The Danube Metropolis 87Ellen Delp, a black woman with a son who was said to be a communist,
with whom he quickly formed a friendship. By chance, Arthur Koestler,
who was not yet famous, was also living in the Luisenheim. Adorno did
not take to him. For his part, Koestler thought the young man from
Frankfurt was a shy, esoteric person with a subtle charm that he was too
callow to appreciate at the time.^16
The 21-year-old Adorno had longed to move to the birthplace of
twelve-tone music and to study with Berg, but this is not to say he left
Frankfurt without regrets. He was reluctant to leave his family and also
to be separated from Gretel Karplus in Berlin or from his close friend
Siegfried Kracauer. To begin with at least, Vienna was terra incognita,
and it took time for him to familiarize himself with it and to accustom
himself to the Viennese sloppiness, the easy-going manners he so fre-
quently complained about.
Vienna at the time was partly an aristocratic city and partly a centre
of bourgeois capitalist commerce. Having left Frankfurt, Adorno may
well have cherished the hope of being able to find there ‘a bolt-hole in
which to lead an acceptable existence’.^17 Ultimately, he did not succeed
in this, although he came to feel at home there and there is no doubt that
he profited from the Viennese way of life and its musical culture. Vienna
had a lively intellectual scene, half bourgeois, half anti-bourgeois. This
stood apart from both the established bourgeois commercial circles and
the socially enfeebled aristocracy. To gain an impression of this artistic
life we need only to remind ourselves of the so-called Secessionist art-
ists, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Peter Altenberg, Oskar Kokoschka,
and especially Karl Kraus, with his magazine Die Fackel. In addition,
there was Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytical Society, the writers who
wrote for Ludwig von Ficker’s literary journal Der Brenner, and the
music journal Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik, which had an
international reputation and was engaged in a campaign to win support
for the Second Viennese School. Some of these intellectual groupings
had already begun to break up while Adorno was in Vienna, and he
came into contact with only a few isolated individuals, but he benefited
all the same from the after-effects of this ferment.
This Viennese avant-garde met in a number of salons, chief among
them those of Alma Mahler-Werfel and Lina Loos. It ‘brought about a
liberation in the very concrete sense of creating an independence from
the institutions and people who impeded their access to the public. We
are talking here about the organizers of exhibitions, publishers and art
critics, etc. This meant also a liberation from the pressure to conform
to assumed or experienced audience expectations. This was the true
“material” foundation of that “great revolution” in the art of the turn of
the century.’^18 When Adorno studied in Vienna in the mid-1920s, the
scandals created by the Rosé Quartet’s performances of works from
the Second Viennese School lay firmly in the past. There had been
tumultuous scenes in December 1908 when Schoenberg’s Second String