100 Part II: A Change of Scene
the Worte ohne Lieder (Words without Songs). So these surrealist pieces
are further evidence of his literary ambitions, without which he would
have been unable to develop the style which was already becoming
visible in the majority of his writings. Presumably, he had been encour-
aged in these literary experimentations by Dreyfus, who hoped to write
a novel on white-collar culture.
Dreyfus was five years older than Adorno and had studied in
Heidelberg. At the time of their collaboration he was the manager of a
business that made him financially independent, so that for the duration
of the Weimar Republic he was able to lead the life of an independent
scholar with literary and artistic interests. This put him in the same
category as Hermann Grab, with whom he was on friendly terms, as he
was with Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer. But he was not only
in contact with male intellectuals. About a year before the Castor
Zwieback texts were published, Dreyfus had met the actress Marianne
Hoppe, who was twenty-one at the time. She was regarded in Frankfurt
as a rising acting talent, and had a contract with the Neues Theater. In
the middle of 1920, the Neues Theater, which was managed by Arthur
Hellmer, had Max Ophüls as its artistic director. The theatre acquired
some notoriety in autumn 1928, above all with the production of Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera. Thanks to her love affair with Dreyfus, Marianne
Hoppe met Adorno and others from the same left-wing circles. She
recalls^23 that the political discussions at which she was present were a
factor in preventing her from approving the ideas of National Socialism,
either then or later, even though she spent the Hitler years in Germany
and made her great career there at that time.^24 Shortly before the Nazi
dictatorship came into being, Dreyfus, under the pseudonym of Ludwig
Carls, had been involved in a project to produce what Adorno described
as an avant-garde film of Theodor Storm’s story Der Schimmelreiter.
Adorno wrote to Berg in September 1933, asking him whether he would
be interested in composing the music for the film.^25 This film was actu-
ally made, although not until 1934. The directors were Hans Deppe and
Curt Oertel. The music was finally written not by Berg, but by Wilfried
Zillig, a pupil of Schoenberg’s, whose work Adorno had briefly men-
tioned in two concert reviews.
Between philosophy and music: no parting of the waysIn December 1926 Adorno had the pleasure of hearing a performance
of his Two Pieces for String Quartet, op. 2, in Vienna. Even before that
he had started work on the Habilitation. Having made up his mind to do
it, he found this ritual exercise something of a chore. The fact was that
his mind was focused on his existing scores. He wished to improve them
to the point where they were ripe for performance and then to compose
further pieces. Over and above that, there were his ambitions as music