226 Part III: Emigration Years
rivalries that made life even harder for those concerned than it was
anyway. The marginality that should have brought them together, the
malaise of exile, was a fertile breeding ground for bitter quarrels. The
network of émigré oppositional intellectuals was riven with splits
between tactical coalitions and enmities. Under the pressure of the con-
ditions in which they lived, the very art for which intellectuals are known,
their ability to judge the consequences of their actions in a spirit of
self-criticism, what Horkheimer called their ability to see themselves as
‘the subjects of critical behaviour’, sometimes failed them.^66
Although each of them separately was the victim of the tribulations
of exile, these were the very difficulties that were ignored. Individual
egoisms, made more sensitive by the broken pride of people who had
been expelled, were as inflated as were their malice and invective. Later,
however, Adorno would account for these undignified reactions by not-
ing that every intellectual is mutilated by emigration.^67 The deformities
of emigration are compounded by the fact that the intellectuals form a
sort of closed society in which ‘they get to know each other in the most
shameful and degrading of all situations, that of competing supplicants.’
They are thus ‘virtually compelled to show each other their most
repulsive sides’.^68 This is precisely what Adorno did when succumbing
to the disreputable idea of being so outraged by Kracauer’s social bio-
graphy of Offenbach as to contemplate and discuss a common initiative
against its author, a conspiracy in which, in addition to Benjamin, Ernst
Bloch should also be involved. Fortunately, nothing came of this – but
only because they could not agree among themselves. Benjamin,
who knew all about the trials of exile, did not wish to attack Kracauer
openly for fear of aggravating his already difficult situation. Bloch had
a different view anyway and ridiculed Adorno’s emphatic rejection of
the Offenbach book.
A double relationship: Gretel and MaxIn the numerous letters Adorno wrote during his Oxford years, either
from Merton or, during his frequent travels, from London, Paris, Frank-
furt and Berlin, he talked more and more about the current political
situation in Germany. This gave him the opportunity to reflect upon
the ‘catastrophic course of events’. As early as 1935, he could see the
growing danger of war for Britain and France if a National Socialist
Germany were to triumph over Russia.^69 With fascism on the march
in Europe he advised Horkheimer to mobilize the resources of the
institute to produce a theory of its origins and modus operandi. Adorno’s
increasingly critical view of the global political situation included devel-
opments in the Soviet Union which he looked at askance, at least since
the Stalin purges, the first death sentences and the cult of personality:
‘Has the planet really and truly gone to Hell?’, he asked Horkheimer at