Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration 169A Twofold Exile: Intellectual
Homelessness as Personal Fate
There is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no onewould
be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity.^1Horrified by the Nazi takeover, Adorno found himself unable to speak
when he became a witness to the ghastly events in Berlin in the first few
months of 1933. On the winners’ side, shouts of ‘Heil Hitler’ in the
intoxicated sense of unity, victory celebrations with the Horst Wessel
song, an oppressive sea of flags with swastikas, mass meetings, vows,
ceremonies of consecration, all accompanied by anti-Semitic outrages
and book-burnings in many German university towns. On the losers’
side, the flight in panic of Jewish fellow citizens, left-wing politicians
and oppositional intellectuals trying to make their escape across the
frontiers of the Third Reich, their exodus triggered by waves of arrests,
torture in the cellars of the Gestapo and the arbitrary violence of the
first concentration camps of the SA.^2
Overwhelmed by shame at his impotence in the face of the bestial
events unfolding before him, Adorno felt paralysed. But, even more
significantly, his distance from them also enabled him to register ‘the
lethal sadness’ that arose from the presentiment of the disasters to come.
He was not unaware that the monumental productions of the new mas-
ters, as well as their talk of a ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft),
were designed to camouflage any awareness of the approaching cata-
strophe. Behind the pomp and ceremony, the rumblings could already
be heard. ‘Everyone and nobody was too stupid to perceive’ the de-
structive nature of National Socialist power politics.^3
It was easier to grasp the situation a good ten years after the events –
that was the time lag between this reminiscence in Minima Moralia and
the triumph of collective folly – than under the weight of theimpressions
that crowded in on him at the time. Adorno, as a ‘half-Jew’ and left-
wing intellectual, had no alternative to the passive role of an observer
who gradually becomes conscious of the threats facing him. For a brief
period he still thought he might be able to lead a private life as a com-
poser, but this belief soon proved illusory. He was quickly disabused of