Adorno

From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 207

one aphorism, ‘The Bad Comrade’, that was dated 1935. The title alluded
to Ludwig Uhland’s poem ‘The Good Comrade’. In it he interpreted his
experience at the Gymnasium in Frankfurt as an anticipation of the
brutality of the totalitarian state. Other fragments referred to his life in
Oxford. One, ‘Tough Baby’, contains the observation that ‘the ideal
form of human relations is the club, that arena of a respect founded on
scrupulous unscrupulousness.’ In Oxford, he wrote, ‘two sorts of students
are distinguished, the tough guys and the intellectuals; the latter,
through this contrast alone, are almost automatically equated with the
effeminate. There is much reason to believe that the ruling stratum, on
its way to dictatorship, becomes polarized towards these two extremes.’^94
Similarly, the fact that intellectuals in emigration found themselves in
the position of ‘competing petitioners’ alludes to situations in which
Adorno found himself in Britain. As things turned out, his intention of
writing a book of aphorisms could not be carried out while he was still
in Oxford. This was not simply because of the burden of his academic
duties or his writing commitments. In addition, during his first year in
emigration in Britain he had to endure two emotional upsets that could
not fail to impinge on his writing plans.

...and personal losses

During the months in which Adorno made his entries in the usual
coloured notebooks in order to record his personal experiences of being
outlawed from his native country and an outsider abroad, news reached
him in Oxford that his ‘second mother’ had fallen seriously ill with a
stroke. He at once returned home to his family in Frankfurt and was
able to see his Aunt Agathe, who was sixty-six years old, while she
was still alive. He had of course been kept informed about the state of
her health. He knew that she had had a mild stroke back in May while
she was with the family in Amorbach, and that she had partly lost the
power of her speech. After she had suffered subsequent heart failure
and further brain damage, Adorno’s parents told him about the serious-
ness of her condition. When he finally arrived in Frankfurt his aunt was
‘quite incapacitated and both depressed and confused almost the whole
time’. He told Horkheimer that he had stayed with her constantly. ‘Her
death (on 26 June) was caused by pneumonia, which normally follows
the paralysis of the respiratory and swallowing functions.’^95
The notice of her death that appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung
on 1 July 1935 gives some idea of what Agathe Calvelli-Adorno meant
to the family. ‘Words cannot express what she gave us from the strength
and depths of her being in a life full of kindness.’ The cremation took
place quietly; the Wiesengrund family asked people to refrain from
making visits to offer their condolences. For Adorno the death of his
aunt meant the painful loss of a person to whom he perhaps had a