Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration 183for Jews who were active as scholars or artists. The prominence of
Jewish citizens in Frankfurt cultural life as well as a culture that owed
so much to private sponsorship provided effective protection, for a time
at least, against the all-levelling pressure of the Nazi system.^38
As late as mid-April 1934 Adorno wrote to Benjamin, who had
emigrated to France, expressing his doubts about the stability of the
Nazi regime. ‘For although I am certainly not optimistic, and expect
the future to bring a kind of right-wing anarchy ... if not a downright
military dictatorship or something like the Dollfuss regime, the signs
of collapse are nevertheless starting to accumulate so much that one no
longer needs to ignore them for fear of the wish proving father to the
thought.’^39 He expressed himself similarly in a letter to Leo Löwenthal
a few weeks later, in which he wrote that the murders of Röhm and
Schleicher had destabilized and compromised the regime ‘which was
so weakened by the elimination of the SA (which has been reduced to
a shadow of its former self) that I do not see how it will be able to cope
with the serious difficulties of the winter. I think it will then come to
killings and murder with the army as saviour.’ In the event of armed
conflict, Adorno naively imagined that revolution would break out: ‘In
general, I think it more likely next year than for the last fifteen years.
But will it succeed? I am almost afraid that everything will move too
quickly and the dictatorship will disintegrate before the workers can set
up an organization to take its place – and then capitalism will emerge
the winner.’^40
In the months preceding and following Hitler’s seizure of power down
to the time he spent at Merton College, Oxford, as an ‘advanced
student’, Adorno continued with his activities as a writer and composer.
Having formally applied for leave during the summer semester 1933,
since his licence to teach had been withdrawn as from the start of the
winter semester, he was able to use the time to work on his opera
project The Treasure of Indian Joe. In addition, he wrote a number of
reviews of new books on philosophy for the Frankfurter Zeitung and for
the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: on Nicolai Hartmann’s The Problem
of Spiritual Existence, a Festschrift for Ludwig Klages, and a monograph
on Hegel. At the same time as his Kierkegaard book appeared, the
Frankfurter Zeitung published the surrealist sketches he had written
with Carl Dreyfus. Quantitatively, the music articles that appeared in
specialist journals stand out; they dealt with such composers as Bach,
Schubert, Brahms, and on down to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.
In number 7 of the Europäische Revue edited by Karl Anton Prinz
Rohan, Adorno published a review of a performance of Wagner’s Die
Meistersinger which had taken place in the Berlin Festival under the
baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler. This ‘Note about Wagner’ is his first
extended discussion of the composer who was being celebrated by the
National Socialist regime as the prophet of a new German religion ofart.
Adorno defended Wagner against Nietzsche’s criticism, whiledistancing