Questions on

Intellectual Emigration

Theodor W. Adorno

Let me immediately take up the distinction between immigration and

emigration. Many of you might find it pedantic. But as an expression
of an attitude it appears to me to be considerable. The immigrant is the
incomer [Einwanderer] who enters more or less voluntarily because he or
she is attracted by the limitless opportunities. The emigrant is the one
expelled [vertriebene], the refugee, who seeks and — as we have done in
America — finds shelter. If we wanted to call ourselves immigrants, we
would be in the right in the sense of our immigration papers, but at the
same time we would deny our actual situation. We would express a zeal
that our American friends probably notice — even if they are too polite
to say so.
If we were in fact immigrants we could present ourselves as a spiritu-
ally [geistig] homogenous group — roughly like the religious sects during
the early settlement of America. What unites us, however, is not a fun-
damental attitude shared from the outset. What unites us is that we have
been thrown out [verstoßen]of Germany, something negative, which all
politically unconscious emigrants experienced as accidental, external, as
a hardship that was done to them. To refer to our lot as a common destiny
reminds one of the fatal German saying, “We’re all in the same boat.”
Such consolation degrades the individual to a mere member of the group
into which he was thrown and deceives about the horror of the world by
passing off senselessness as sense.
The questions, however, to which I want to draw your attention — 
namely, the ones that refer to so-called contribution — depend on such con-

Social Text 99 • Vol. 27, No. 2 • Summer 2009

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2008-029  © 2009 Duke University Press
German original © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1986 159
 siderations. For the idea of contribution implies the claim of deliberateness:
that one originally feels attracted by a sphere of life and that one wants to
prove to oneself and others the right to be accepted into the new circle on
account of one’s accomplishment. But who among us could claim that?
Without the moment of freedom the talk about contribution turns into a
transfiguration of conformity, of making oneself useful, finally of one’s self-
abandonment. It is as though we — because we escaped the gas chambers
of the Germans — wanted to recommend ourselves with the words, “Please
excuse our having been born,” and pay a premium, as it were, for being
spared our lives. Through such gestures we would insult our hosts, just as
we think we are obliging them, and mock democratic ideals. Human rights
were not intended as a reward for obedient conduct.
If our experience places us under an obligation, it is to resist the
oppression and injustice that today even a person who is wholly taken up
with self-preservation would have to recognize. We may not, however,
develop our morality according to the view of the commercial world,
namely, that one should offer people remuneration. Our gratitude is more
serious: it should not be misused in order to deliver high-sounding jus-
tifications for bustle [Betriebamkeit], joining in, and customer service.
The material expropriation by the Germans forces countless among us to
conform. It is exactly such pressure, however, that the intellectuals have
to withstand through self-reflection. Otherwise they betray the Geist to
which they lay claim. They can thank the Americans by sticking to their
insight and experience, by comparing them with the new experience — but
also with what happened in Europe — and continuing it; by expressing the
insight they have without stealing a glance at success. The intellectual,
however, who conforms to the formula, “This is how things are done
over here,” behaves more or less like those Jews in Germany of whom one
joked that they had taken part in the Nuremberg Party Rally and carried
signs that said “Out we go!” “In we go!” is the same thing, seen from the
other side. If the demand for intellectual independence is not consistent
with the dominant habits of American intellectual life [Geistesleben], then
it is more decent — as regards America — to oppose such habits than it is
to subscribe to and perhaps even outdo them. Such silly customs lie on
the surface and can be seen through all too easily. It is up to us to get in
touch with the exponents of the American Geist who are different: who
do not conform.
There are intellectual spheres in which the notion of contribution
has its place. What I mean are the individual academic fields, particularly
the natural-scientific and technical disciplines as well as the theorems
of formal logic and methodology that are part of the natural sciences. In
other words, the so-called positive sciences in which a new discovery or
invention has always and everywhere been rated a contribution. No one

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will deny that the emigrants have made such contributions in abundance.
However, the more one approaches the humanities, the more problematic
the idea of contribution becomes. Granted, the discovery of new philologi-
cal interrelations, the restoration of a difficult musical text from the Middle
Ages, even the dating of a certain painting might be part of the formula
for a contribution. But no unbiased person can close his or her eyes to the
fact that the essence of the humanities does not actually consist in that.
Rather, it is inseparable from insight into meaning, coherence, and con-
tradiction; it is inseparable from a critical moment. Even the biggest work
of art — and it especially — contains this critical moment, and thereby the
demand that the beholder equal it. This demand, however, applies to every
insight into that which takes place in history and society. Even a historical
fact — however coarse it may appear to be — becomes understandable only
when one relates it to the life process of society as a whole, equally to its
positive and negative moments, finally to truth itself. In other words, any
way of looking at a problem in the humanities — even if it were a statistical
finding of modern sociology — presses toward philosophical theory in order
to be insight at all. This, however, is never a contribution in the sense of
a palpable result but rather reflection about the results and finally about
the essence of contribution itself. For contribution naively presupposes the
merit of the order to which one is supposed to contribute something. It is
precisely the merit of the order that is to be questioned. If great philosophy
at its prime, namely, with Hegel, equated the work of the mind [Arbeit des
Geistes] with the principle of negation, then that reflects the recognition of
the obligation to transcend the merely given and existing — not only for the
sake of the possibility that something better might be achieved, but also to
be able to grasp the merely given in the first place. One only has to contrast
such a notion of conceptual work with the talk that something positive has
to be accomplished in order to become aware of the shallowness, smugness,
and mendaciousness of such conventional wisdom.
It seems to me that this is what the emigrant intellectuals are to blame
for. In general, they are satisfied with making contributions (be it actual
ones or those to the cultural bustle), elude any uncomfortable reflection,
and deny themselves any seriously deviating productivity. Some form
sectarian schools of philosophy that are just as specialized and limited as
their German models. Most of the time, however, philosophical thought
is left to kitsch and noncommittal worldview literature [unverbindlichen
Weltanschauungsliteratur] whose ideals are already roughly tailored to
the standards of Hollywood — even before the final editing of a film is
undertaken.
This is not wholly a matter of individual guilt. The organization of
American intellectual life [Geistesleben], which to a great extent reflects
industrial organization, leaves it up to every intellectual to either integrate

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 him- or herself or to remain a powerless outsider. What America lacks are
loopholes. By contrast, Europe — which is not organized down to the last
detail — offered its independent intellectuals such hideouts. Intellectual
work [geistige Arbeit], which is unprotected, is referred to the market and
competition and is controlled by consumers to a hitherto unknown degree.
Natural-born citizens who know their way around the branching of the sys-
tem can at best evade its constraints. We — who encounter the all-powerful
institutions wherever we look — are tempted to resignedly relent and to
even make a moral principle out of our compliance. In reality, it should be
our task to deny — as far as that is possible — to the established bustle the
corresponding and standardized contribution. Instead of again denying
ourselves critical thoughts, which are at home in our way of thinking and
have been eradicated in Europe, we should develop them in relation to the
new situation.
Let me give you two examples. One of the most successful social
scientists of the Emigration, a man of great abilities, once had the idea to
measure culture by means of the methodology that over here has evolved
to an extraordinary degree and conduct statistical surveys on the con-
sumption of cultural goods. He had stopped to reflect critically when
faced with the notion of culture. He contented himself with the idea that
culture was the consumption of books, music, paintings without even as
little as asking himself if culture did not consist in precisely that form of
experience and spontaneous memory that resisted its translation into facts
and numbers. He did not ask himself, in other words, if culture was not
precisely the opposite of those thought processes with which he proposed
to investigate it. Please do not misinterpret my words as being supportive
of cultural conservatism that plays off an allegedly organic culture against
technological civilization. Rather, I think that it is precisely the all-too-
swift application of technical methods to culture that stands in the way of
cultural critique. The sociologist I was talking about — who, by the way,
will have probably changed his mind in the meantime — has closed his eyes
to the fact that consumer culture is no longer what it claims to be — simply
because he has equated culture with intellectual consumption [geistiger
Konsum]. On the contrary, it is exactly the devouring of bestsellers, films,
and standard symphonies that destroys the relation to intellectual goods
that it supposedly testifies to. To experience an intellectual object is not to
enjoy it but rather to grasp it — and that necessarily means to understand
it critically. Culture that is blindly accepted and branded as something of
absolute worth is already barbarism.
A second example: a German philosopher who had been close to the
so-called existentialist philosophy of Heidegger and whom one had been
unable to acquit of certain nationalist leanings over there told me that
he was happy about having to write in English rather than German: the

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new language forced him to think through every thought immeasurably
more clearly than before. I do not want to decide whether that compul-
sion was actually salutary in his particular case or not. But I do know that
enthusiasm for the new language, which none of us can write in the way
at least some of us could write in German, not only amounts to the fact
that one abandons all nuances and expressive aspects of thought — that
is, the things of which a thought’s life actually consists — for the sake
of communication and comprehensibility. It also boils down to the fact
that one coarsens and reifies the things themselves — the consequence of
which is that their substance disappears. By pretending to cultivate noble
simplicity and silent greatness and shedding European tortuousness and
extravagance, one does not actually achieve a crystal-clear wording of
one’s ideas. Rather, one cuts them into little chunks — one is even afraid to
put long sentences down in writing — and stirs them in a general sauce of
intellectual [geistigen] communication. What defines one as an individual
is barely good enough to serve as a mark of the colorful personality and
sufficiently distinguish one from one’s competitors whom one otherwise
equals in all respects. No thought is independent of the form of its commu-
nication: assuming so already presupposes a distinction between thing and
experience that stems from the most disastrous tendencies of contempo-
rary society. It befits thought to critically describe this distinction instead
of tacitly submitting to it. If one tries to make Geist altogether practical
and to attach an instruction to every thought as to what one is to do with
it, one accepts the existing circumstances within whose framework this
practice takes place. It would be the task of thought, however, to analyze
the circumstances themselves.
All of these things are — as I know only too well — relatively formal
indications. In reality there is no other answer to the questions that I have
posed than elaborated philosophical theory itself. It, however, cannot
even be hinted at in a contribution to a discussion. Let me instead and
at a stroke sum up in four theses what I deem to be legitimate demands
on the intellectual Emigration [Forderung an die intellektuelle Emigration].
Before that, however, I want to concede to you that the gesture of demand
possesses something that is as unpleasant as the format of terse theses,
and I want to ask you to excuse the immoderateness of expression with
the difficulty of the issue.

1. The thinking person in the Emigration should not fool him- or herself
about beginning life anew. Instead, one should consider one’s past life, the
sum of one’s experience, the European catastrophe, and the difficulties in
the new country and come to the obvious conclusion. Even if people preach
to us that a transfer of our European past is impossible, we should at least
remain conscious of the fact that people who do not delete themselves as

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 individuals are not blank slates and that the notion of beginning anew con-
stitutes an illusion in the intellectual realm. We have no other choice than
to transfer the nontransferable, as it were.

2. The superior strength of the immense industrial apparatus over the indi-
vidual should not entice us into idolizing the world in which we live and that
dominates us. Rather, we should become aware of the possibilities contained
in the overpowering reality over here and — by virtue of these possibilities — 
try to resist the pressure of the ubiquitous machinery.

3. We should remain unflustered when conducting our material work. That

is to say, we should endeavor to express what we have in mind purely and
without regard for ends and communication. In a world in which everything
is communication, in reality only he or she who is not cleverly intent on
speaking to people speaks to them.

4. We should not let ourselves be made stupid. We should not deduce pro-
hibitions on thought from the compulsion to render everything in facts and
numbers. While we should learn everything that can heal us of the illusory
moment of German thought, we should at the same time not curtail our
imagination, speculation, and unconcerned insight. The more the universal
control mechanisms of the academic bustle [wissenschaftbetrieb] check the
correctness of each and every one of our thoughts, the more we should
remain aware of the fact that truth is only contained in the thought that
manages to slip through the mechanism of control.

I have reached the end. Let me repeat: my suggestions were not

intended as an unworldly homily. The dangers that I indicated stem from
the need to sustain one’s life — a need to which the intellectuals among the
emigrants are subject like everybody else. We are caught up in the Ger-
man temptation to not be able to tell a lie without at the same time believ-
ing it — of all things German, that has remained with us. What I advise
is neither defiance nor a situation in which we are viewed as curiosities
who — for the sake of their peculiarity — are gaped at and perhaps also fed.
What I mean to say is that whenever we are forced to make concessions,
we should not accept them as our own will with beat of drum and flourish
of trumpets. Rather, we should accept them in the harsh knowledge of
the compulsion weighing on us. Especially when we are in earnest about
achieving a better society, we may hope to contribute to that end only if
we do not blindly devote ourselves to the existing.

 — Translated by Mark Kalbus

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