160 Part II: A Change of Scene
the ability to keep to a strict timetable, we may still feel baffled by his
ability to cope with all his other duties as well as his writing commit-
ments. As soon as he became a lecturer (Privatdozent), he took on a
growing number of academic duties, on the one hand as Paul Tillich’s
assistant, and on the other as a teacher in his own right in the Arts
Faculty. He also took part in the sociologists’ debates in the Institute of
Social Research, presided over by Horkheimer – and not simply as an
onlooker. These sociologists were attempting to produce a theory of the
historical laws governing the age. His association with the institute also
implied a willingness to publish in Horkheimer’s new journal, the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. That was just one publishing commit-
ment alongside many others.
Pride of place among them must go to the various music journals he
wrote for: Anbruch, Pult und Taktstock, Die Musik, Der Scheinwerfer,
and 23 , among others. Independently of the many articles that appeared
in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Vossische Zeitung, and periodicals such
as the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur, he gave a growing number
of talks for Frankfurt Radio. Added to these were public lectures and
talks on musical topics, as well as philosophy. During this period, he
produced more texts than he could publish or than he wished to make
available to a larger readership. Much of what he wrote took the form
of spontaneous, improvised notes. They disappeared into his desk from
which they were eventually to be retrieved for subsequent use. He
scattered his hand-written notes among various octavo notebooks,^98
each devoted to a particular topic and with titles like ‘Black Book’,
‘Coloured Book’ or ‘Green Book’. In contrast, he typed his completed
manuscripts himself on his Underwood typewriter. Later on, after his
marriage to Gretel Karplus, he went over to dictation, and this soon
became his preferred method. Once the texts had been typed out, he
would go through them several times, sentence by sentence. Over the
twelve years up to his emigration, these writings came to include over
a hundred opera or concert reviews, and a further fifty critiques of
musical compositions. Even professional music critics would be hard
put to keep pace with productivity on this scale.
Quite apart from the sheer quantity of his output, the diversity of the
literary forms involved is very striking. In addition to the relatively
large number of polemical concert reviews, all written in his highly
individual style, he experimented with aphorisms and essays. Alongside
the features written for radio, there were monograph-length studies of
musical trends and composers. Qualitatively speaking, these critiques
of varying length, taken together with his numerous articles, can be
seen as the building blocks of an independent theory of music which
their youthful author would only develop in the years to come. Despite
their fragmentary nature, these formally diverse texts had one thing in
common: they provided growing evidence of the philosophical focus of
his thinking. This had developed, by the time of his inaugural lecture at