244 Part III: Emigration Years
On a different, less immediate level, of course, there were his ideas
about the ideological meaning of modern American mass culture and
the commercial functionalization of art, about the relations between
politics and the economy at the end of the liberal era, about the role of
the intellectual in such a society and about expulsion and exile.^14 Adorno
was well aware that New York was no more than a refuge, an episode
that would have to last as long as Hitler was in power in Germany.
He noted an incident that occurred to him late one evening, returning
home in the subway, that seemed to him to offer a significant insight
into the condition of ‘exile in exile’. This concerned a chance encounter
with a young woman, obviously a refugee like himself. He smiled at
her, but, instead of responding, ‘her weary face froze and took on a dis-
missive expression that she evidently thought ladylike. In Vienna, where
she may well have come from, or in Berlin, she would have smiled
back.... That is Hitler’s triumph, I thought. He has not only robbed us
of our country, language and money, but has even confiscated a harmless
smile. The world he has created will soon make us as evil as him. The
girl’s rejection and my inconsiderateness are worthy of each other.’^15
Adorno had little time to familiarize himself with living conditions in
Manhattan, since he was compelled to make an almost immediate start
with the strenuous work on the radio research project, in other words,
he was forced to immerse himself in a completely unknown sphere of
activity. To begin with, he was based outside New York City, in Newark,
where Lazarsfeld had found space for his project in a disused brewery.
‘Whenever I travelled there’, he wrote, ‘through the tunnel under
the Hudson, I felt a little as if I were in Kafka’s Nature Theatre in
Oklahoma. Indeed, I was attracted by the lack of inhibition in the choice
of a locality that would have been hardly imaginable in European
academic practices.’^16 He did indeed try to approach his new situation
with enthusiasm and an open mind, but he had an outright allergic
reaction to the expectation that he would have to adapt to the given
realities of the scientific culture of the United States. ‘It went without
saying that I wanted to maintain intellectual continuity, and this soon
became a fully conscious desire in America. I still remember the shock
I felt when a woman I met early on in my stay in New York, herself
an émigrée, said to me: “People used to go to the philharmonic, now
they go to Radio City!”’^17
No sooner had Adorno moved into his provisional apartment in
Greenwich Village, than Paul Lazarsfeld pressed for an early meeting
to discuss the future project. In a letter at the end of November 1937,
he had already set down in explicit detail exactly what he expected
from Adorno when he took over the music section of the project. Adorno
was to ensure that the ‘research project’ would not confine itself to
‘fact-finding’, but should be embedded in a theoretical framework that
embraced both music and society. For his part, Adorno had explained
his own view of the matter in a lengthy letter of 24 January 1938,