The Danube Metropolis 93the heading ‘A Jew Boy from Frankfurt’, he described how Helene
Berg became very agitated and had done everything in her power to
protect her husband from the torrent of words that poured forth from
the newly arrived Adorno. Even in the last few minutes before the start
of a Mahler concert he had made use of every moment to overwhelm
his teacher with his verbosity. Helene begged Morgenstern to rescue
her husband. He attempted therefore to draw Adorno into a conversa-
tion and invited him to accompany him after the concert.
He was slightly built. Although the weather was very mild, he
wore an overcoat of indeterminate colour. He had a thin, bony
face, a well-shaped head with short hair which, despite his boyish
appearance, was already rather sparse. His eyes were large, brown,
and protruded slightly. His hands were the most expressive thing
about him: they were narrow, with long fingers, very delicate and
attractively sensitive. Such hands were not uncommon among young
Talmud scholars in Eastern Europe.... I asked him whether he
came from a religious family. He took a deep breath and said,
‘Yes, my father is a socialist’, whereupon I decided to invite him
to join me in a coffee house. I went on to ask him, ‘Surely you
didn’t learn your Baudelaire [whose poems Adorno had been quot-
ing in French] from your father?’ He replied, ‘No, I learned about
him from my aunt. My Aunt Agathe is a great connoisseur
of Baudelaire, and she told me all about him when I was still a
child.’ So I invited him to come with me to the coffee house, and
realized even before my friends had joined us that this Frankfurt
Jew boy with his twenty-one years was a very knowledgeable,
well-educated man.^40If we are to believe Morgenstern, the epithet ‘Jew boy’ comes from
Helene Berg. But he had no compunction in using it himself, despite
its obvious anti-Semitic tenor. Ignoring this is obviously a way of
expressing his own aversion to Adorno. Morgenstern goes on to find
fault with Adorno’s high-flown, Hegelian–Marxist jargon, as well as
his use of terminology derived from phenomenology and psycho-
analysis. From Morgenstern’s description, Adorno must have displayed
an extreme intellectuality. He is said to have spoken constantly in a
language full of ambitious theoretical concepts. Adorno points to the
accuracy of this observation himself when he recalls that Berg would
describe him as a ‘bore’ (Fadian), referring to his custom of always
speaking earnestly in that refined language that came across to the
Viennese as ‘boring’.
At the same time, Adorno also struck Morgenstern as being extremely
devoted and eager to communicate. At their very first meeting, he
told Morgenstern with pride about his friendship with Kracauer and