Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, philosopher, composer, sociologist, and aesthetic theorist, was born September 11, 1903, in Frankfurt am Main and died August 6, 1969. His last days were beset by the "emergencies in democracy" prompted by the student movement of the 1960s; the students simultaneously treated him as friend and foe.

Life and Work

Studying in Frankfurt in the 1920s, but increasingly unable to secure employment in the first years of Nazi Germany, Adorno moved to England in 1934. Four years later, with his new wife, Margarethe ("Gretel") Karplus (1902–1993), he moved to the United States, first to New York and then to Los Angeles. In 1949 they returned to Frankfurt where Adorno worked both as professor at the university and as public intellectual, participating in radio and television programs on philosophy, society, education, and the arts.

Born into a comfortable bourgeois home, he was the only son of a...