182 Part III: Emigration Years
by radicals within the NSDAP. And he showed how extremists should
be dealt with on 30 June 1934 when he engineered the so-called Röhm
putsch and crushed the SA, which in the eyes of the public had been
responsible for the terrorism on the streets. Hitler’s success in repres-
enting himself as a force for order can be judged not least by the fact
that even ‘leading figures of the Jewish community were trying to hide
their distress behind a façade of confidence. Despite all difficulties, the
future of Jewish life in Germany was not being irretrievably endan-
gered.’^32 Such misjudgements on the part of artists were aggravated by,
among other factors, the Cultural League of German Jews, with whom,
as it happened, Adorno had experience of his own. This organization
was one that, although tolerated by the Nazis, was intended to secure
autonomous cultural activities for Jews. It had been established in May
1933 by Kurt Singer, who had previously been the deputy director
of the Städtische Oper in Berlin. It embraced Jews from all parts of
Germany and concentrated on organizing concert and opera perform-
ances. These included a performance in Frankfurt of a selection of
Schoenberg’s works in honour of his sixtieth birthday. When Adorno,
who was attracted by this initiative, applied for membership in the
Cultural League his application was turned down because ‘he wasracially
a half-Jew’ and a Christian by religion.^33
Just as Adorno kept postponing a decision about his future, so
too the relatively well-informed circle around Leo Baeck kept issuing
warnings even as late as 1934 about the political risks and material
consequences of an over-hasty emigration, particularly in the light of
the tax imposed by the Nazis on the export of capital. All these factors
played a part in the much commented-on ‘seeming lack of enthusiasm
for leaving a country where segregation, humiliation and a whole array
of persecutory measures were becoming steadily worse.. ..Most of the
Jews expected to weather the storm in Germany.’^34 Oscar Wiesengrund,
whose family was classified by the Nazis as being ‘related to Jews by
marriage’, belonged to this group. He believed that his military service
during the war would protect him.^35 Moreover, he had been awarded
the Cross of Honour ‘in the name of the Führer and Reich Chancellor’,
a medal for war veterans that had been established by the Reich presi-
dent, Paul von Hindenburg, shortly before his death. In the first few
years of Nazi rule, Jewish veterans who had been so honoured enjoyed
a certain immunity. Since Adorno dismissed racial ideology as insane
and could not imagine that the bourgeoisie would allow itself to be
governed by what he called ‘gang leaders’,^36 he daily expected the col-
lapse of the regime whose ‘Führer’ seemed to him to be ‘a mixture of
King Kong and a suburban hairdresser’.^37
As a citizen of Frankfurt, Adorno discovered that a community
with a well-developed civic culture and privately run cultural institu-
tions such as the Städel Art Gallery, the Deutscher Hochstift and the
Senckenberg Society for Natural Science contained a number of refuges