124 Part II: A Change of Scene
Scarcely had Adorno begun to focus on these central themes of
Kierkegaard’s thought than he wrote that he was enjoying this work,
but that it cost him far greater effort than the more narrowly circum-
scribed essays he had been writing for music journals. Even so, he started
with lofty ambitions: first of all, he wished to reconstruct Kierkegaard’s
philosophy following the kind of procedure Benjamin had employed in
his Origin of German Tragic Drama. In that book Benjamin had devel-
oped the idea of an allegorical principle of knowledge. The truth con-
tent of the baroque tragic drama was to be decoded by focusing on
seemingly peripheral individual elements.^14
Second, however, he wanted to appropriate the dialectical structural
analysis with which Georg Lukács had attempted to solve the riddle of
the commodity form. Particular importance was attached to the idea
that ‘the structure of commodity relations can be made to yield a model
of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the
subjective forms corresponding to them.’^15 Of equal importance was
the ‘theory of interiors’. The interior was interpreted as the ‘model
of Kierkegaardian inwardness’. Furthermore, a fundamental critical
analysis of the ‘concept of existence’ was indispensable.^16
In order to advance his work, his excerpting and note-taking, Adorno
had retreated in spring 1930 to Kronberg, an idyllic little town at the
edge of the Taunus Hills, not far from the centre of Frankfurt. In
this secluded village environment he worked on a draft of the book in
‘complete isolation’. He worked so intensively, night and day, that by
the beginning of August, as he reported to Berg, he had ‘a complete
breakdown – something that had never happened to me in the whole of
my life.’^17 Even if we take his sensitive, slightly delicate nature into
account, this breakdown was no chance matter. It was the product not
just of his strenuous work on the dissertation, but also of his countless
other activities. For despite the intended retreat to Kronberg, to the
Frankfurter Hof inn, he was still in contact with a large number of
people. Horkheimer and Pollock lived in the same place, and there
were frequent visitors from Frankfurt. For the Whitsun holidays Gretel
Karplus came from Berlin. In addition, there were concerts to be heard
in Frankfurt. And since Ernst Schoen, a childhood friend of Benjamin’s,
had a contract as arts editor with Frankfurt Radio, Adorno found
himself being drawn increasingly into activities for the radio.^18 One such
was the performance of Ernst Krenek’s songs by Hilda Crevenna-
Bolongaro. What proved decisive for Adorno’s nervous breakdown,
however, was the fact that, in addition to his Kierkegaard studies, he
was producing so many other writings. Having complained to Kracauer
about continual insomnia and strong palpitations because of the
overwork, he frequently sent him miniature treatises arising from his
work on Kierkegaard with the request that he use his influence as
editor of the cultural section of the Frankfurter Zeitung to have them
published in that paper. Kracauer’s efforts were successful. Adorno’s