Naples 1925 - Martin Mittelmeier

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the complete review - philosophy / travel

Naples 1925

by
Martin Mittelmeier

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Naples 1925
Author:	Martin Mittelmeier
Genre:	Non-fiction
Written:	2013 (Eng. 2024)
Length:	138 pages
Original in:	German
Availability:	Naples 1925 - US
	Naples 1925 - UK
	Naples 1925 - Canada
	Adorno in Neapel - Deutschland
	Adorno a Napoli - Italia
	Adorno en Nápoles - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

	directly from: Yale University Press

German title: Adorno in Neapel
Translated by Shelley Frisch
There is a small-print clarification on the copyright page, that: "The text was specially adapted for this edition in a joint work by the author, translator, and editor."
With twenty-two photographs

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Our Assessment:

C : interesting bits and pieces, but doesn't add up

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
NZZ	.	27/11/2013	Sandra Lehmann
The New Yorker	.	2/12/2024	Thomas Meaney
TLS	.	7/2/2014	Ben Hutchinson
Wall St. Journal	.	8/11/2024	Dominic Green
Die Zeit	.	26/9/2013	Gisela von Wysocki

From the Reviews:

"Mittelmeiers Verfahren überzeugt vor allem, wo der Autor nachzeichnet, wie dies Konzept aus der Erfahrung mit Porosität gewonnen wird. (...) Die eigentliche Schwäche des Buches ist weniger dessen mangelnde methodische Stringenz, sondern dass es ihm nicht gelingt, die Dringlichkeit mitzuteilen, mit der Adorno und seine Mitstreiter dachten." - Sandra Lehmann, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"(A) kind of intellectual history by way of Vitamin D synthesis. He examines how this group of thinkers was changed by the Italian environment. (...) The concept of porosity might seem like a wispy metaphor for the kind of comprehensive operation that Benjamin and Lācis -- as well as Adorno and their other companions -- wanted to perform on European philosophy and art. Mittelmeier does not help matters with exaggerated claims on behalf of tuff (.....) It is always summer in these books, which seem aimed at German feuilleton readers who like to have a little Kant or Adorno with their morning coffee. (...) It may be diverting to consider how the lack of hierarchies in the streets of Naples influenced Adorno’s thorny syntax, but Naples 1925 makes Adorno and his companions into much more comforting figures than they need to be." - Thomas Meaney, The New Yorker

"Combining philosophical exegesis with intellectual and cultural history, he sets out to show that the Gulf of Naples -- its topography, its characters and its history -- had a formative and enduring effect on Adorno's thought. In a seductively simple move, Mittelmeier takes Adorno's images literally, linking them to the striking landscape of the Neapolitan region. (...) The concept of the constellation can be (and has been) extended into near meaninglessness, so the attempt to give it geological traction is to be welcomed. (...) One's response to this book will inevitably depend on how convincing one finds the more speculative moments. (...) (T)his is an attractive, elegantly written book, synthesizing philosophical criticism with intellectual history to produce a fresh perspective on a familiar body of work." - Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement

"Reading Adorno, however, is like chewing gravel. Despite these inherent limitations, Naples 1925 is surprisingly well-written --and well-translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. Mr. Mittelmeier’s book will interest Frankfurt fans, intellectual historians and philosophical masochists. (...) These are the makings of a revealing and mildly absurd group biography. (...) Mr. Mittelmeier has achieved the impossible. He has found the funny side of the Frankfurt School." - Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal

"Man kann hier von Tableaux vivants, von lebenden Bildern sprechen, die den Schriften des Frankfurter Philosophen den Charakter groß angelegter Performances geben. Hätte das Buch sich doch auf der Höhe einer solch brillanten Gedanken-Inszenierung halten können ! Und würde es doch nicht so restlos dem Faszinosum erlegen sein, mit der Formidee der neapolitanischen Konstellation eine Art Passepartout in den Händen zu halten !" - Gisela von Wysocki, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Martin Mittelmeier at one point in Naples 1925 sums up:

In September 1925, four young manic readers met up somewhere in Naples. They were all just learning to use the surface of their surroundings to analyze the world around them and to discern how a better one might be created.

       The four were a then-just-twenty-one-year-old Theodore W. Adorno -- "one of the most influential European philosophers of the twentieth century", as Mittelmeier presents him in the book's opening sentence --; the considerably old Frankfurter Zeitung-editor with whom he was traveling, Siegfried Kracauer; Walter Benjamin; and Alfred Sohn-Rethel -- the latter two having already spent more time in southern Italy, having lived in in Capri and Positano respectively for a while by then.
       As the original German title of the book, Adorno in Neapel, suggests, Adorno, and the influence of this Naples-visit on his thought, is the focus here, but Mittelmeier does offer something of a group-portrait which also extends to some extent to a fifth, a "Bolshevik woman from Latvia" (so Benjamin) Asja Lācis, whom Benjamin had befriended in Capri. In his Postlude, however, Mittelmeier emphasizes again that his focus has been on Adorno, his aim here specifically: "to render visible the structural materiality of his texts".
       Near the end, Mittelmeier also points to correspondence between Sohn-Rethel and Adorno from 1966, in which Sohn-Rethel looks back to the quartet's conversation(s) in 1925, Mittelmeier summing up Adorno's response:

After World War II, after the experience of National Socialism and amid the perils of the Cold War, Naples in the 1920s seemed surreally distant to Adorno.

       But, Mittelmeier adds, -- arguably rather presumptuously --: "But he was mistaken".
       Was he, though ? The few days in Naples in 1925 -- which Mittelmeier can't even precisely date ... -- can seem like a very slim thread on which to hang this book's ambitious thesis.
       Mittelmeier finds two significant keys to Adorno's writing in the Naples (and associated ....) experiences, concepts that are also variously presented and used in texts by the other present: porosity -- as also physically manifested all about in the physical environment there, thanks to to nearby Mount Vesuvius and the tuff it spit out ("the city came to exhibit the same quality of porosity as the rock from which it was built") -- and the idea of 'constellation'. So, for example, Mittelmeier quotes from a piece written around that time by Benjamin and Laics about Naples (in which -- so Mittelmeier -- they: "turned its contents, the structure of porosity, into its form")

Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations.

And he extrapolates:

Once identified, the concept of porosity extended well beyond construction and architecture and became a descriptor for all everyday phenomena that Benjamin and Lacis observed. Every depiction in the Naples text is infused with this principle.

       This idea of recognizing and using: "the structural and philosophical possibilities afforded by the Neapolitan landscape" has a certain appeal, and Mittelmeier does nicely suggest the potential of the remarkable geography, geology, and architecture in and around Naples, but the connection to Adorno's philosophy and writing remains rather tenuous. For one, Mittelmeier doesn't convey much of what Adorno's philosophy is, or might be. Perhaps those better-versed in his writings can make the connections, but they certainly escaped me; admittedly, I have little understanding of (most any) 'theory', but what examples are offered her don't really seem to make much of a case; reliance then on Adorno's best-known work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer (who Mittelmeier struggles some to place, since he doesn't neatly fit the Naples-narrative), with grand pronouncements such as: "Adorno's versatile little narrative had suddenly turned into the nucleus of human history" did not make things any clearer for this reader.
       The whole project isn't helped by Mittelmeier's shifting back and forth between philosophical-intellectual speculation, biography, and historical travelogue. Yes, the descriptions of the Naples of the times (as well as other nearby places, such as Positano), and their appeal to tourists, are interesting, and the colorful cast of characters is certainly intriguing, complete with the different relationships, such as Kracauer's shifting one with Adorno, who by the early 1920s would: "slowly but steadily outgrow his influence, become enamored with women, and, worse still develop independent intellectual interests". There are also other interesting figures, such Gilbert Clavel, who (re)constructed the famous tower at Positano -- "Clavel's artistic project of a lifetime" -- , a man and site Adorno and Kracauer visited on their 1925 tour, with Mittelmeier observing: "Clave was a universal artist. He wrote several stories and a short novel, An Institute for Suicides, which was published only in an Italian translation and reads like Kafka on drugs". But it all gets to be a bit much, packed into very little space -- leading also then to a bit much mixing-and-matching of odds and ends and big pronouncements all over, as in the observation: "Adolf Hitler, a dictator who, like Clavel, lacked a testicle, had shattered the world into hell". (Perhaps such connections are what Mittelmeier means by 'constellations' ?)
       Indeed, with a wealth of material to work with, Mittelmeier's writing too readily gets sidetracked, leading readers down ... well, for example, Amalfi Drives of some but not quite relevant interest:

Horkheimer and Adorno finally seized the opportunity to merge their writing styles and achieve this product of inexorable verve. They wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment together on the West Coast, about a twenty-minute drive west of downtown Los Angeles, in an area that an ingenious realtor dubbed the "California Riviera." Its street names -- San Remo Drive, Monaco Drive -- appealed to many European immigrants who associated these names with their dream destinations. The resulting geographical hodgepodge also superimposed a faux Gulf of Naples on the area. Napoli, Capri, and Sorrento Drive intermingled with the southern French network of roads, and Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann lived on Amalfi Drive before moving into their villas (which today serve as scholarly residences). Hanns Eisler, with whom Adorno wrote the book Composing for Films (Komposition für den Film), also lived on Amalfi Drive, number 689.

       (The contrasts in specificity -- the irrelevant (as Eisler's house-number surely is) precisely noted, the significant (the exact date(s) in September, 1925 when the foursome's get-together in Naples transpired) fudged ... -- suggests one of the problems with this whole undertaking.)
       Tangential details such as these might find room in a larger-scale book (see also the note below), but here they pull constantly away from what surely should be the heart of the matter. Meanwhile, the concepts that seem so central, such as 'porosity', get short shrift. (I realize that I have difficulty with such terms-in-the-abstract, perhaps more so than the average reader, but I came away with absolutely no understanding of what could possibly be meant by this.)
       Mittelmeier may well be onto something, that the conversation(s) Adorno, Kracauaer, Benjamin, and Sohn-Rethel had in Naples in 1925, and what they saw, influenced their (and maybe especially Adorno's) thinking and writing -- certainly some of the examples, their writing on Naples itself, for example, suggests as much --, but there's too little known about what was actually said -- and too little about the connections to Adorno's later writings -- to make a truly convincing case for these few days having the significance Mittelmeier wants to attribute to them.
       Presented in short chapters, there is a lot here that is of interest, from the characters, primary and secondary, to the locales and how outsiders engaged with and in them. Connections to some of these thinkers' writings, and explications thereof, are of interest, but hardly convince on the larger scale -- the quartet's body of work immense compared with what is mentioned and discussed here. Mittelmeier also plays loosely in trying to fit everything into his picture (not that it helps all too much ...), including sometimes forcing the issue, as when he writes:

Due to the sparse selection of actual postcards, we have to look to Adorno's imaginary postcards to "see" which sort of card he would have chosen, given the chance.

       He makes a connection here, to Adorno's Schubert-essay, but this seems rather a stretch for a thought experiment -- something that might just pass in a work focused more on the theoretical but not one that makes such a point of relying on actual experience and events (the point of the book being, after all, how the experiences of Adorno et al. influenced their work).
       Mittelmeier writes that he hoped here: "to render visible the structural materiality of [Adorno's] texts", and maybe he manages to do so for those with a deeper familiarity with those texts; as a reader who can't make heads or tails of what the 'structural materiality' of a text might be or involve, I'm afraid it failed in this and similar regards for me.
       So also 'porosity' and 'constellation' remain terms that, in their philosophical-theoretical application, elude me -- and it's small comfort that Mittelmeier himself points out that: "While the vagueness of the term constellation makes it open to multiple uses in the critical literature that followed, the concept remains oddly nebulous". (No kidding ! (Also: not helpful !))
       Lively and quick, Naples 1925 does offer many titbits of interest, but doesn't really take shape.

[Note: that a small note on the copyright page reveals that: "The text was specially adapted for this edition in a joint work by the author, translator, and editor," and a cursory check (using Amazon's 'Read sample'-preview; I have not seen the complete original text) shows that the original German edition has considerably many more pages (about 250 of text, compared to less than 140 in this English edition) and quite a few more chapters; a look at the opening sections of the German edition as well as the chapter-titles suggest the original was a rather more far-reaching work; in these early bits and outline it certainly looks like a more promising one. Something -- chunks, in fact -- were definitely lost somewhere in the translation process, and Naples 1925 shapes up to be a quite different work than Adorno in Neapel (something to also take into account when considering the reviews of these two different editions).]

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 November 2024

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Links:

Naples 1925:

Yale University Press publicity page
btb publicity page
Feltrinelli publicity page
Ediciones Paidós publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

Jörg Später's biography of Siegfried Kracauer
See Index of Biographical works under review
See Index of Philosophy books
See Index of Travel-related books
See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

German author Martin Mittelmeier was born in 1971.

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