92 Part II: A Change of Scene
Mahler had a brief marriage with Walter Gropius before settling down
with Franz Werfel. At any rate, it was through Berg that the visit came
about. He was horrified by her, ‘particularly by the aplomb with which
she produced the most excruciating trivialities.... There is no need to
add that she absolutely failed to match up to the image that a 21-year-
old had of Mahler’s widow.’^37
Together with Berg, he also attended the spectacular readings by
Karl Kraus. Both Berg and Adorno were captivated by Kraus’s charisma
and intellectual brilliance, though in Adorno’s case this did not happen
all at once, but only later when he had a chance to read his writings, in
particular Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität (Morality and Criminality) of 1908
and The Last Days of Mankind of 1922. His initial reaction was rather
reserved. But in the public lectures Adorno thought of Kraus as an
actor who was half-priest and half-clown. Decades later, when Sittlichkeit
und Kriminalität was reprinted, he devoted an essay to Kraus in which he
described him as an anti-psychological psychologist, a master of textual
criticism, which he carried out with a specific combination of commentary
and a montage of quotations.
A further noteworthy acquaintance was that of the thirty-year-old
Soma Morgenstern, whom he also met through Alban and Helene Berg.
Morgenstern, who had studied law, did not always have an easy rela-
tionship with the Frankfurt philosopher. The two men found them-
selves in competition for Berg’s favour, which was all the harder because
Berg was attracting considerable public interest in Vienna following the
success of Wozzeck. Morgenstern was a writer from Eastern Galicia
who had been living in Vienna since 1912. He had already known Berg
for two years, and he was also acquainted with Béla Balázs and Georg
Lukács, with Robert Musil and Joseph Roth. Adorno readily conceded
that Morgenstern had a gift for wit and repartee which he did not
possess himself to the same degree. As a German, he hoped to impress
Berg by his ostentatious philosophical earnestness.
Even after he left Vienna, Adorno stayed in touch with Morgenstern,
who worked briefly as the cultural correspondent of the Frankfurter
Zeitung at the end of the 1920s. Berg, however, was keen to remain on
good terms with both Morgenstern and Adorno. In a letter he used the
image of a ‘four-leaf clover’ to refer to the three of them and his wife.
What they liked doing best was what Berg referred to erroneously as
‘Teikizerei’, referring to the Yiddish word ‘daigetzen’ that was current
in Vienna and means something like ‘to spout profound rubbish’.
Morgenstern maintained ‘that Dr Wiesengrund was the greatest daigetzer
ever.’^38 While Adorno told Kracauer about Morgenstern’s friendliness
and openness, he wrote later to Benjamin that, despite all his good
qualities, Soma ‘had an unfortunate tendency to mediocrity, even towards
himself’.^39
Morgenstern was equally blunt in his references to Adorno. In an
essay (about Alban Berg that appeared posthumously in 1995), under