178 Part III: Emigration Years
by the SA of the house in Kronberg he shared with Pollock, the
so-called Schweizerhäuschen. From February they had transferred their
research to Geneva, where they continued to work with Löwenthal,
Fromm and Marcuse. Other members of the institute had gone under-
ground or had left Germany.
As far as Adorno was concerned, matters did not rest with his
dismissal from the university. In July his house in Seeheimer Strasse
was subjected to a search. He also had grounds to believe that his post
was being spied on. When he took steps to qualify as a music teacher in
order to be able to earn his living, he was informed that he could only
take on ‘non-Aryan’ pupils. As if that were not enough, in November
1933 he had found it necessary to apply for membership of the Reich
Chamber of Literature. A few months later he was informed by the
president of the chamber that his application had been rejected, since
membership was restricted to ‘reliable members of the Volk’,^18 i.e., ‘per-
sons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character
[Art] and blood. As a non-Aryan you are unable to feel and appreciate
such an obligation. Signed: Suchenwirth. Certified as correct: Nowotny.’^19
This decision was more than just another act of spite on the part of the
Nazi bureaucracy, since it had the effect of suddenly confronting Adorno
with the Jewish side of his identity. As a member of the educated
middle class, he was made aware by persecution and expulsion that he
had a relation to Judaism even though he had always regarded it with
scepticism and even mockery.^20
In retrospect, Adorno frankly admitted that he had completely
misjudged the political situation in 1933. During the first months follow-
ing the political intrigues which culminated in what was after all the
legal appointment of Hitler as Reich chancellor, he was under theillusion
that the Third Reich would last only a short time because of theeconomic
incompetence of its leaders.^21 This error is all the more significant
as Adorno could see plainly what was happening before his very eyes.
In 1933 Arnold Schoenberg resigned from his post as professor in the
Prussian Academy of Arts because of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, and he
was forced to leave Germany. The public performance of avant-garde
works such as the compositions of Anton Webern, the operas of Alban
Berg, and the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler was forbidden, and,
in general, works by Jewish composers were strictly controlled. Max
Horkheimer and Fritz Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and
Erich Fromm had all realized very early on what was about to happen.
But they were not alone: people closer to Adorno, such as Siegfried
Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Schoen and Walter Benjamin, hadalready
turned their backs on their native land in order to escape arrest by the
Gestapo. There was nothing unusual about packing one’s suitcases as a
response to the threats from a state that openly threatened to persecute
those who disagreed with it politically and to eliminate both Jews and
‘subhumans’. Thousands of intellectuals, writers, journalists and artists