Seyla Benhabib in Boston Review:
I first arrived in Frankfurt, in this city of immigrants and exiles, in the fall of 1980, as a foreign student and scholar whose life was forever changed by her encounter with it. In Frankfurt I met brilliant friends and scholars from all over the world who gathered in Jürgen Habermas’s “Doktoranden-Kolloquium” on Monday evenings in the old Department of Philosophy on Dantestrasse—alas, a building which no longer exists! In Frankfurt, I also learned about many famous intellectuals whose lives intersected for various periods in this city of migrants, among them none other than Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno.
Any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted from the start by the profound dislike which Arendt in particular seems to have borne towards Adorno. In 1929 Adorno was among members of the faculty of the University of Frankfurt who would be evaluating Arendt’s first husband Günther Anders’s habilitation. Adorno found the work unsatisfactory, thus bringing to an end Anders’s hopes for a university career. It is also in this period that Arendt’s notorious statement regarding Adorno—“Der kommt uns nicht ins Haus,” meaning that Adorno was not to set foot in their apartment in Frankfurt—was uttered.
This hostility on Arendt’s part never diminished, while Adorno encountered it with a cultivated politesse. Arendt’s temper flared up several more times at Adorno: first, when she was wrongly convinced that Adorno and his colleagues were preventing the publication of Walter Benjamin’s posthumous manuscripts, and secondly, when Adorno’s critique of Heidegger—The Jargon of Authenticity—appeared in 1964.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.