The article examines Adorno and Heidegger's contrasting conceptions of art and myth in relation to their reading of western history since the Greeks and to German thinking on the relation between nature and history since Kant. In Part I Adorno's lecture `The Idea of Natural History' (1932), which draws on Lukács's Theory of the Novel and Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heidegger's fundamental ontology in Being and Time, serves as focus for (...) the interrelation between myth, origin and repetition in western history, construed as the forgetting of nature (Adorno) or the forgetting of Being (Heidegger). In Part II, the question of the remythologization or the demythologization of art in Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno is examined in the context of aesthetic modernism. (shrink)