176 Part III: Emigration YearsAt the point in time when the members of the Institute of Social
Research started to become conscious of the threat represented by the
conservative and reactionary trends of the age, Adorno wrote to Alban
Berg, following the dramatic Nazi gains in the election of September
1930, arguing that the Germans ‘had succumbed to demonic stupidity’.
He explained his recurrent inability to compose music by the absence of
future prospects in Germany, something that ‘robbed him of all creative
energy’.^9 In his letters to Berg in the mid-1920s he had made no secret
of his sympathies for the political ideas of the democratic wing of the
communist movement, even though he was highly sceptical about the
political strategy of the KPD as a whole.^10 The topic of anti-Semitism
does arise in Adorno’s early letters, but nowhere does he suggest that
he had personal experience of it. Not having been confronted personally
with the excesses of Nazi behaviour in the first few months after Hitler
came to power, he was able to continue his life as normal. Thus inAugust
1933 he found nothing to prevent him from taking his usual holiday
with Gretel Karplus, and they spent several weeks in Binz on the Baltic
coast, where they met Paul and Hannah Tillich.^11 And as late as March
1934, when he had taken up his father’s contacts in London in order to
find out about any future academic prospects, he returned to Germany
for a summer holiday in the Alps. He sought to deal with the new situ-
ation by continuing to pursue his personal interests as unobtrusively as
possible. Nevertheless, the difficulties grew. In spring 1933 he complained
about persistent stomach pains and headaches. Anxieties about thefuture
would not go away despite all his whistling in the dark and, together
with his habit of constant overwork, they were not without consequences.
Kracauer warned him not to overdo things; he should reduce his work-
load and even consider a spell in a sanatorium.^12 As to the advance of
National Socialism, Adorno did not at first believe that this would prove
to be a danger to democracy and political freedom in Germany in the
long run. He loathed racist nationalism (das Völkische) and all the pro-
paganda about ‘blood and soil’ that went with it. He had firstencountered
fascism during his various travels in Italy, namely the local petty bour-
geois, anti-socialist fascism of the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, ‘Il
Duce’, and his idea of the ‘stato totalitario’. His response to nationalism
and the one-party state had been one of outright rejection.^13
This dislike did not protect him from making a number of misjudge-
ments concerning the popularity of Hitlerism and the attractions of the
leader-and-follower ideology to broad sections of the German people.
He was convinced that sooner or later the primitive racial theory, the
irrational anti-Semitism, would put many people off, and the same thing
applied to the violence of the mob of brownshirts, the wave of arrests
after the Reichstag fire on 27 February, the boycott of Jewishbusinesses
on 1 April 1933 and the public book-burnings in May. For a long time
he thought it inconceivable that National Socialism could achieve its
own stabilization by terrorizing its opponents.