A Short Introduction to

Adornos Mediation
between Kultur and Culture
Mark Kalbus

On 17 December 1956, Theodor W. Adorno gave a talk entitled Some

Aspects of a Comparison between German and American Culture at the
Historical Society of the U.S. Armys Third Armored Division in Hanau
near Frankfurt am Main. His lecture, as he told his older colleague Max
Horkheimer in a letter written in October of the following year, had been
received exceedingly well; the atmosphere, he continued, was extremely
pleasant and the generals exhibited a friendliness and humanity, even
towards their own soldiers, that had something surprising and very agreeable about it.1 On 9 July 1958, Adorno gave this talk again. This time,
however, the lecture was held in German at an annual event of continuing education, called the Hessische Hochschulwochen fr staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung, in Bad Wildungen.
As Adornos preliminary remarks make clear, he had not intended his
talk for transcription and publication. Although he failed to be frank about
the precise motive that impelled him to oppose the pieces dissemination
in print, it is fairly clear that he was aware of just how fundamentally it
contradicted his older analyses of U.S. society, most notably the one contained in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 2 On the other hand, the assessment of
the American way of life in Kultur and Culture is not so different from
the one propounded in parts of Minima Moralia or his Critical Models
of the 1950s and 1960s. 3 On the Question: What Is German? for
instance, immediately comes to mind. Kultur and Culture also shares
the intention of Critical Models: to intervene in reified consciousness. It

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shows Adorno from his most practical side, as someone deeply concerned
about the consolidation of the young German democracy.
Kultur and Culture is further intriguing because it represents one
of the rare instances in which Adorno occupied himself with the topic of
culture proper as opposed to the culture industry, cultural criticism,
or the administration of culture, to which he devoted lengthy and wellknown investigations. One might thus claim that the piece under scrutiny
constitutes a comparatively Anglo-American take on the matter, one that
is not entirely free from connotations of cultural anthropology. What
makes the talk vintage Adorno, however, is the fact that the intention
behind the speakers investigation of German and American ways of life
isin the final analysiscritical and dialectical in nature. In fact, it is a
prime example of what the Frankfurt School understood by immanent
critique. The object subjected to this critique is, of course, the Enlightenment, both in the sense of a more or less concrete historical epoch as well
as in the sense of humans increasing technical mastery over nature.
In Kultur and Culture, Adorno claimed that the historical process
of the Enlightenmentboth in its political and in its scientific formhad
been wholly successful, even victorious, in the United States. From his
perspective, the bourgeois and republican revolution of 177689 had created a purely bourgeois and democratic social order, a society that lacked
any traces of an old gentry or aristocracy and consequently comprised
free and equal citizens. Moreover, he saw in America a purely capitalist
and commercial society, or, as he put it, a barter society, in which the
exchange principle reigned supreme.4 What he meant was that its free
and equal citizens constantly engaged in market exchanges as free agents,
in other words, as buyers and sellers of goods and services who were uninhibited by any market-distorting feudal and thus precapitalist residues.
In his masterpiece, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
which depicted the disfigurement of life by the exchange principle,
Adorno illustrated the time lag between the thoroughly enlightened
United States and the semi-traditionalist Old World by comparing the
continents youth: in a passage of the book titled Olet, he contended that
in Europe a certain measure of the aristocratic reluctance to receive financial remuneration in return for rendered services or favors had survived.
Making money by means other than privileges or control (by production,
for instance) had been considered to be decidedly bourgeois and American.
While every child of the European upper class had blushed when he or
she had been given money as a present, no American child (not even one
who could boast wealthy parents) had qualms about earning a few cents by
delivering a paper.5 Adorno, however, also claimed (and this is where the
dialectical twist came in) that the American democracy of the earnings-

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Adornos Mediation between Kultur and Culture

principle, that is, the absence of airs and graces as well as the belief that
labor did not sully, directly contributed to the continuation of what is
utterly anti-democratic, economic injustice, human degradation.6
Yet America also differed from Europe in another sense, one that
more fundamentally pertained to the sphere of culture. The origin of the
term culture is to be found in the Latin word colere (colo, colui, cultus) that
means both (1) to care for, to look after, to farm, to till, as well
as (2) to worship. Parenthetically, one could infer that tilling the earth
(unlike hunting) and worshipping deitiesi.e., engaging in agriculture
and practicing cultswere thus actions that distinguished early humans
from animals.7 In America, Adorno argued, culture was grasped as
signifying the exertion of control over ones natural surroundings as well
as human nature (particularly the subconscious). From the vantage point
of Americans, the term culture referred to the active shaping of the social
and natural reality. Europeans understanding of the word in question,
however, was much less assertive. As Adorno saw it, the Old World was
cultured because it cared for, looked after, and preserved nature. The
example he drew on to illustrate his point was a certain type of wine
whose unadulterated taste reminded its consumer of earth and grapes.
The European notion of culture thus did not come on as strong as the
American; in a sense, it was more mindful, diffident, and conservative,
and thereby indicative of the fact that the Enlightenment in the sense of
humans increasing technical mastery over nature hadnot yet been wholly
victorious in the Old World. To Adorno, the most important upshot of
European self-reflection and internalization was what is commonly referred
to as Geisteskultur. Such intellectual culture, however, tended to entail its
own risksthe most alarming probably being a neglect of praxis.
By immanently critiquing the Enlightenment, both in its historical
and philosophical sense, Adorno hoped to transcendas he expressed
it in Kultur and Culturethe tragic fatality of German-American
relations.8 He wanted to overcome the false dichotomy that had for so
long plagued the European in America, namely, the compulsion to either
uncritically identify oneself with, or hypercritically isolate oneself from,
the United States. Instead, Adorno tried to achieve a true dialectic
between his American experience and what he himself represented.9 Consequently, although he always explicitly distinguished between European
and American understandings of culture, he simultaneously rejected the
anti-American opposition between an allegedly profound German Kultur
and the United States (according to the prejudice) mere civilization. In
the famous work of postwar sociology entitled Gruppenexperiment (Group
Experiment), Adorno and his colleagues at the Institute of Social Research
had traced such stereotypes back to the psychological motive of collective

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narcissism.10 This is only one example demonstrating that his intention to

mediate between the Old and the New World went beyond mere rhetoric.
The translation of Kultur und Culture (which even in Germany is
anything but well known) into English has been long overdue. The pitfalls
are twofold: syntactically, the texts involved sentencesa signature trait
of Adornos, so to speakhave at times proven difficult to translate. This
difficulty was exacerbated by the talks spontaneous nature, or, to be more
precise, by the fact that it was improvised. The sentence structure occasionally reflects this. Semantically, Adornos Hegelian vocabulary has at
times led the translator to choose three or four English terms to signify one
German word. The root Geist, for instance, has been rendered as mind,
spirit, spiritualization, intellectual, depending on the context and
grammatical modifications, or has even been left untranslated. Owing to
the words centrality to the talk, the German terms have in each case been
included in brackets.
In Minima Moralia and elsewhere, Adorno habitually referred to his
sojourn in the United States with the intriguing phrase intellectual emigration (rather than, say, immigration or exile). It seemed appropriate
to pair Kultur and Culture here with a translation of another of Adornos
lectures, Questions on Intellectual Emigration, which was delivered at
the Jewish Club of Los Angeles on 27 May 1945. Whereas Kultur and
Culture looks back to the United Statesover there[drben], as Adorno
puts itfrom the perspective of Germany in the 1950s, Questions on
Intellectual Emigration looks back to Germany from the United States a
mere two weeks after the German surrender at Rheims that ended World
War II. The lecture is fascinating not only for its mode of address to its
presumed audience and its fierce commitment to intellectual nonconformity, but also for its adoption of the proper noun the Emigration [die
Emigration] to describe the diaspora.
Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel IV, 19501969
(Correspondence IV, 19501969), ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 453; my translation.
2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklrung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998).
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974); Critical Models: Interventions and Catch
Words, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Kultur und Culture (Kultur and Culture), in
Hessische Hochschulwochen fr staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung (Hessian University
Weeks for Continuing Education in Policial Science) (Bad Homburg: Max Gehlen,
1958), 24659.
5. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 195.

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6. Ibid.
7. Klaus Hansen, Kultur und Kulturwissenschaft (Culture and Cultural Studies),
2nd ed. (Tbingen: Francke, 2000), 1415.
8. Adorno, Kultur und Culture, 254.
9. Ibid.
10. Institut fr Sozialforschung, Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht (Group
Experiment: Report on a Study), ed. Friedrich Pollock (Frankfurt am Main: Euro
pische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), 487.

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