Adorno

Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration 181

deprived Adorno of a professional opportunity – one of the last
straws at which he was clutching in his efforts ‘to remain in Germany at
any price’.^29
Despite all the restrictions, he was ‘quite able to survive materially
in Germany’ and – as he explained in a letter – he ‘would have had no
political difficulties either. The only problem is that I would have had
no way of exerting any influence.’^30
Adorno seemed, then, to have been struck blind politically, and
it is in tune with this that he refrained from public criticism of any
kind of the Nazis and their ‘great power’ policies. He undoubtedly
rejected their totalitarianism, their anti-Semitism and their militant
anti-communism. But even in his private letters, until well into the
mid-1930s, we find no more than rather generalized, pessimistic mood-
pictures, and no unambiguous statements on the political situation. There
was no significant political comment in his correspondence with
Benjamin, Berg and Krenek, even though the lives of all three were
directly affected by Hitler’s politics. It may be that Adorno had the
same view of political criticism as he demanded from the musical
avant-garde: ‘It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society:
it fulfils its social function more precisely when it presents social
problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws

• problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of
  its technique. The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel rela-
  tionship to the task of social theory.’^31 Did Adorno become politicized
  by discovering the vast scope of the barbarism of the dictatorship in
  Germany and by his insight into its dimensions? Whatever political
  consciousness he had became evident in his cultural criticism. In this
  sense his scepticism towards current events was not simply aesthetic.
  But the political inferences he drew did not lead the philosopher and
  the musical theorist to a public declaration of his opposition to the
  totalitarian state.

Hibernating with dignity?

Adorno was not alone in wishing to go into hibernation; in fact he was
in the very best of company with many writers who were convinced,
as he was, that the regime would soon collapse and who thought of
their flight abroad as a sojourn in what Lion Feuchtwanger called
Europe’s ‘waiting-room’. Even major sections of the Jewish population
succumbed to the illusion that the regime would not target them but
only the orthodox pro-Soviet Bolshevists and communists who had drawn
attention to themselves politically or who had been involved in illegal
conspiracies. Moreover, despite his declared anti-Semitism, Hitler was
keen to create the impression that anti-Jewish acts were the isolated,
spontaneous outbursts of the ‘national soul’ that were approved of only