Adorno

194 Part III: Emigration Years

of the society, he brought guests to three concerts. From the well-
equipped library of the society he borrowed scores of music by various
composers, including Brahms and Ravel. In addition, he made a number
of entries in the book where purchases could be recommended, suggest-
ing a whole series of modern composers, including, of course, Schoenberg
and Webern, but also Bartók and Debussy.^30
In the following term Adorno slowly began to find his feet in Oxford,
where he was to remain for the following three years. His cosmopolitan
outlook made it easier for him to find his way around London, of
which he had no previous experience. His reports to Berg make it clear
that he soon felt himself more or less at home in Britain, and that
he particularly enjoyed alternating between the idyllic small-town life
of Oxford and the metropolitan urbanity of London. In spring 1935
Berg declared his intention of coming to London for a performance
of Wozzeck (although this finally fell through). Adorno promised to
show him all the districts that he by then knew quite well, ‘from the
Whitechapel streets where Jack the Ripper met Lulu, to the best restaur-
ants in Piccadilly, from the Bloody Tower to Hampstead, London’s
Hietzing.’^31 Even if Adorno increasingly began to feel comfortable with
his situation abroad, his memories of the past in Frankfurt would not
leave him in peace:

In London a precise dream from my childhood came true, too

late, and almost painfully. The bus conductor kept all the tickets

neatly arranged in all conceivable colours on a box, just as Hauff’s

grocer kept the magic potions; the cheapest are white, and they

rose up to a crescendo of colour. In my home town there were

only three colours, white, red and the rare green ones. Nothing

can be compared to the bliss of playing with them other than to

see the nostalgia they evoked so uncertainly and mockingly fulfilled:

faced by these tickets I knew that if I had preserved the three

colours of my childhood, instead of sacrificing them to the white

printing paper, many disasters would have been averted, and if

I had tried out the plenitude of colours everything would have

been alright. Today, however, it is no more possible for me to

salvage anything than it is possible for the London colours to

restore the bliss and nostalgia of childhood.^32

Sticks and carrots

Adorno had barely begun to enjoy the ‘indescribable peace and quiet’
that would enable him to advance his philosophical work when at the
end of October 1934 his tranquillity was disrupted by a letter from Max
Horkheimer. What he read evidently opened old wounds. At any
rate, it disrupted his secluded existence. He and Horkheimer had not