Adorno’s Path to Social Research 243arrived in significant numbers. In addition to colleagues and friends
from the institute, they included Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch and
Paul Tillich among the philosophers, musicians such as Ernst Krenek,
Eduard Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch, the art historian Meyer
Schapiro, the architect Ferdinand Kramer, a childhood friend, as well
as other personal friends, such as Marie Seligmann,^6 Egon Wissing^7
and Liselotte Karplus, Gretel’s younger sister. This apartment, with its
furniture full of private memories, such as the ‘grandfather chair’, the
‘Biedermeier suite’, and the old ‘secretaire’, was not just ‘beautiful
and delightful’, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer, ‘but also a social asset,
something that helped to protect us from malice and suspicion, and
made it possible for us to invite people without embarrassment.’^8
The list of visitors included, admittedly not until two years later,
Hermann Grab, who had emigrated to Paris from his home town of
Prague, and had then succeeded in fleeing via Lisbon to New York.
His story ‘Wedding in Brooklyn’ contained a sensitive account of the
reaction of a European to the experience of exile in America. In it he
described Adorno’s apartment: ‘My friend led me to the window. Far
below, along the river, you could see the moving car lights, a few lights
on the opposite shore were, so I was told, the lights of New Jersey; from
the harbour we could hear a foghorn. On that evening, from the height
of the apartment on Riverside Drive, New York appeared as a mighty,
silent city.’^9 For his part, Adorno had done everything in his power to
facilitate Grab’s entry into the United States. He hoped that Horkheimer
would be able to help and wrote to him on Grab’s behalf: ‘Grab is
a musician, a brilliant pianist; he is a D.Phil. and a Dr. Jur. (a pupil of
Scheler, but a renegade); he has written an interesting novel, can recite
the whole of Proust by heart and can play all of Strauss’s operas without
a score – undoubtedly a prodigy of nature, and the fact that he once had
God-knows how much money ought in his case to present no obstacle,
since he really has turned his back on the world.’^10
From the outset, the Adornos had no lack of private contacts and
relationships in New York City. Despite the extremely hot summer
of 1938 in the USA, they soon discovered the attractions of this cultural
centre of America. Adorno took the opportunity to go to a ‘negro revue
in Harlem’ with friends. They also gained an impression of the sur-
rounding area during those first summer months. They particularly liked
what they saw of New England.^11 In this respect, what Adorno reported
in a later reminiscence gives a one-sided view of his experience: ‘When
you come to America, everywhere looks the same. The standardization,
the product of technology and monopoly, is disconcerting.’^12 Things
looked different to Adorno on the spot. In August 1938, they spent the
holidays in the Hotel de Gregoire in Bar Harbor, ‘in an exceptionally
pleasant location here, on an island’.^13 Given this background, there can
be no truth in the idea that Adorno’s experience of the American way
of life was nothing but a great shock.