Adorno

Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 241

to cope with conditions in America, their departure did mean taking
leave of Europe, and also of Benjamin and Paris:

The Eiffel Tower, looked at from below, is a dreadful monster,

‘squat’, as the English say, standing on four short, monstrously

crooked legs, greedily waiting to see if it cannot after all devour

the city over which the images of so many disasters have passed,

but which has been spared. From a distance, however, the Eiffel

Tower is the slender, misty symbol which the indestructible Babylon

extends into the sky of modernity.^130

Adorno and his wife were fully conscious of the privilege of being
able to live in New York without money worries, thanks to his work for
the radio research project and the contract with the Institute of Social
Research. They were well aware that, if they had not taken this step,
their lives in Europe would have been in constant danger. Adorno
took with him into exile a personal present from his mother, a painting
entitled Die Konfurter Mühle by Max Rossmann, which he had loved
since childhood. Rossmann had painted this view of a farmhouse near
Babenhausen in Hessen that was ‘unfinished and badly ruined’ in his
studio in Amorbach, the place that Adorno had described as the only
home that remained to him.^131
This was in the nick of time, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer a day
before they sailed: ‘The European situation is completely desperate; the
prognoses in my last letter seem to have been confirmed in the worst
way possible: Austria will fall to Hitler and in a world hypnotized by
success this will enable him to stabilize his position indefinitely and on
the foundation of the most appalling terror. It can scarcely be doubted
any more that the Jews still living in Germany will be wiped out
[ausgerottet]; for once they have been expropriated, no country in the
world will grant them asylum. And once again, nothing will be done:
the others fully deserve their Hitler.’^132
Adorno was just starting to find his feet in New York when the Nazi
regime intensified its repressive measures against the Jewish population
in the course of 1938. The lethal threat that Hitler represented and his
outlandish view of the world were of course well known to Adorno
even before the pogroms and the ghettoization of the Jews. He lived
in the expectation that the worst was still to come: deportation and
genocide. He feared that none of the great powers would take action to
save the victims from their executioners.