Editing Theodor W. Adorno (section)

====Post-war German culture====
At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as [[Paul Celan]] and [[Ingeborg Bachmann]]. Adorno's 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in ''Negative Dialectics'', for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in "Commitment", he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany's struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet [[Hans Magnus Enzensberger]] as well as the film-maker [[Alexander Kluge]].

In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and, in 1968, on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and [[Karl Popper]], later published as the ''[[Positivist Dispute in German Sociology]]'', arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin.

Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like [[Karl Jaspers]] and [[Otto Friedrich Bollnow]], and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of ''The Jargon of Authenticity'' took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision", and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed ''[[Negative Dialectics]]'' in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967–68, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans [[Angela Davis]] and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection, which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself."