Adorno’s Path to Social Research 261November throughout the Reich. Previously to this there had been
blackmail and boycotts. Now there were open acts of violence and
arson attacks on Jewish synagogues and other buildings. The so-called
Kristallnacht was the beginning of the Nazi regime’s policy of physical
violence towards Jews. It would soon lead to the ‘Final Solution’, the
murder of millions of Jews throughout Europe.
Adorno’s parents in Frankfurt were not spared the effects of these
anti-Jewish measures. His father’s offices were ransacked, he himself
was injured and finally arrested and forced to spend several weeks in
gaol. His wife Maria was also interned for several days and Oscar lost
the right to dispose of his own property. Adorno was of course fully
informed of these terrible events. Evidently greatly shocked, he described
what had happened in Frankfurt in a letter to Benjamin on 1 February
- His father was now almost seventy, and following this persecu-
tion, with its physical and mental after-effects, he contracted pneumonia,
so that the family was prevented initially from making use of its travel
permit to Cuba. Not until the spring of 1939 did Adorno’s parents
succeed in emigrating to the USA, where they arrived safely early in
1940, after a lengthy stay in Cuba.^102 Some of their possessions, including
private family papers, were destroyed by fire in a storage warehouse.^103
Benjamin was to learn from bitter personal experience that even
exile in France would not save him from the impact of Nazi rule.
Following the November pogroms he had sought French naturalization,
but without success. After the Stalin–Hitler Pact of August 1939, the
position of the refugees who had fled from the German Reich became
increasingly precarious in France. After the German army had invaded
Poland on 1 September 1939, and England and France had declared
war on Germany, all German-speaking émigrés living in Paris were
rounded up and interned in the football stadium Yves du Manoir in
Colombes. Among them was Benjamin, who was taken from there
directly to a ‘camp des travailleurs volontaires’ close to Nevers. He kept
the Adornos informed of his fate by the letters he was able to write to
Gretel from the camp.^104 Thanks to the efforts of a friend, Adrienne
Monnier, the bookseller and publisher famous for her championing of
modern writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway,
Benjamin was released from the Château de Vermuche in November
1939, and was able to return to Paris, his health gravely undermined.^105
The fact that Adorno’s parents had become the victims of Nazi
terrorism and that Benjamin, with many other émigrés in France, had
been interned in contravention of international law undoubtedly helped
to sharpen Adorno’s assessment of the catastrophic course taken by the
Nazi leadership in its pursuit of policies leading to genocide. Bombarded
by the news from Europe about Hitler’s racial policies, he ‘could no
longer ignore the fate of the Jews’, he wrote to Horkheimer in August - ‘It often seems to me as if all the suffering we are accustomed to
think of in connection with the proletariat has now been transferred