Adorno

In Search of a Career 95

7

In Search of a Career

In mid-August Adorno left Vienna, initially to take a holiday in the
Dolomites, as he had done the previous year. Else Herzberger, the
wealthy friend of the Wiesengrund family, had invited him to Madonna
di Campiglio. From there he went travelling for almost six weeks,
taking in Genoa, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum and Capri. In Genoa, where
he also went to see the Palazzo Adorno, he met up with Kracauer. The
trip to the south had been planned as a joint venture. As he reported,
not without irony, he thought Italy a wild country ‘in which thevolcanoes
are an institution and the swindlers are saved’. This affronts his ‘bour-
geois sense of values just as fascism is incompatible with my rebellious
instincts. Nevertheless, I feel very comfortable here.’^1
Kracauer recorded some of his impressions of Italy in an article
for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Here is his description of Positano, in the
vicinity of Salerno:

A vanishing sense of time, pathological conditions; such things

are no rarity in Positano. The pernicious effect of mythological

substances attracts outlaws as well as flirtatious exhibitionists. ..;

their disorientation seems to find a sanctuary here. In the evenings

everyone comes together in the beach café, a versatile locality in

which, operetta-like, the Camorra chieftain holds court to the back-

drop of the thundering breakers. Gramophone records succeed

one another, intimate couples dance by the light of the sooty gas

lamps, their contours merge, relationships smoulder wordlessly.^2

Adorno too was very taken with the beauty of Positano, as can be seen
from a letter to Berg written shortly after his return to Frankfurt: ‘the
Positano landscape is one familiar only in dreams; the same can be said
of the people there. The Byzantine Ravello – above Amalfi – vouch-
safes a glimpse of the East for the space of an evening.... Naples seemed
like an ominous chaos at first, the streets look like a forest, melons are
up for sale beneath symbols of a heathen culture.’^3 In the context of
Naples, he mentions that the two travellers had met Walter Benjamin