From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 18712
Between Academic and
Authentic Concerns:
From Philosophy Lecturer to
Advanced Student in Oxford
Adorno had personal experience of harassment by the Nazis, but this
did not lead to his precipitate departure from Germany. His hesitation
was in part the result of political misjudgement, but in part arose from
a reluctance to leave without at least minimal assurances about his
career prospects. If he could not obtain a university post, he wished
at least to be able to obtain work as a music critic and pursue his
ambitions as a composer. This latter included the possibility of public
performances of his work.
Adorno’s father urged him to put out feelers in Britain. This advice
may have been an effect of his Anglophilia, but more probably the
rational calculation that as a wine-merchant he traditionally had close
business relationships with his British customers^1 and that his brother
Bernhard Wiesengrund had lived there with his wife Helene (néeRichter)
for thirty years.^2 As an electrical engineer, Bernhard Wiesengrund had
successfully built up a business, the Power Plant Company, even before
the First World War, and acquired a certain reputation as a businessman.
He lived in a comfortable house in Finchley with his three children – his
daughter, Lina, who was the eldest, and his two sons, Bernhard Theodore
and Louis Alexander. He had acquired British citizenship in 1914 and
had changed his name to Bernhard Robert Wingfield.^3
Because the Wiesengrunds had kept in touch with the Wingfields,
Adorno’s father knew quite early on that there was a private British aid
organization devoted to helping émigrés establish contact with Anglo-
Saxon universities. This was the Academic Assistance Council (AAC),
which had been set up in March 1933 on the initiative of Sir William
Beveridge, the director of the London School of Economics. The AAC
was renamed in March 1936, after which it became known as the Society
for the Protection of Science and Learning.^4 The AAC concentrated on
providing an information service, and then on making financial assist-
ance available to émigré scholars, subsidies for travel or university fees
and – of particular importance to Adorno – the award of maintenance