Adorno

In Search of a Career 99

He had been told that he would have to obtain a qualification in law.
Was this a genuine threat? It may have been merely a ruse on Adorno’s
part to gain Kracauer’s support, since the latter was on friendly terms
with Löwenthal and welcomed his plans for the Habilitation as warmly
as Adorno’s. Indeed, he may well have believed that Adorno’s true
talents lay in the sphere of music. And so they did, but he had other
talents too. Admittedly, these other talents would showthemselves only
after a number of bitter disappointments both in philosophy and in
music criticism.
The year 1926 also witnessed Adorno’s unhappy love affair with the
Frankfurt actress Ellen Dreyfus-Herz. She was in the process of obtain-
ing a divorce from Adorno’s friend Carl Dreyfus. In a letter written to
Berg in August 1926 from Staudach-Rotten on the Tegernsee in Upper
Bavaria, where he was holidaying, Adorno complained that he was suf-
fering from ‘severe depressions’ that he ascribed to ‘erotic confusions
without hope or way out’. The relationship between him and Ellen was
‘very strange. For both parties it is a combination of the intimate and
the alien. And it proves to me once again how terrible it is for human
relationships that have great ambitions to be incapable of fulfilment.’^18
A few weeks later, in November, he told Berg despondently that this
passionate affair had now come to an end. ‘This woman, to whom
I have been totally committed, has left me for someone else – and in
a way that only Kafka could have endured.’^19
Adorno’s affair with Dreyfus’s divorced wife appears to havedisrupted
the friendship between the two men for a time. A few years later,
however, they jointly published so-called Surrealist Pieces that appeared
in the Frankfurter Zeitung in November 1931 under the pseudonym
of Castor Zwieback.^20 These prose pieces depict grotesque situations:
at a funeral, a committee meeting or in the tram. Castor Zwieback’s
surrealist intentions were also highlighted by the motto by André Breton
and Paul Éluard that preceded them: ‘Frappe à la porte, crie: Entrez,
et n’entre pas.’

Morning

A young man went on holiday in a spa hotel in the south. In the

morning, still in his pyjamas, he went to the lavatory. Opening the

door, he saw an elderly woman sitting on the seat. Although he

hastened to shut the door, he could not avoid seeing the woman.

She was wearing an embroidered black dress, and beneath the

skirt, which was pulled up, long white knickers and black boots.

The woman muttered something. When she appeared on the

veranda in the black dress at lunchtime, the young man bowed.^21

The two writers had produced far more pieces than could be pub-
lished in the newspaper at the time.^22 Adorno had already tried out such
prose forms in other contributions to the Frankfurter Zeitung, such as