episode in German history. Crude Marxist interpretations have seen Fascism and National Socialism as symptoms of a capitalist society overcome by its own contradictions. It was, the Marxists said, a last ditch attempt to save the capitalist system through authoritarianism. Others have sought to combine Marxist theory with psychoanalysis. The proponents of such theories were prominent in the Ger...

“It is a very strange relationship.”1 Writing to his mother in January 1947, when the collaboration with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus was reaching its end, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno would still fi nd their connection impossible to describe. From today’s greater distance we in turn cannot presume to say defi nitively what it is that went on there. Certainly, a novel was written; certainly, a d...