Adorno in the Kingdom of Unfreedom: History and Freedom’s Lecture The Principle of Nationality

[First paragraph] By 1964, Adorno could see the first clouds of disagreement with his students on the horizon, who were mobilizing against proposed legislation on the Emergency Laws and the American War in Vietnam: ‘Admittedly, from 1967 on this opposition in part adopted forms of protest that Adorno was to condemn emphatically as “pseudo-activity”. Not content with merely interpreting the world, the students called for social change, and Adorno’s lectures represented something of an attempt to provide theoretical analysis of this situation by refocusing attention on the relations between theory and practice’… ‘when the students demanded guidance for political practice. It was for this reason that he wanted to discuss the question of theory and practice again, quite explicitly, in the summer of 1969, at the height of the student movement’… ‘but he never gave more than a few lectures because it was repeatedly disrupted and he was forced to cancel it.’ (Editor’s forward in Adorno, 2006: xviii). His lectures were disrupted in protest of Adorno and his colleagues calling the police to clear 70 students in January 1969 from the institute, who they thought they were going to occupy the premises. It is at that fateful period at the end of that semester that Adorno takes his annual leave and dies on a mountain vacation.