The Secret Knowledge

1967. West Germany

Theodor Adorno wakes, rolls and sees Ulrike still asleep beside him, pale shoulder studded with fine freckles. Late afternoon sunshine filters through the thin curtains of her apartment, it’s in one of Frankfurt’s noisier suburbs, swelled by immigrants and perpetually permeated, it seems, by amplified music. Teddie must be home before seven.

Praxis is the ensemble of means for minimising material necessity. It therefore becomes identical with pleasure. Yet pleasure is denied within a society that asserts only rational practicality. Being married and sixty-four years old shouldn’t stop a man fucking his student. Ulrike appreciates the hermetic character of play. Her record collection includes only the latest rock-and-roll releases, nevertheless her non-compulsory attendance at his course on advanced dialectics has indicated to him acute awareness of the fundamental contradiction those commodities represent. Sex, too, can be understood negatively. That he is not with his wife should not imply infidelity. He has never kept secrets from Gretel, except when too nugatory to be worth mentioning.

Lying with her back to him, Ulrike’s short brown hair leaves naked and exposed the vertebrae of her neck. Teddie traces the undulating ridge with his finger, she stirs and sighs, suddenly conscious of comfort, warmth, intrusion.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Mmm.”

She doesn’t turn; her acceptance, which is rejection, disappoints him. Instead of leaving the bed as he ought, he gazes at the ceiling, noting its hairline cracks and peeling paint. One day Ulrike will be a philosophy lecturer, as he is now. At least that’s the dream, though he doubts she’s up to it.

She becomes fully awake. “Want some coffee?” she asks, sitting up and reaching for her cigarettes and lighter. Teddie doesn’t care either way. He answers a different question.

“Tomorrow would have been Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday.” Even as he says it, the future conditional evokes an inescapable antinomy. “There’s a symposium at the university.”

“I know.”

“Will you come?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I’m to be the main speaker.”

“Will Gretel be there?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think so.”

Ulrike breathes blue smoke into the static air. “Sure, I’ll come.”

Just how little truth converges with subjective idea, with intention, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. Benjamin’s dictum — the paradox of beauty is that it appears — is less enigmatic than it sounds.

“What’ll you say?” she asks.

“Obviously I won’t offer an hommage or appreciation. That would be vulgar.”

She gets up, standing thin and naked in thought beside the bed. Her breasts are small, there is something almost emaciated about her appearance, yet youthful, defiant. She could be contemplating her own execution. She picks up some underwear, pulls a shirt over her head, begins to walk away. “What if there’s another protest?” She peeks through the curtains at whatever isn’t happening in the void outside.

“I’m sure there won’t be.”

“The movement’s gaining support.”

“Its motives are compromised.”

At a recent seminar a group of students came and stood in front of the lectern, completely blocking Adorno’s view of the audience. One of them read a series of pledges and demands ranging from solidarity with the people of Vietnam to complaints about the university cafeteria, then there was an open discussion about the meaning of political action in which Adorno took no part.

“They won’t disrupt the symposium,” he says. “Not given the sort of saintly figure Benjamin has become.”

She turns. “You sound almost jealous.”

Ulrike’s swinging rump departs to the kitchen while Teddie remains prostrate, wondering if there will be coffee or even further sex before he goes. Of course he isn’t jealous. His position in the Institute makes him custodian of the Benjamin archive, while his work on the same questions his late friend confronted, his duty to correct error, becomes easily equated in some minds with the false notion of legacy. All that is least essential in a philosopher can be summarised under the heading “biography”. Hence the snide attacks and mischief-making of people like Arendt. What matters to them is not truth-content, but the preservation of a dead man’s every sacred word, even the wrong ones. That is touching but misguided. Were Walter Benjamin alive today, thinks Teddie, he would have destroyed and rewritten a large proportion of the texts for which he is celebrated. He would have cared little for the birthday festivities planned in his honour.

He hears the water hiss and begin to boil. He knows he has never been handsome or attractive in the reified sense of movie actors; but there will always be discerning women for whom a discourse on Hegel is more seductive than a bunch of flowers. Ulrike is able to see beneath the social superstructure; he has taught her how. She comes back holding a striped mug in her hand. “I’ve never thought to ask you, Teddie. When’s your birthday?”

“September eleven.”

She sips, pauses. “That’s a long way off.”

“You don’t think we’ll be together then?”

“I mean, it’s still only July.”

No coffee, no sex. When Teddie gets home he finds his wife has already left for the theatre alone. He needs to prepare for the symposium. He should like to say something about Benjamin’s position on Heidegger; Teddie has discussed his own in his most recent book, Negative Dialectics. The first edition has already sold out, a new one is being printed. Everyone has an opinion about it, even if they don’t understand it, which is the majority position. Adorno is accused of obscurity, jargon-mongering, the very things he opposes. When the world is discussed in the clearest possible terms it becomes infinitely opaque. Are there existing things that cannot be considered concepts? A clear enough question, surely. That phoney Heidegger merely ontologises the pre-existing; Walter saw clearly enough the fascism already implicit in Heidegger’s return to the mythological.

Not enough, though, to expound on negative dialectics, even given the level of public interest, not after recent events, the student shot by riot police. Adorno made his lecture class stand for a minute’s silence in honour of the victim. One could call it a sentimental and therefore anti-philosophical gesture, like the Benjamin symposium with its tang of hero-worship, but the point was to recognise the significance of the present, not dwell on an invented past. Some of the students are speaking of a revolutionary moment, they say the Federal Republic is a fascist state, utter nonsense. They condemn a country where there are free elections and praise Mao for terrorising his own people. Their condition is despair, like Walter’s, but also, fatally, it is disillusion.

He should address the question they keep asking him. At one of his lectures a girl came and handed him a teddy bear, simply trying to embarrass him, and said to the audience, how is critical theory to become critical practice? Some applauded, others jeered, but the question dogs him. He is a thinker, a theoretician, but what the youth of today demand is action, any sort of action. Class struggle is a mythology that lies conveniently within their grasp. By asking people to think, he becomes identified with the forces of oppression.

He has been accused of suppressing or distorting Benjamin’s work because Benjamin was insufficiently Marxist, or else too much of a Marxist. His frantic and ultimately doomed efforts to give Benjamin research money and get him out of Europe are portrayed as manipulation, the arbitrary exertion of power. He has been a selective and partisan editor of their published correspondence. Let’s be honest about all this. If Benjamin had not killed himself then he would not be on the pedestal posterity has made for him. He’s like Anne Frank, a symbol that becomes a substitute for thought, a point of adhesion for pre-existing emotion. What of the forgotten? What of those denied even the status of concept?

He’s beginning to feel his age. Two tasks lie before him: his aesthetic theory, which he expects to be his most lasting work, and his book on Beethoven. Perhaps he should talk about one of those. As long as some bearded hippie doesn’t intervene.

He’s already asleep when Gretel gets back, doesn’t see her until next morning. Of course she’ll be coming to the symposium; how could she miss such an important event? She loved Walter too. But she hasn’t heard anything about the programme, nor can Teddie enlighten her. He understands it’s a university event, but the organisation of it has been ramshackle, he’s not even sure if it’s intended for academics or the general public. Somebody noticed the anniversary, that’s all. Felt it should be marked. Adorno’s publisher is possibly involved. Perhaps the entire thing is a marketing exercise.

It takes place that night; Adorno shows up and among the audience in the large, well-filled auditorium he sees at least three women with whom he has been romantically involved, a few others with whom he’d like to be. He’s expecting to give a lecture but the stage has a row of chairs behind a long table, microphones for half a dozen participants. Nobody bothered to tell him anything, explain what was wanted. There are many faces he doesn’t recognise, faces who appear not to recognise him.

A young fellow comes and shakes him by the hand, introduces himself as chairman for the evening, journalist on one of the left-wing newspapers. Can’t be any older than thirty, thinning hair and thick-rimmed glasses, an earnest demeanour that gives him the air of someone in fancy dress. Other participants materialise; a lecturer Adorno knows, a writer, a woman who’s apparently a film-maker, people from the margins of Frankfurt’s intelligentsia. Such eclecticism mirrors only the most unfortunate aspect of Benjamin’s endeavour. Adorno foresees a talk on Benjamin’s use of hashish.

Eventually it gets going; they all have ten minutes to make whatever claim they can on the public’s attention. The film-maker is planning a work based on Benjamin’s life; this is the first that Adorno has heard of the project, which strikes him as tasteless and banal, the epitome of everything to which Benjamin stood in opposition. The lecturer then uses his ration of time to speak about the student protests and police violence, asking what Benjamin would have thought of it and reaching no conclusion more illuminating than that Walter would have been as upset about it as everyone else in the room. He was, that is to say, one of us, an emblem like those Baroque images he discussed so penetratingly, whose captions can signify anything we want them to.

The writer’s offering is strangest and most outrageous of all: a story about Walter, a fictional depiction of the man Adorno knew personally, as though he were some legendary hero. This, thinks Adorno, is the limit point of historical sentimentalism; his gorge is rising even before he hears the first words of the story, the introduction is bad enough. Benjamin, the writer explains, was fascinated by the figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and his theory that there are other worlds like our own, but with altered histories. Sheer nonsense, Adorno mutters to himself, barely concealing his words; Benjamin’s interest was a small and characteristically eccentric part of a far larger analysis of the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. And so, the writer continues, in a way that is I hope faithful to Benjamin’s insights, I have imagined how it might have been otherwise, if Benjamin had not died while fleeing from the Gestapo, but had instead escaped.

Adorno pushes back his seat, about to leave. The chairman stares at him, alarmed, and waves him to remain, a gesture that is both a request and a command. Adorno manages not to listen to the story, its inconsequentiality rendering it surprisingly easy to ignore, instead he looks at Ulrike, remembers her naked body when they made love, remembers every sound she made, and thinks how futile life is. In everything we do there is an element of exchange, and contemporary social relations, he reflects, are becoming subject to a devaluation far greater than what befell the Reichsmark nearly half a century ago. The result is a lapse into authoritarianism.

People are applauding that stupid story. Now at last it’s Teddie’s turn. He leans forward into the welcoming ambit of the microphone. “I knew Walter Benjamin,” he says. “More importantly, I have spent decades studying problems that engaged his thought. A man’s ideas, if they are at all original, are the property of no one, not even the man himself. To consider them such would be to deny them the autonomy that is their claim to significance. My intervention in Benjamin’s ideas has been criticised in some quarters. This, however, is the practice to which critical theory naturally gives rise. Benjamin, who was a gifted linguist, once wrote of the task of the literary translator, saying it was not to make the translated work appear as if it were not a translation, but rather to make the work appear what it is, foreign, the product of a different culture. And everything we read is a kind of translation. Everywhere is a foreign country. I lived for some years in America, and all the time there I considered myself a European. Here in Europe, I feel at times as if perhaps I have become an American.”

There is a shout from the audience, Adorno cannot hear the words but a moment later a person in another part stands up and begins shouting back. Two activists from opposing factions are having an argument. People tell them to sit down, order is restored though it is a false and uneasy order. He looks at Ulrike again but her attention is on the demonstrators. It is his wife Gretel who gazes lovingly at him, convinced as always by every word he says.

“Walter Benjamin’s intention was to join me and my colleagues in America. An imaginative novelist might speculate on the ensuing biographical events, but who could envisage the philosophical insights that would have resulted, except for a philosopher? There we see the limitation of fiction in relation to philosophy, for fiction deals with the particular, the accidental, the psychologically arresting; whereas philosophy, while traditionally it encompassed only the most abstract and conceptual, nevertheless, in Benjamin’s view and in my own, ought also to account for the particular, the unique, the never to be repeated or replicated. Then philosophy would finally have conquered fiction, and for the latter there would be no need. Why, we may ask, did Walter Benjamin, that most exquisite of prose writers and most discerning of critics, never write a novel, nor attempt one? It was because of this realisation he had, that a fully formed materialist conception of history would render fiction obsolete, like the magic-lantern shows he wrote about, which have been replaced by the distractions of cinema. Philosophy is truth, not fiction. And the truth is that Walter was a melancholy man as well as a genius. The truth is that even if the Gestapo had not pursued him, he would probably have killed himself in the end, if not in Spain then in some hotel room in New York, upset over yet another unrequited love affair. Was it his destiny? No, it was his predisposition. So forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, if I express my displeasure at the ease with which this man whom I knew has become an intellectual commodity.”

An activist gets to his feet and this time his words are clearly heard. “You deny freedom and are a fascist.”

Adorno answers calmly. “I deny the legitimacy of authoritarianism masquerading as free speech.”

But there are more shouts, drowning him out, and then, as if a pre-rehearsed moment in the proceedings has finally been reached, three young women bring out a banner made of pieces of paper or card taped together, painted with bright green letters that say something not entirely legible about workers of the world. The girls shuffle out of their row in the audience and bring the banner to the front, accidentally tearing it on the way, then when they reach the stage, completely unopposed, they discard the remains of the banner and two of them sing while the third begins removing her clothes. At this point the celebration of Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday reaches its end.

Adorno is in his office at the university next day when he gets a phone call. The woman says her name but he doesn’t catch it; he assumes it’s one of the protesters and considers putting the receiver down; but no, she isn’t phoning to apologise or launch a further attack, she had nothing to do with the demonstration; in fact, she says with an embarrassed laugh when he questions her, she’s an elderly and, she likes to think, perfectly respectable lady. She simply wants to meet and discuss with him a matter concerning Walter Benjamin. This afternoon, perhaps?

She proposes a park; the weather recommends it, though there is also an air of mystery to the assignation. Is the conversation to be of a kind she would prefer no one to overhear? Parks, in Adorno’s mind, are a place for clandestine lovers wishing to proclaim an illusory freedom. The woman says she’s elderly but that could still signify fewer years than his own. Her voice is beautiful.

He arrives early and waits on a bench. Some sort of bird is hopping on the grass, he doesn’t know the name. Sunlight perforates the trees, momentarily dazzles him, connects him with primal warmth. He remembers hearing it claimed that the sun emits radio waves.

Then he sees her, approaching slowly. Yes, he thinks, it’s surely her, incongruous by her dignity, a moving statue, relic of an earlier time, perhaps a decade older than himself, yet straight-backed and without a walking stick. And yes, she’s beautiful. He rises to greet her; she extends her slender hand.

“I am Yvette Carreau.”

He finds himself making a bow, crooking his arm for her to hold. An old, extinguished world has come alive.

“My late husband was a collector,” she explains as they begin walking, for she says she would prefer it, and he hears a trace of a French accent that hadn’t been apparent on the telephone.

“A collector of what?”

“Miscellaneous objects and distractions. Also something of a gambler, willing to part with large amounts of money for items that might prove worthless. And a hunter, determined to catch the quarry he sought.” She stops and turns to look at Adorno. “He met your friend Walter Benjamin on the night before he died.”

Now Teddie understands. This woman has no interest in him, only in the past he represents, the connection with history. She wants to tell him an anecdote he can put in a book or lecture. “Were Benjamin and your late husband intimately acquainted?”

“They met on only that single occasion. Some people say once is as good as never, but I’ve always felt that a single meeting can mean more than a thousand.”

“An interesting observation. So your husband was in Portbou?”

“And I was with him, at the Hotel de Francia. Louis had the visas and Benjamin had what Louis wanted in return.”

“My God.”

“You see now why I wanted to meet.”

“You could have told me this long ago.”

“Not while Louis was alive. My late husband insisted there was a plot against my life, a secret cabal, from which he alone could protect me.” They’re reaching a boating pond; now Yvette would like to sit and watch the glittering water broken only by paddling ducks and the empty boats moored and rocking at the edge. They position themselves at a respectful distance from one another on the bench she selects. “Louis was a good and loyal husband. But he never believed that I really loved him, I see that now.”

Adorno gives a cough of embarrassment. “What went wrong with the visas? Did Benjamin not have enough money for them?”

Yvette shakes her head. “All I know is what Louis told me, which is that Benjamin had somehow, quite unwittingly, acquired a book containing crucial evidence of the conspiracy. Louis wanted it in exchange for the visas he’d procured at great risk. And so I sat in the restaurant of the hotel while Louis went upstairs to see Benjamin, who had been arrested with some other Jews. A gramophone played nearby, it was a balmy evening and in different circumstances it could all have been romantic and pleasurable, yet I was tired, depressed, fearful. And when Louis came back he told me that he had the book, its former owner had the travel documents. We returned to our own hotel and next day back across the border to France. It was only much later that I learned the poor refugee had been a scholar of some importance, and that instead of trying to use the visas he had decided to take his own life.”

Adorno is sceptical. “What was the book?”

She smiles. “Long ago I was engaged to a musician named Pierre Klauer. Fate stole him from me, but I was left with the key to his desk, where he said his latest work was to be found. It was Louis who retrieved it, a piano score ominously titled The Secret Knowledge. And how I treasured that relic of my sweetheart. So many times I wept over it, clutching it until the pages became bent and faded, but determined that it should live forever. Louis’ acquisition of the work, right from under the noses of Pierre’s parents, was the first indication to me, both of his ingenuity, and of the threat we jointly faced. Pierre’s death was the work of an underground sect; I risked being their next victim. The music, Louis explained, was a coded message, the protocols of the organisation, but it lacked one vital thing. Pierre gave me the key to his desk, but not the key to the code. This was what had somehow fallen into the hands of Walter Benjamin, a book the society was determined to recover, at whatever cost.”

Adorno glances at his watch. “This is most… unusual.”

“I see that you are doubtful of my story. And you are right to be — for it was built on a lie. Louis always kept from me the secret knowledge that he said could only harm me, but when he passed away I felt as though my own life were no longer worth living. Come now, damned conspirators, I said to myself. Come and kill me, but before I die I shall unlock the code, break the spell of fear itself. I knew where the book was kept, knew the combination of the safe. Louis had forbidden me from opening it and I had obeyed, but now what else was I to do? So I brought it out into the light of the day, the slender volume that Walter Benjamin thought could save his life, as well as other papers stored with it. I sat at Louis’ desk and looked at those cursed documents. And I realised at once: I had been deceived.”

“What did you see?”

“First the book, written in some unknown language and peppered with symbols, hieroglyphs; it was no cipher but was itself in code. Why had this confused jumble been kept hidden from me? What might I have learned from it? Only that it was meaningless. But more than the book, it was the other papers that drew my attention, for what I had before me were notes for Pierre’s work, sketches and drafts. Surely my husband must have retrieved these from the composer’s desk along with the score, for a moment this was what I thought. But the pages told a different story. Mingled with musical notation there were verbal comments, suggestions, mathematical equations. The handwriting was not Pierre’s. I even retrieved the letters I still kept from him, in order to verify what was so immediately obvious to me.”

“He could have worked with an assistant.”

“No, professor, there was no assistant. Because you see, I recognised the handwriting at once. I told myself it couldn’t be true, yet there was no other explanation. The man who wrote those words was my husband. Certainly there was another hand at work in the drafts, another style of writing, but when I examined it all closely, so very closely, I understood what had gone on. As well as Pierre’s letters I revisited the most sacred item of all, the score. And like a detective, with a magnifying glass in my hand, I discovered what I knew must be the truth. The work was a forgery. My husband, Louis Carreau, cobbled it together as a way of winning me for himself. He said he knew Pierre, this much I believe is true, and he must have seen his writing, practised until he was able to replicate it, penned what looks like an entire piece of music and claimed to have taken it from Pierre’s desk. Made me hide it, so that in all the years I never heard it. I expect it would be only crude noise. Poor Louis had no ear for music.”

“Surely you must hate him for it.”

“I pity him. He saved me from my misery after Pierre died, but that was not enough, instead he felt the need to invent some other kind of salvation, more tangible and persuasive, that would bind us together. A great hoax reinforced by so many strange incidents over the decades, obscure items he acquired. And I never suspected a thing, because from the very start, Louis had done what would make his story most convincing, he had created the essential piece of material evidence that would extinguish all doubt. Some women lose a husband and discover he had another wife and home, another life, making a mockery of the love they claimed to feel. But when I discovered how I’d been deceived, it had the opposite effect. He did it all for me, because he thought he had to. He simply couldn’t believe that I might love him only for what he was, for the good and pure heart that he had. How I miss the years of happiness we might have shared.”

Adorno imagines the aftermath of his own death, Gretel reading every letter, recognising every name, being surprised by nothing. “Your story is a tragic one.”

“The word is overused. They say your friend Benjamin was tragic; others might call his demise typical.”

“He made a fatal error.”

“He was a fool, like Louis.”

Adorno finds it a wise and admirable comment, but also deduces that the woman’s late husband was not wholly wrong in doubting the possibility of love. “I thank you for this interesting piece of history, now I ought to return to my work.” He begins to rise, Yvette holds his arm.

“I admit my story is bizarre and you had no need to hear it. But I wanted to speak of Walter Benjamin. The book he gave my husband is real.”

“You thought it nonsense.”

“Whatever it is, wherever it came from, even when we discard my husband’s deceptions, it remains the fact that your friend carried the book over the Pyrenees; for him it was equivalent to life itself. I should like you to have it. To me it means nothing.”

“And to me it should mean more?”

Yvette looks sadly at the bright water of the pond. “If you will not receive what I am offering then I shall destroy it. I suppose it has no place in the archive of Benjamin’s papers, but perhaps he might have liked you to have what cost him so much effort.”

Adorno considers the strange proposal; a gift that focuses with startling clarity the nullity of all gifts, their purely symbolic value, where what is symbolised is always an exchange, because the gift has to be accepted as well as given. This poor woman’s life has been an illusion, her marriage a sham, her love affairs counterfeit. His acceptance would amount to telling her: it has not been wasted.

“Send it to me,” he says, giving her his card. Then he bids farewell to Yvette Carreau, leaving her sitting on the bench where she watches the ducks, looking now like the old woman she always was. He walks away and forgets her. Already he’s late for an encounter with Ulrike at her apartment.

The package arrives at his home the following day. Wrapped in brown paper he finds the slim, elegantly bound volume the Frenchwoman described; also some Xeroxed pages of musical manuscript and an accompanying note explaining them to be the work she spoke of. She knows it to be a fake, she writes, yet still cannot part with the original that has been her trusted companion for so many years.

Adorno leafs through the book, whose age and provenance only a specialist could determine. It is, as she said, written in some form of invented language, incorporating tables, diagrams and symbols one could guess to be mathematical or magical (categories indistinguishable except to the initiated). A frequently recurring mark resembling the Greek letter psi could equally be a pitchfork; Adorno suspects the work to be a coded treatise on demonology or the Kabbalah, topics upon which Benjamin allowed his intellectual energies to be squandered.

Yet there is no evidence at all, other than the widow’s tale, that this book ever lay within his friend’s possession. Adorno puts it aside and considers the score, allegedly the fabrication of an unmusical man. A moment’s perusal throws doubt on that, for Adorno can see at once that it is not randomly written noise, but a credible composition. If Louis Carreau forged this then he must have worked from some original model, perhaps several. Adorno takes it to the piano, arranges the pages, and begins to play.

The style is instantly recognisable; it is certainly a piece that belongs to the first decade of the twentieth century. The revolution of serialism has not yet happened; there is perhaps something of Scriabin in it, or Stravinsky. And Adorno reminds himself: this is supposed to be a fake. Louis Carreau was no artist, but he must have had some understanding of what he pieced together from unknown sources. One could almost say there is a hint of Ravel, only a hint. And my word, a thinly concealed quotation from Beethoven.

All of it pastiche, apparently — for the love of a woman! This Carreau was a sensitive soul, poor Yvette doesn’t know how lucky she was to find him. The man who will build an entire world of falsehood around his beloved, surely that man is rare. More common is he who covers his own false life.

Abrupt transitions suggest the influence of Mahler; hurrying onwards to the recapitulation, Adorno is irritated by consecutive fifths that feel almost barbaric. But Beethoven, he realises, is the key. Thomas Mann, when he needed to invent a composer for his novel, called Adorno to his aid, and the result was a masterpiece. Mann and Carreau have something in common. Or is it Carreau and Adorno? Are we all counterfeiters? The thought of that stupid woman conned by her husband for years over this… this… extraordinary concoction. The strange fact is that for all its manifest flaws, the work displays genuine if modest artistic talent. It’s about as good as anything Adorno himself ever composed. Not a masterpiece, no, such things are as infrequent as faithful husbands. But even were it average, were it no better than the work of any music student, that would still make the hoax a most striking one. And all for the most inconsequential of motives.

Beethoven’s music represents the social process; the way in which the part can be understood only in relation to the totality. Yet this organic wholeness is also the mutual estrangement of individuals; Carreau-Klauer acknowledges, in the first movement of The Secret Knowledge, the tonic-mediant relationship so characteristic of Beethoven, but instead of merely imitating he highlights its strangeness. Only ears tired by the sounds of industry can fail to notice the abrupt juxtapositions and shocking montage that Beethoven made into a style, and that this fictitious composer whose work Adorno now plays has managed, albeit naively and intuitively, to comprehend.

He has spoken to Ulrike about Beethoven. Fundamentally she prefers the Rolling Stones but won’t admit it. There lingers in her hesitation to accompany him to concerts, not fear of exposure, but suspicion that the whole of the so-called classical repertoire constitutes bourgeois hegemony, when really its finest works are both its expression and negation. The significance of recapitulation is its emphasis: the identity of the non-identical. In those atavistic consecutive fifths Carreau-Klauer involuntarily affirms the fundamental inadequacy that was, after all, the initial impulse. The Frenchwoman loved Klauer, so Carreau had to become Klauer. The music is a process of becoming that is forever unfinishable. There can be no ending to it — until Adorno stops playing.

Two days later he gets another phone call at the university. This time he’s expecting a journalist or radio producer wanting to know his views about the student movement; instead it’s a man who gives a name Adorno doesn’t recognise and says, “I believe you spoke with Yvette Carreau.”

“Who? Oh yes, the French lady.”

“She told you about a certain book?”

“I have it.”

A pause. “Perhaps we could meet to discuss this.”

Please not another pointless stroll past the flowerbeds. “Come to my office,” Adorno says; they agree an appointment and he hangs up. The country’s in a rising state of turmoil and there are people pestering him with trivialities. The book is in his drawer in the office; he thought of trying to find a colleague who might understand the coded symbols but his curiosity evaporated as soon as the item was out of sight. Instead he’s been thinking about the problems of the Missa Solemnis. No themes, no development. Omission as a means of expression.

He gives a seminar on eternity. Ulrike is there, taking notes and hardly looking at him. What if she got pregnant? Says there’s no chance but anything’s possible. Good that he and Gretel never had children. No way to perceive the little mites except in relation to one’s own generation whom they can only despise. The student protests are a manifestation of social infantilisation. Relate this to the growing tendency to remain childless.

“Are you saying that immanent and to-be-completed eternity are distinct?” a student asks him. Adorno says nothing, he’s lost his train of thought. Everything is a void and the students look at each other, even Ulrike stops writing.

One of them turns to his companion. “I think he’s saying there is no eternity. It only feels that way.”

When he goes to Ulrike’s apartment building later that day and presses the entry buzzer he gets no reply. And yet they had an arrangement, she told him to come at exactly this time. She must have gone out briefly, he waits. Eventually a dark-skinned foreign woman comes and lets herself in, he follows her and takes the lift to the third floor, tries Ulrike’s door but of course it’s locked. Keeps waiting until at last, furious, he goes home. So this is how she tells him it’s over.

The man comes to see him about that wretched book. The appointment is in his diary but Adorno is in the middle of writing about dialectic in the Eroica when the secretary knocks and reminds him, then shows the fellow in.

“Laurent Oeillet.” He extends a hand, though the first thing Adorno notices apart from his French accent is the eye-patch; a war-wound, perhaps, he’s old enough to have been in the Resistance or Wehrmacht.

“You wanted to talk to me about this.” Adorno opens his drawer, rifles beneath some student essays that have been deposited there in the last few days, and brings out the thin yellow book which he drops on his desk. Oeillet’s single eye is momentarily transfixed by it, then sends its sparkle once more at Adorno who invites him to sit down.

“What story did Madame Carreau tell you?” Oeillet asks. “You know she thinks she can hear messages from aliens on her radio?”

“She struck me as having a lively imagination.”

“A polite way to put it.”

“She herself said the story was fiction. Now are you going to give me a different version?”

The secretary knocks again and asks if the gentlemen wish coffee. University life these days, thinks Adorno, is so much less pleasant than it used to be, so much less conducive to thought. More like being in a cafeteria.

“I was a friend of the late Monsieur Carreau. He was a fine man. His business interests brought him to Germany not long after the war ended; he ran a small plant producing thermionic valves, later he got into electronics. His wife, his very lovely wife, unfortunately developed mental problems. She spent time in an institution.”

“What about the lover she lost, Klauer?”

“Madame Carreau is what one might charitably call a romantic.”

“She says this book belonged to my friend Walter Benjamin.”

“And you believe her?”

“Carreau got it from him in Spain in 1940.”

Oeillet laughs. “Louis came across it not long before he died.”

It is an interesting problem: two stories, wholly contradictory, either of which could be true. Oeillet leans forward in his chair, about to continue, but the coffee arrives. When the secretary departs with her tray and closes the door behind her Oeillet says, “I should like to buy the book.”

The proposal is more distasteful than the coffee; Adorno nearly spits what’s in his mouth, but swallows. “You’ve come for that?”

“I’m a collector and Louis intended me to have it.”

“His wife evidently doesn’t. And whatever her mental condition, she happens to be the one still living.”

Oeillet is barely able to conceal his displeasure. “Natural courtesy would be to give it freely to its rightful possessor; instead I show you the favour of making a fair offer.”

Adorno, too, is displeased. “The courtesy was mine, in receiving you here. It is you who have made of this meeting a financial transaction, and in relations such as those, courtesy plays no part.”

“Fifty marks,” Oeillet says abruptly. “More than it’s worth.”

“And less than I have imminent need of.”

“One hundred.”

“I shall not sell it.”

“You don’t believe me? You find Yvette’s ravings more convincing than the plain facts I’ve told you?”

Adorno shakes his head. “I believe what you say. Her story is false. But she gave the book to me, and unless you tell me what it is and why it is important, I will not part with it so easily.” He opens the drawer, puts the book back inside, and waits for Oeillet to leave. But the seated visitor has no intention of departing.

“It is mine, sir, and I shall have it. My dear friend wished it, yet you go against the most fundamental decency of human conduct, respect for the dead. You are an atheist, I suppose. You have no notion of the immortality of the soul…”

“Do not presume to lecture me about the categorical imperative. Excuse me but I have work to do.” Adorno turns to arrange papers on his desk; the Frenchman refuses to take the hint.

“You will give it to me or there will be consequences.”

This is the most incredible effrontery. “Consequences?”

“One hundred marks for your troubles, professor, I can give you cash straight away. Otherwise…” Oeillet shrugs with the casual brutality of a police interrogator.

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“Women.” The word falls stillborn from Oeillet’s lips, vile and slimy.

“You think you can blackmail me?”

“I have names, evidence. Photographs.”

Adorno can feel the room spinning; this is simply unreal. “You’ve been following me? Spying on me? Who the hell are you? Who are you working for?”

Oeillet has found beneath his own fingernail something more noteworthy than Adorno’s pale face. He picks at the irritation, then looks up. “Just give me the damned book, that’s all. Give me it or I’ll tell your wife.”

“You pathetic bastard, she knows already. I’m not afraid of you.”

“She knows everything about you? And the faculty, do they know? Your students? The press? Would you ruin yourself on account of a few pages that mean nothing to you?”

All is apparent: the widow’s story holds a greater truth. Walter Benjamin was once in exactly the position that is now Adorno’s own, confronted by a demon persecutor. Is Adorno to be a martyr too? And for what will posterity praise and honour him? No Gestapo, no epic journey of escape. Only torrid afternoons at an apartment in an inferior part of town. You’ve lost the game, he says to himself, a game that is not worth playing. He opens the drawer, brings out the book and hands it to Oeillet who quickly glances with satisfaction at it, flicks through the pages, puts it inside his briefcase then reaches into his pocket and begins to draw out his wallet.

“Get out,” Adorno says heavily, barely able to breathe.

“I owe you one hundred marks.”

“I said get out of here.”

“I’m a man of my word.” Oeillet tosses the notes onto his lap. Adorno, broken, grasps and crumples them like a handkerchief.

“Who are you?” Adorno eventually asks.

“I told you, I’m a collector.”

“No more of that shit. Your name, your story, even that stupid eye-patch, none of them real, surely?”

“They’re all that you, your secretary or anyone else will remember of me. Far better that way, wouldn’t you agree?”

“What will you do with the book?”

Oeillet rises to his feet, puts on his hat and lifts his briefcase from the floor. “Its rightful owners will make good use of it. Congratulations, professor, you have shown yourself to be a man of action as well as thought. You have changed the course of history.”