on Martin Mittelmeier’s Naples 1925

Porosity and Constellation

Four German philosophers walk into a café in Naples in late September 1925. It sounds like the start of a donnish joke or riddle, a peculiar piece of porosity, a constellation way off any astrological or astronomical chart, a scenario for a post-postmodernist novel that wakens the dead and pitches them into incongruous situations and settings. But it did happen, possibly in the Café Gambrinus, popular with visiting intellectuals, or perhaps in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Vesuvio that accommodated two of the philosophers in the bourgeois comfort to which their upbringing had accustomed them. The two hotel guests were Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer; Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel completed the foursome. In the informed, innovative and entertaining constellation that constitutes this book, Martin Mittelmeier maps stars of varying magnitude and weaves shifting stellar patterns to link bright points of light and hitherto barely visible ones.

Adorno, approaching twenty-two, and Kracauer, then thirty-seven, travelled together to the Bay of Naples. Their relationship was intellectually intense, involving the reading and discussion of philosophy, with Kracauer encouraging Adorno to discern the contradictions in philosophical texts; but it also had, for Kracauer, erotic and romantic dimensions. He was in love with Adorno, an unrequited passion that, as he wrote to Leo Löwenthal, ‘I can explain to myself only in terms of my being homosexual in matters of the spirit’. There was also an audible contrast in oral articulacy: Adorno, a bumptious and demanding young man, was irrepressibly voluble; Kracauer, though sixteen ...