SOURCE: “Adorno in America,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 120-37.

In the following essay, Jay analyzes the theoretical, sociological, and aesthetic work Adorno did while living and working in the United States.

The exemplary anecdotes are known to us all. Adorno arrives in America in 1938 to work on Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project. Lazarsfeld writes of his new acquaintance: “He looks as you would image a very absent-minded German professor, and he behaves so foreign that I feel like a member of the Mayflower society.”¹ Adorno travels to the Project's offices in an abandoned brewery in Newark, New Jersey, through a tunnel under the Hudson River and admits “I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater of Oklahoma.”² The attempt to adapt his ideas to the needs of the Project soon proves...