of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favour of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt's articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb." Adorno would refer to the radical students as stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung)