Theodor Adorno's Damaged Life

Minima Moralia is a work of exile. Published just over 70 years ago in 1951, the greater share of it was written at the conclusion of the Second World War, when its German-born author Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was living in Los Angeles County, not far from other artists and intellectuals who had the good fortune to escape the Third Reich. “The violence that expelled me,” he explained, left him with an enduring sense of guilt at the very fact of his survival. The book’s subtitle, “Reflections from Damaged Life”, is a record of this unhealed wound, a bitter confession that even to write about individual experience suggests a complicity with “unspeakable collective events”.