“Worlds connect me with Adorno, worlds separate me from Adorno,” says Klaus Theweleit.
After all, he repeatedly criticized Adorno's “right-wing gesture” in strong words.
The fact that he has now received the city's Theodor W. Adorno Prize has again met with criticism.
Every three years the city of Frankfurt am Main awards the prize, endowed with fifty thousand euros, on Adorno's birthday, September 11th.
As if to prove that the jury's choice is justified, Theweleit Adornos holds up "Jargon of Authenticity", published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt in 1964 and immediately devoured, literally plowed through by the student Theweleit - he shows the pen traces at the desk of the Paulskirche.
Each page is densely commented.
Eva-Maria Magel
Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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With his study "Männerphantasien" (Male Fantasies), published in 1977 in two volumes by the Frankfurter Verlag Roter Stern, Theweleit shaped generations that this book was a "thunderclap", said Ina Hartwig (SPD), head of the cultural department at the beginning of the ceremony on Saturday in the Paulskirche.
Theweleit is "an influencer avant la lettre".
In her laudation, literary critic Sigrid Löffler analyzed how this wild thinking escaped the German studies seminar and how it came about that Theweleit's first and best-known book had such an impact.
She explained that the “discourse epic that transcends all borders” extends far into the present, because the connections between power, violence, desire and fear of the feminine, with which Theweleit's fascism theory operates, can also include present-day terror.
A plea for pop culture
The first adult whose language and thinking Theweleit could accept, the antidote to Heidegger, whom the young Theweleit encountered at first perplexed until Adorno's judgment shed light on him: This is how Theweleit, born in 1942, describes his first engagement with Adorno. At the end of his acceptance speech, he will come to the conclusion that the prevention of violence in the world is their aim, but the days of dialectics, binary thinking, are over. So he continues to disagree with Adorno, especially when it comes to the question of the “barbarism” of pop and subculture.
Casually associative, as Theweleit meanders everything into his social and discourse analyzes, including current pop, in his acceptance speech he also came to the four musicians who framed the ceremony with improvisations on Adorno's string quartet from 1921: If only Adorno had got away from his students just play Free Jazz! What Theweleit wrote in great detail in the city's golden book will only be shared with a few. But what other life and reading stories and Adorno references are in the large bundle of sheets that Theweleit wanted to present can soon be read in full on the city's digital culture portal, so the promise. Because even extended, Theweleit's speaking time was nowhere near enough.