208 Part III: Emigration Years
closer, more trusting relationship than to anyone else. This sense of loss
emerges clearly from a letter to Ernst Krenek in response to his letter
of condolence. ‘I cannot tell you what her loss means to me’, he wrote
to Krenek, ‘not so much the death of a relative as that of the person
closest to me, my most faithful friend, a part of nature. Contact with
her always brought me new life. I feel utterly stricken and can only
gradually begin to contemplate going on with my life. This sounds like a
wild overstatement, but you can take it from me that it does not contain
a grain of exaggeration or sentimentality.’^96 A few days after the crema-
tion, Adorno went with his mother and Gretel Karplus to spend three
weeks in the Hotel Bär, near Hornberg, in the Black Forest, in order to
recover from this experience so far as was possible. Reduced to the
defective typewriter he found in the hotel, he nevertheless wrote a
lengthy letter to Walter Benjamin in which he gave a critical response
to the exposé Benjamin had sent him of his planned work on the Paris
arcades. In addition, he wrote a short, linguistically diffuse essay on
Gustav Mahler which, despite its defects, appeared in May 1936, in the
Viennese music journal 23.^97 In the opening sentence he managed to
bring his own highly personal experience of the death of someone he
loved to bear on a profound analysis of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.
Like every memory, the musical memory of a person who had recently
died was said to be ‘directed towards the preservation of what was
possible, but had not happened’. What marked out Mahler’s symphon-
ies was the tendency to smash everything to pieces and at the same
time the free constructive use of the theme as musical material. In
addition, he stressed the element of reconciliation within a state of
hopelessness. For this reason, ‘every piece of Mahler’s, from the “Way-
farer’s Songs” to the “Ninth Symphony”... was a farewell gesture.’^98
This essay, which deals principally with the Kindertotenlieder, shows
how keenly Adorno felt the death of his Aunt Agathe and perceived it
as a turning point in his life. Six months later, he was confronted by the
sudden death of Alban Berg. This was a new catastrophe, all the more
painful because it affected his sense of his own identity as a composer
and musicologist. He knew from Berg’s letters that the latter had spent
the summer in his beloved ‘forest house’ in Auen on the Wörthersee,
and that there he had developed an abscess which he had tried to cure
himself without consulting a doctor.^99 The need to save money seems to
have been the reason for his reluctance to seek professional medical
help. For he had found himself in increasingly ‘wretched material
circumstances’, as he explained to Adorno,^100 as a consequence of the
discriminatory policies of the Nazis. After the Nazi takeover, Berg’s
music had been banned as ‘degenerate’. It was for this reason that
Wilhelm Furtwängler refused to conduct the world premiere of his new
opera Lulu in Berlin.^101
Whatever made Berg decide not to consult a doctor, his negligence
was to have bitter consequences. According to Soma Morgenstern,