262 Part III: Emigration Years
to the Jews in a horrifyingly concentrated form. I wonder whether we
should not say... the things we are actually planning to say [in the
book they were planning jointly] in connection with the Jews who
represent the opposite pole of the concentration of power.’^106
Horkheimer’s parents, Moritz and Babette, who were eighty and
seventy years old respectively, were similarly affected by the same
events, and they had emigrated to Switzerland at the beginning of 1939.
Horkheimer too was forced to think about the causes of this horror that
had started to assume global proportions. Needless to say, neither man
was enough of an optimist to suppose that the insights that might emerge
from their research would enable them to prevent or even influence
the catastrophic course of events. The only thing they believed they
might hope for was articulated in a letter Horkheimer wrote to Salka
Viertel, the actress and scriptwriter. What he said there came very
close to Adorno’s views on the position of the critical intellectual: ‘In
view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe,... our present work
is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is
approaching: a kind of message in a bottle.’^107 This image, incidentally,
was one that Adorno himself used on occasion.
Given Adorno’s intensive working day, the paralysing attitude of
resignation was not an option. His time was increasingly filled with
the growing number of duties that he had to perform in the institute.
In February 1940, he gave a lecture in Columbia University ‘On
Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’.^108 Shortly afterwards, he made his
debut on American radio. When Eduard Steuermann and the Kolisch
Quartet presented works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Eisler and Krenek,
Adorno took part by delivering an introductory talk.
Adorno’s frantic activity during these months was accompanied
by a growing anxiety about Benjamin, who now found himself in an
extremely dangerous situation in Paris. After his return from the intern-
ment camp, he soon realized that there was no longer any safe place
for him in Europe. Immediately after the German invasion of Poland,
Adorno, fiercely supported by his wife, urged Benjamin to start pro-
ceedings to emigrate to the USA without delay.^109 However, it was
now becoming increasingly difficult to leave. Following Hitler’s offens-
ive in the west, over two million refugees – Walter Benjamin among
them – fled in panic from Paris in June 1940, hoping to find sanctuary in
unoccupied France. The pilgrimage town of Lourdes to the north-west
of the Pyrenees was Benjamin’s first stopping-place. There he waited
for the documents that would permit him to enter the United States.
At the urging of Adorno and his wife, Horkheimer had taken out an
affidavit, an emergency visa, which had been left with the American
consul in Marseilles. In August Benjamin reached Marseilles, which was
crammed full with refugees. He hoped to be able to collect the transit
visa for Spain and Portugal, and to proceed from there to Lisbon,
from where he intended to leave for the USA. In his haste, which was