Dream Notes

Edited by CHRISTOPH GÖDDE and HENRI LONITZ

Afterword by JAN PHILIPP REEMTSMA

Translated by

RODNEY LIVINGSTONE

polity

First published in German as Traumprotokolle and copyright ©
Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2005

This English translation © Polity Press, 2007

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-9461-0

Text design by Peter Ducker

Editorial Foreword

Dream Notes

Afterword by Jan Philipp Reemtsma

Index

Editorial Foreword

Early in January 1956, Adorno noted down two ideas about dreams that testify to his particular interest in a central theory of dreams and the interconnectedness of his own dreams. ‘Certain dream experiences lead me to believe that the individual experiences his own death as a cosmic catastrophe.’ And, ‘Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are “ours”, but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit “the same world”. The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.’ This second reflection was followed by the dream that he wrote down from memory on 9 January 1956. The idea that dreams are connected by certain motifs is what induced him to select a number of them for publication. This selection did not appear while Adorno was still alive, but Rolf Tiedemann included it in Volume 20 of the Gesammelte Schriften. It is based on a typescript preceded by Adorno’s own preliminary comment: ‘These Dream Notes, which have been chosen from a much larger collection, are authentic. I wrote them all down immediately on waking and in preparing them for publication have only corrected the most obvious linguistic lapses.’ ‘A much larger collection’ refers not just to the great number of dreams recorded in the notebooks, but also to a bundle of papers that were then copied by Gretel Adorno with diplomatic accuracy. The present volume adds to the dream notes already published by drawing on the copies existing in typescript. A comparison between the copies and original typescripts confirms that Adorno’s alterations were largely confined to correcting the linguistic mistakes that arose from the haste with which he recorded the dreams and also from changing the names of people either to their initials or to periphrases such as ‘my friend ’ or ‘my doctor’. For example, he replaced Rudolf Kolisch’s nickname ‘Rudi’ with his surname. On the other hand, he retained the names where he believed the content was harmless. Apart from obvious typing mistakes, Gretel Adorno’s copies were not further edited and have been reproduced in full. A few errors in transcription have been corrected, as have the dates of the dreams given in the Gesammelte Schriften as 1 February 1942 and 22 May 1942 [which have now been changed to January 1942 and 22 May 1941 respectively]. A few names were made anonymous in the copies; in one case Eduard was replaced by his surname Steuermann. The notes to the dreams have been added by the translator. The notes to the Afterword are by Jan Philipp Reemtsma except where indicated.

Dreams are as black as death.

THEODOR W. ADORNO