196 Part III: Emigration YearsMurray Butler, as well as the leading sociologists Robert S. Lund and
Robert MacIver. This meant that Horkheimer was able to make a speedy
decision in favour of moving to the United States. He had been sur-
prised to find that the members of the institute would be made welcome
in New York and given the opportunity to pursue their own work.^35
Horkheimer had a visa enabling him to stay in Switzerland without
restriction, but Pollock, Löwenthal and Marcuse only had limited tourist
visas. In addition, the position of Jewish émigrés in Switzerland was
not without complications. For this reason, and above all because he
feared the outbreak of a European war, the decision to leave the Con-
tinent in favour of New York was relatively straightforward. There
they established themselves in their own building on 429 West 117th
Street as the ‘International Institute of Social Research affiliated with
Columbia University’.^36 In the USA, in the context of diminishing
financial resources, the institute strove to support émigrés with com-
missions, scholarships and research projects. From 1936 on, members
of the institute, which was concerned to maintain its independence as
a research organization, gave lectures and seminars at Columbia Uni-
versity for the first time.^37
Adorno took less than a week to respond to Horkheimer. In his
letter of 2 November he replied in detail to the allegations and com-
plained that all the institute members, and especially Leo Löwenthal,
had failed to keep him informed. ‘I had no prior warning of your move
to New York. Your scorn about my confiding in Cassirer is wide of the
mark. He is a conformist fool, as he always has been, and I never asked
his advice. His function was to explain my position to the council. I have
seen him only once in Oxford and our conversation was restricted to
the exchange of detective novels.’^38
Because the institute had never made Adorno a firm offer, he had
felt unable to take the risk of a precipitate departure from Germany,
particularly since this might have involved the additional risk of having
his passport confiscated. It was clear, he wrote, that Horkheimer had
given preference to other associates of the institute. At the end of his
letter, Adorno made a small conciliatory gesture, expressing his enthu-
siasm about Horkheimer’s collection of aphorisms with the title of Dawn
and Decline: Notes 1926–1931, which had just appeared in Zurich under
the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius. And he defended his own choice of
pseudonym, Charles de Kloës, for his (unpublished) review of Walter
Ehrenstein’s Introduction to Gestalt Psychology (Leipzig, 1934) by say-
ing that he was a fiction: ‘He is mentally subnormal, has a relationship
with a child and a herd of gazelles.’^39
In the correspondence that followed during 1934–5, in which both
men sought to clear up any misunderstandings, Adorno addressed one
issue of great importance to himself: ‘the last point that needs to be
clarified between us. It is quite simply the question of the confidence and
the honesty of the institute in its dealings with me.... In a relationship