen to the story, its inconsequentiality rendering it surprisingly easy to ignore, instead he looks at Ulrike, remembers her naked body when they made love, remembers every sound she made, and thinks how futile life is. In everything we do there is an element of exchange, and contemporary social relations, he reflects, are becoming subject to a devaluation far greater than what befell the Reichsmark nearly half a century ago. The result is a lapse into authoritarianism.
People are applauding that stupid story. Now at last it’s Teddie’s turn. He leans forward into the welcoming ambit of the microphone. “I knew Walter Benjamin,” he says. “More importantly, I have spent decades studying problems that engaged his thought. A man’s ideas, if they are at all original, are the property of no one, not even the man himself. To consider them such would be to deny them the autonomy that is their claim to significance. My intervention in Benjamin’s ideas has been criticised in some quarters. This, however, is the practice to which critical theory naturally gives rise. Benjamin, who was a gifted linguist, once wrote of the task of the literary translator, saying it was not to make the translated work appear as if it were not a translation, but rather to make the work appear what it is, foreign, the product of a different culture. And everything we read is a kind of translation. Everywhere is a foreign country. I lived for some years in America, and all the time there I considered myself a European. Here in Europe, I feel at times as if perhaps I have become an American.”
There is a shout from the audience, Adorno cannot hear the words but a moment later a person in another part stands up and begins shouting back. Two activists from opposing factions are having an argument. People tell them to sit down, order is restored though it is a false and uneasy order. He looks at Ulrike again but her attention is on the demonstrators. It is his wife Gretel who gazes lovingly at him, convinced as always by every word he says.
“Walter Benjamin’s intention was to join me and my colleagues in America. An imaginative novelist might speculate on the ensuing biographical events, but who could envisage the philosophical insights that would have resulted, except for a philosopher? There we see the limitation of fiction in relation to philosophy, for fiction deals with the particular, the accidental, the psychologically arresting; whereas philosophy, while traditionally it encompassed only the most abstract and conceptual, nevertheless, in Benjamin’s view and in my own, ought also to account for the particular, the unique, the never to be repeated or replicated. Then philosophy would finally have conquered fiction, and for the latter there would be no need. Why, we may ask, did Walter Benjamin, that most exquisite of prose writers and most discerning of critics, never write a novel, nor attempt one? It was because of this realisation he had, that a fully formed materialist conception of history would render fiction obsolete, like the magic-lantern shows he wrote about, which have been replaced by the distractions of cinema. Philosophy is truth, not fiction. And the truth is that Walter was a melancholy man as well as a genius. The truth is that even if the Gestapo had not pursued him, he would probably have killed himself in the end, if not in Spain then in some hotel room in New York, upset over yet another unrequited love affair. Was it his destiny? No, it was his predisposition. So forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, if I express my displeasure at the ease with which this man whom I knew has become an intellectual commodity.”
An activist gets to his feet and this time his words are clearly heard. “You deny freedom and are a fascist.”
Adorno answers calmly. “I deny the legitimacy of authoritarianism masquerading as free speech.”
But there are more shouts, drowning him out, and then, as if a pre-rehearsed moment in the proceedings has finally been reached, three young women bring out a banner made of pieces of paper or card taped together, painted with bright green letters that say something not entirely legible about workers of the world. The girls shuffle out of their row in the audience and bring the banner to the front, accidentally tearing it on the way, then when they reach the stage, completely unopposed, they discard the remains of the banner and two of them sing while the third begins removing her clothes. At this point the celebration of Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday reaches its end.
Adorno is in his office at the university next day when he gets a phone call. The woman says her name but he doesn’t catch it; he assumes it’s one of the protesters and considers putting the receiver down; but no, she isn’t phoning to apologise or launch a further attack, she had nothing to do with the demonstration; in fact, she says with an embarrassed laugh when he questions her, she’s an elderly and, she likes to think, perfectly respectable lady. She simply wants to meet and discuss with him a matter concerning Walter Benjamin. This afternoon, perhaps?
She proposes a park; the weather recommends it, though there is also an air of mystery to the assignation. Is the conversation to be of a kind she would prefer no one to overhear? Parks, in Adorno’s mind, are a place for clandestine lovers wishing to proclaim an illusory freedom. The woman says she’s elderly but that could still signify fewer years than his own. Her voice is beautiful.