Krahl himself was only 27 when he was killed, a front-seat passenger in a motor accident on an icy road north of Marburg, barely six months after the death of Adorno.
His reputation as the great theoretician of Europe's '68 movement, able and willing to grapple with both the ideological and the economic mechanisms of mature capitalism, persists among scholars of the political left.
Much of Krahl's written work, which included large amounts of material delivered orally - albeit in perfectly formed prose structures - and recorded at the time, to be transcribed onto paper only much later, was published posthumously.
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Hans-Jürgen Krahl came from a lower-middle class ("kleinbürgerlich" / "petit bourgeois") background in what he later termed "the darkest recesses of Lower Saxony" (aus "den finstersten Teilen Niedersachsens").
The "Ludendorffbund" was a populist movement dedicated to ethniocationalism and racism and other mystical extremist notions which had fallen out of fashion in western Europe in the aftermath of the twelve year Hitler nightmare, and was in its day regarded as somewhat "niche".
[5][20] He was also hugely respectful of his doctoral mentor-supervisor, from whom he drew numerous key concepts of the "Frankfurt School Critical theory", which he applied in a number of important philosophical-political writings of his own.
In Frankfurt the public mood in respect of student protests had been somewhat heated for more than half a year, and the police unhesitatingly complied with the request of the Institute authorities.
[22][23] Following the eviction, police arrested 76 of the students involved, including Krahl, the favourite pupil whom by many criteria Adorno had at this point vehemently disowned.
[5][24] Adorno was painfully conscious of the brutal irony whereby "a piece of political theater" had left him identified by many of his students as a defender of conservative repression.
[27][28] If, as some commentators seem to have anticipated, Krahl was hoping to be able to recreate the Athenian Agora in a Frankfurt court room in order to engage in a very public debate on the fundamentals of critical theory with its most important theoretician, he was disappointed.
It is hard to be confident that Adorno was unaffected by the months of ad hominem attacks from IFS radical students who identified a polarised battle between himself and his (formerly) favourite pupil, however.
[5] On 13 September 1968 Krahl was involved, unintentionally, in an incident at the 23rd delegates' conference of the SDS which some have characterised as the launching pad for second-wave feminism in West Germany.
[30][31][32] Another of the women in the group was Helke Sander an activist film-maker originally from Berlin who had recently returned to Germany after several years living and working in Helsinki.
It concluded with a rousing plea: "Comrades, if you are not yet ready for this discussion, which needs to be conducted on the basis of substantive issues, then we will have established that the SDS is nothing more than an over-inflated bubble of counter-revolutionary uncooked dough.
Afflicted, in the context of her pregnancy, by a powerful dietary craving, Rüger had arrived at the conference clutching a large box of tomatoes, which she had placed on the table in front of her.
[35][d] It was later reported by some that she had been aiming not at Krahl (who was gay and, in a number of ways, the complete opposite of a misogynist) but at the face of Helmut Schauer the SDS president at the time.
The attention grabbing difference on this occasion was that the thrown tomatoes came from a group of SDS women: their target was the (male) leadership circle of their own student socialist organisation.
"That evening Krahl sat in the bath and cried", recalled a mutual friend, Tilman Fichter, speaking to a reporter: "Then Sigrid came round to comfort him.
He was identified by the court, along with his co-accused, Günter Amendt and Karl Dietrich Wolff as one of three leading members of the SDS who had taken part in a demonstration against the awarding of the "Peace Prize of the German Book Trade" to Président Senghor of Senegal.
[21] He derived and evolved from it a "thesis of the technical-scientific intelligentsia", which provides definition and impulse for the centrality of "thought labour" and "mass intellectual output" in late-stage capitalist societies.
[3] After Rudi Dutschke was shot in Paris "by a protnazi attacker" and seriously incapacitated on 11 April 1968, Krahl found himself expected by SDS comrades to fill the void that had opened up in respect of on some of the charismatic and intellectual leadership roles that Dutsche had hitherto occupied.
[15][44] The so-called Prague Spring and the ensuing Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 represented a series of events on which Krahl expressed himself with robust clarity.