142 Part II: A Change of Scene
This library was situated in a quiet villa in the Westend, comfort-
ably furnished, evidently a foundation. In my eyes this library of
modern literature was an oasis in which we often found refuge
from the sterility of the lecture rooms and the dreariness of the
student residences. Here we met with Amorelli every Thursday
evening in one of the little seminar rooms; there were no more
than a dozen of us. He would sit at the upper narrow end of the
table. His roundish head with the curly black hair, already begin-
ning to recede, and his large dark eyes behind the horn-rimmed
spectacles gave him a frog-like appearance. Sometimes he was
accompanied by a young lady with golden hair, gold-brown eyes
and rosy cheeks. She would sit next to him like a princess in ‘The
Frog-Prince’, but she never uttered a single word.
The students in this seminar did not have an easy time of it.
Amorelli insisted that minutes should be taken of what had been
said in every discussion, and he was particular about what was
recorded and how it was phrased. Those who took the minutes
were exposed to a rigorous and sometimes bitingly ironic critique.
No one wanted to disgrace himself. So when at the beginning of
the session Amorelli asked who would like to take the minutes,
the Twelve Apostles would for the most part sit in silence looking
down at the floor.^40Another student has similar memories from this period before the
Second World War. This was Wilhelm Emrich, subsequently a major
literary scholar and Kafka critic who developed his own method of text
interpretation. What had stayed in his mind were the discussions with
Adorno about the ‘prehistory of history’, and ‘Theodor Storm’s “Der
Schimmelreiter” [The Dykemaster] and “Regentrude”. Adorno was
interested in them as myths that exhibited the strange clash of regress-
ive and progressive trends. Further topics included the traffic island
around the Frankfurt City Theatre around midnight as an allegory of
explosive traffic jams and the vacuum at the heart of modern society;
Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; the bourgeois mystique surrounding fires... ;
the traumas of inwardness in Johannes Brahms, etc. etc.’^41 In contrast
to Emrich, Ernst Erich Noth was fascinated by the meetings after the
seminars in the Café Laumer that were said to have contributed more
to the students’ education than the official teaching programme.^42
These contemporary testimonies to Adorno’s intellectual activity
in the 1930s flesh out the picture of an unusually alert and cultivated
literary mind. His nonconformism went hand in hand with a penchant
for discussing philosophical trends. Because Frankfurt University was
a focal point of competing intellectual tendencies, everyone who had
a feel for these political and ideological controversies was courted by
the different parties. The boundaries between the different intellectual
groupings were vague and membership of the groups overlapped. Even