Adorno

In Search of a Career 103

was left to cope on its own with its Black Bottom and Yes, Sir,

that’s my Baby. No sensation, then, for a public used to bars. A

few girls with gold fillings, very few in fact, though at least one

with a good figure. A show projected against eerily out-of-date

backdrops, among them a New York street so senselessly empty

that it recalls Kafka’s empty spaces. With a star that isn’t one, and

that is visibly imitating another unknown star that may not be one

either.^30

His discussion of Hermann Scherchen was free of polemics. Adorno
observed in a review that his approach to music ‘penetrated to the heart
of the ideological problems raised by the works’.^31
Adorno sent detailed accounts of all these cultural events to his
‘master and teacher’. He spent the summer of 1926 trying to prepare
the first movement of his quartet for performance. At the same time, he
was writing a third movement. In addition, he wrote the ‘Piano Piecesin
strict twelve-tone technique’, as well as songs that were later integrated
into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6.^32 And, as if that were
not enough, he also wrote a number of musical aphorisms, a genre new
to him, that he was able to publish in the Musikblätter des Anbruch, and
later in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Typical of such aphorisms was one
in which he compared Max Reger’s works to contemporary interior
design, while Debussy’s music was said to come to an end ‘as a picture
comes to an end when we step away from it’.^33
All this composing and writing about music could not but have an
adverse effect on his Habilitation. For several months he had under-
taken an intensive study of psychoanalysis and had produced a bulky
manuscript on the subject. In November 1927, he presented it to
Cornelius for a preliminary reading. It bore the title The Concept of the
Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche. When Cornelius
had read it, he advised Adorno privately to withdraw his application for
the Habilitation. He subsequently wrote to the committee of the Arts
Faculty, saying that Adorno’s work was too close to his own way of
thinking, that it was insufficiently original and that it lacked innovative
content. Adorno’s disappointment was all the greater since he had
evidently hoped that taking over Cornelius’s terminology in the
Transzendentale Systematik would be a guarantee of success. A vain
hope: he now felt ‘shamefully let down’.^34 His only consolation was that
a majority in the faculty had been in favour in principle of awarding
the Habilitation, and he was able to persuade himself that this setback
did not close the door to a university career in Frankfurt. What further
conclusions did he draw from this debacle? It was the first and only time
that Adorno compromised his intellectual integrity. He also made at-
tempts to see what could be salvaged. It was little enough. Since he had
cautiously not gone beyond submitting an inquiry about an application
for the Habilitation, he was able to withdraw it in January 1928. In his