Adorno

Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration 179

went into exile. Those who left were, according to Adorno, the people
who counted.
Although he witnessed both this exodus and the increasingly harsh
acts of discrimination, his aim was to discover a niche in which he could
bide his time until the Hitler dictatorship had found what he hoped
would be a speedy end. ‘At the time this catastrophic misjudgement was
shared even by prominent émigrés who filled the hotels of Paris, Vienna
and Prague, sitting there, as it were, without unpacking their suitcases,
waiting for a quick return... .Not everyone grasped the terrorist nature
of the regime from the outset, or saw it as a lethal threat.’^22 Like many
of his contemporaries, Adorno regarded Hitler ‘as an increasingly poor
caricature. ..of himself as well as of a real dictator (Aryan, statesman
and general)’,^23 a shady figure whose bizarre speech and gestures pre-
vented him from being taken seriously. Adorno might have learnt from
Siegfried Kracauer, one of his closest friends, that the National Socialist
movement was a real threat, despite the grotesque nature of its ‘Führer’.
No later than 1932 Kracauer had drawn attention to some of the signs
pointing to the approaching catastrophe. For example, he wrote a highly
critical article for the Frankfurter Zeitung about the voluntary work
service and the work camps that, despite their supposedly unpolitical
and purely educational mandate, had turned out to contain ‘the nucleus
of the political organization, the prototypes of the national community’.
Later, in the same newspaper and while it was still possible, Kracauer
attacked the totalitarian nationalism of a writer such as Friedrich
Hielscher and the doctrines of his journal Das Reich, which he regarded
as the advance guard of the ideology of the totalitarian state. As late as
the beginning of 1933, Kracauer produced an analysis of the electoral
success of the National Socialists and a breakdown of those who had
voted for them. However, this article could no longer be published in
the Frankfurter Zeitung, even though he remained an editor until the
spring. Following his clairvoyant study of the white-collar worker (Die
Angestellten) of 1929, he wrote that the middle-class vote for the Hitler
movement resulted from the proletarianization of these social strata.
But ‘National Socialism had thrived thanks to the financial support of
industry.’ In the case of industry the hatred of the unions had been
the deciding factor, while for its part the upper middle class accepted
Hitler’s seizure of power from fear of communism. ‘Anti-Semitism, which
many all too optimistic citizens dismissed as a mere blemish, is in truth
at the ideological core of the movement. This is why it is still cultivated.
Its true mission is to conceal the facts of class struggle by diverting it
into race hatred.’^24
It is unlikely that Adorno remained in ignorance of this analysis.
Even if he did, he had received warning enough in Kracauer’s letters.
As early as the summer of 1930, Kracauer wrote insistently to Adorno,
‘The situation in Germany is worse than serious.... This country is
facing disaster and I know that it is not just a question of capitalism.