Der engagierte Eremit: Critique and Escape in Arno Schmidt and Theodor W. Adorno

Critics are right to identify in the work of Arno Schmidt an antagonism between the impulse to critique society and the desire to escape it, an antinomy with sometimes uneasy political and ethical ramifications. However, they underestimate the complexity and radicalism of Schmidt’s considerations in this vein, which this article illuminates by bringing his 1950s work into dialogue with the contemporaneous aesthetic writings of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno philosophically defends the position that art’s autonomy and potential for effective critique consist precisely in the moment of its attempted break with society. Schmidt’s protagonists, in their striving for a non-complicit independence from fascism and capitalism, place their faith in a similar equation. In Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (1953), this essay argues, this escape eventually succeeds; in Das steinerne Herz (1956), it instructively fails. Both works exhibit the counterproductive entanglement of Schmidt’s formal innovations with his social critique, whereby the former threaten to render the latter largely ineffective.