188 Part III: Emigration Years
grants.^5 When Robert Wingfield first heard about the AAC he applied
at once to the secretary in order to find out whether his nephew, Fritz
Epstein, a lecturer in history who had also been dismissed by the Nazis,
had any prospects of finding a job at an English university. Fritz Epstein,
who had been born in 1898, was the elder son of Adorno’s aunt Alice
Betty, who had married Paul Epstein, the mathematician. Fritz Epstein
had studied with Richard Salomon in Hamburg, where he had begun
his career as a historian in the Institute for East European History.^6 At
the time when his uncle approached the AAC, Fritz Epstein had two
children of nine and seven to provide for, as well as his non-Jewish wife
(née Bertelsmann), who was subject to the degrading provisions of a
‘mixed marriage’. It is understandable, therefore, that Bernhard Robert
Wingfield should have regarded assistance for Fritz, the son of his sister,
as a higher priority than concern for his brother’s son who was five
years younger and as yet unmarried.
Without the help of the AAC it would not have been possible for
either Adorno or Epstein to set foot in Britain. A strict asylum policy
was in force in the British Isles, thanks to the Aliens Restriction Act. In
addition, the Foreign Office pursued a policy of appeasement towards
the Third Reich up to the eve of war in September 1939, and this
encouraged the British tendency to isolationism. Just as Prime Minister
Chamberlain strove to reach an accommodation with Hitler, so too
officialdom greeted émigrés from Germany with reserve.^7 The state of
the British economy was also a significant factor, in particular, the
relatively high rates of unemployment and the fear of the British that
jobs would be lost to foreigners. The precondition for immigration in
general, and hence also for Adorno, was independent means or the
guarantees provided by a private sponsor. Immigrants were also under
an obligation to report regularly to the police.
When Adorno established contact with the AAC he was able to
benefit from the loose relations his father had cultivated with John
Maynard Keynes. Keynes had already been in touch with Sir William
Beveridge with regard to the case of the young lecturer from Frankfurt.
On 28 September 1939, he wrote to Sir William: ‘I do not know Mr
T. L. Wiesengrund personally, but I have known his father slightly for
some years. It would appear from the papers that he is of rather unusual
talent, combining philosophy, primarily the theory of aesthetics, with
exceptional musical gifts and qualifications.’^8 Thus Adorno was not
entirely unknown when he applied personally by letter to the general
secretary of the council in order to give them the names of his referees
needed to support his case. He listed Adolf Löwe, the economist, Karl
Mannheim, the sociologist, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and Edward
Dent, president of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
With the exception of Dent, they were all immigrants to Britain, and
Adorno did not know any of them well. In order to obtain as positive
a reference as possible from Dent, Adorno had already written to Berg