We live in what Nietzsche might have called an Alexandrian age, in which the compilation of knowledge is expanding relentlessly: witness the many encyclopedias, dictionaries, user's guides, and introductions of all sorts that grace academic publishers' catalogs, and not a few of our own bookshelves. (Rumors that an Adorno for Dummies is in the works are probably exaggerated.) We find ourselves lamenting that the secondary literature on important thinkers has become so vast that it can scarcely be mastered any longer, obscuring the original texts behind the profusion of commentary. Detlev Claussen opens his engrossing, unconventional biography Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius by declaring it his aspiration “to help Adorno's texts speak for themselves and emerge in their original form from behind the secondary literature that has proliferated so endlessly” (p. vii).

Claussen's work is unconventional because he declines to provide the sort of exhaustive, documentary treatment called for by the genre of definitive biography. (Stefan Müller-Doohm's Adorno: A Biography, likewise originally published during the 2003 centennial celebrations of Adorno's birth, met this legitimate need quite well.) Rather, he gives us an Adorno whose life is mediated through Adorno's own texts. Above all, it is an Adorno seen through the lens of his significant intellectual friendships, some well known (Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer), others underestimated (Hanns Eisler, Fritz Lang). Claussen's Adorno is someone who “had a deep need for friendship” (pp. 52–3). This is not an introduction to Adorno or a reference that can be scanned quickly for background information. Rather, it addresses readers who are already familiar with Adorno's work and might consider engaging with it again.

Claussen was among Adorno's last students in the 1960s, but for all his evident sympathy with his subject, he is by no means uncritical. The book's title itself is something of a provocation, given Adorno's distaste for both the genre of biography and the notion of genius. Both aversions go back to his analyses of the disintegration of experience and the vanishing of bourgeois individuality, understood in the German tradition as a life that is “a meaningful unity unfolding from within itself” (p. 5). This strong version of individuality is one that, as Adorno famously argued, the twentieth century made increasingly implausible. While biographers need not adopt their subject's principles as their own, Claussen's work takes these reservations seriously and tries to do them justice.

The Adorno who emerges is quite different from the stereotype of the aloof, precious mandarin. Here Claussen contributes to a reevaluation that has been going on for some time. Pointers to Adorno's essays on jazz have regularly been invoked to prove that at best, Adorno had a tin ear for popular culture, and at worst, that he was an incorrigible elitist. Instead, Claussen gives us an Adorno who was surprisingly engaged during his eleven-year exile in America, which satisfied his “need for extraterritoriality” (p. 201). (For more on this, see David Jenemann's recent Adorno in America.) Adorno's closeness to the emigré Viennese filmmaker Fritz Lang can hardly be understood if his attitude toward the culture industry was entirely lacking in nuance. Nor were his relations with advocates of politically committed art straightforward: despite Adorno's well-known skepticism about Brecht, he maintained a long-term friendship with Brecht's associate Hanns Eisler—Adorno's “non-identical brother,” in Claussen's apt phrase (p. 149). Ironically, while in California Eisler and Adorno collaborated to write Composing for the Films, “a practical handbook for writing better film music” (p. 161). Their mutual respect survived their decisions to remigrate to different German states during the Cold War.

Most strikingly of all, in Claussen's telling the Adorno who returned to the Federal Republic in the 1950s was not only the daunting philosopher who produced a Negative Dialectics but also a decidedly public figure committed to helping to shape West Germany's public culture. (For extensive evidence of Horkheimer and Adorno's practical activities after their return, see Alex Demirovic, Der Nonkonformistische Intellektuelle.) This public engagement went so far that in the 1950s, the Adorno who was a “non-identical emigré would vanish behind the public Adorno” (p. 259). Claussen argues that his willingness to live out the contradictions of a return from exile did not amount to a hypocritical reconciliation with the postwar order. Instead, “[i]t was only in Frankfurt after 1953 that Adorno became fully the genius that he was” (p. 259).

The book's highlight is its extended chapter on Adorno's “Frankfurt Childhood around 1910.” In an afterword, Claussen confesses that his book can also be read as his own “declaration of love to the city of Frankfurt am Main” (p. 424). He has put his lover's intimate knowledge to good use here: turn-of-the-century Frankfurt receives a sharp profile that pulls it out of the shadow of Berlin. Claussen's portrait of the family and the urban networks into which Adorno was born is a tour de force, teasing out their meanings by ranging freely through texts from every period of his life. He traces Adorno's “disharmonious experience of his own individuality” (p. 42) to the tension between the notion of happiness that he owed to the world of his childhood and the sadness that hung over it in light of his later knowledge that the forces that would destroy that world had already been at work within it. The corpus produced by Adorno's lifelong probing of that constellation of forces, and the process of disintegration it produced, gave his life the only sort of disharmonious individuality still worthy of being described as genius in the twentieth century, Claussen argues.

Surprisingly, Claussen underplays some key episodes in Adorno's life. For instance, while his relationship to Walter Benjamin makes regular appearances, it is not given the kind of extended, incisive treatment that other relationships receive. Most puzzling is his comparatively brief treatment of Adorno's relations with the student rebels of the 1960s. In the received version of the story, his stormy conflicts with impatient activists (who at one point occupied the Institute for Social Research, prompting Adorno to call in the police) crushed his spirit and sent a “badly battered Teddie”—Adorno's wry self-description—to an early demise (pp. 333–4). Claussen gives us reason to doubt whether the toll of these conflicts was as decisive as usually assumed, when placed alongside the punishing pace of Adorno's intellectual productivity and the survivor's guilt that weighed on him. Moreover, he maintains that lines of communication between Adorno and the protesters always remained open, however sharp their differences. But given the theme Claussen chose for his book's overture—that Adorno would have, in his own words, “no heirs [keine Nachkommen]” (pp. 1, 9)—one wishes that he had ended his book by reflecting more expansively on Adorno, his students, and his heirs. One wishes it all the more because this is a book so full of fresh insights into Adorno's life and work.