“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...
