A curious tribute: The strange case of Adorno and Kracauer

Abstract

This paper deals with the role reversal between Kracauer and Adorno – a product of their wrecked homoerotic bond in the early 1920s –, which affected their lifetime relationship and approach to philosophy. Although for different reasons, that failure – concealed and revealed in The Curious realist, Adorno's tribute to Kracauer – was experienced by both as an insurmountable trauma, which continued to inform their adult relation yet mutilated of its erotic aspects. Still, the reiteration of that crucial event represents also a kind of paradoxical fulfilment of the promise of happiness of youth. Indeed, in this way, those strange friends partly managed to fulfil the greatest demand of that love so helplessly impossible for them: the miracle of a forever beyond death, with the unwavering hope of being gladly united. Such union is the most powerful cipher of final conciliation, which glimmers on the horizon as a redemption of the suffering that shaped the life and work of Kracauer and Adorno.