![]() ![]() Gretel assisted in rewriting and revising but also in a “political” context as well, helping to keep Theodor’s contributions on task and avoid needless provocation of rivals. Gretel was instrumental in not only recording the early conversations that produced the first draft of the work, but also in editing the work as it progressed. During this time, Horkheimer and Theodor began work on what would become The Dialectic of Enlightenment. They emigrated to New York in 1938, where Theodor joined Max Horkheimer at the relocated Institute for Social Research, now at Columbia University. Theodor had been studying at Oxford for several years, and the two were married in England in 1937. ![]() In the mid-1930s Gretel left Germany for England amid the intensifying discrimination and violence against Jews by the Nazi regime. Such was the close connection between Gretel and both Theodor and Benjamin that she was quoted as saying she “had the opportunity of marrying two geniuses and that it ‘turned out’ to be Adorno”. Her relationship with Benjamin was especially close, and she collected and safeguarded much of his work when he left Germany for Paris following the rise of the Nazi party and helped support him financially through his time in exile. Gretel was responsible for introducing Theodor to a number of others who would later be associated with the legacy of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, also known as the “Frankfurt School”. Literary theorist Walter Benjamin was a mutual friend of both Gretel and her future husband Theodor, and Gretel’s significant correspondence with Benjamin currently comprises the most extensive examples of her writing. ![]() And yet these appearances collectively argue for a greater role in the legacy of critical theory than she is usually assigned, and urge us to potentially reconsider the nature and prominence of both “product” and “process” in intellectual production.īorn Marguerite Karplus on June 10, 1902, the eldest daughter of a middle-class Jewish family, Gretel held a PhD in chemistry at the age of 23 and was well-acquainted with intellectuals active in 1920s Berlin. Gretel Adorno is a fascinating figure whose legacy, owing to the present absence of most primary sources or direct scholarship concerning her, must be reconstructed from her appearances, often as a marginal figure, in the lives of others. ![]()
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