European Perspectives
1 total work
After years of exile during the Second World War, Theodor Adorno returned home to Germany. Having stated, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, " what would he now have to say about the remnants and transformations of the society from which he had barely escaped a few years before? The answer lies in Adorno's postwar work - trenchant essays, aphorisms, and radio addresses created in a wide-ranging attempt to reintroduce psychoanalysis, critical thinking, and philosophy to a culture that, in the wake of Nazism, had an "inability to mourn" and no sense of "memory." Between 1959 and his death ten years later, Adorno published fourteen paperback collections of his work, often combining revised and new essays - publications intended for an educated, politically and culturally influential audience. Two collections of those works are combined in this single volume - Interventions: Nine Critical Models (1963) and Catchwords: Critical Models II (1969). These books are passionate examples of Adorno's postwar commitment to unmasking the culture that engendered Nazism and its antihumanist nightmare.