Adorno’s Years in California 301engaged with Horkheimer were very copious, as were those to the
studies in anti-Semitism.^132 He even mentioned the little selection of
‘Dream Protocols’ he had published in the Aufbau on 2 October 1942.
These, he said, were faithful records of dreams he had had and which he
had written down immediately on waking. He had a large collection of
such dream protocols.^133 The three published texts are pure descriptions
of manifest dream contents, for the most part grotesque scenes, a blend
of cultural reminiscences, biographical snippets and daily occurrences.
The author made no attempt at interpretation, let alone a psycho-
analytical one.
We were walking, my mother, Agathe and I, on a ridge path of
a reddish sandstone hue familiar to me from Amorbach. But we
were on the West Coast of America. To the left lay the Pacific
Ocean. At one point the path seemed to become steeper or peter
out altogether. I set about looking for another path off to the
right, through rocks and undergrowth. After a few steps I came to
a large plateau. I thought I had now found the path. But I soon
discovered that the vegetation concealed the dizziest precipices in
every direction, and that there was no way to reach the plain that
stretched landwards and that I had mistakenly thought to be part
of the plateau. There, at frighteningly regular intervals, I saw groups
of people with apparatuses, geometers perhaps. I looked for the
way back to the first path, and found it too. When I rejoined my
mother and Agathe a laughing black couple suddenly stood in our
path, he was dressed in bold checked trousers, she in a grey sport-
ing costume. We went on. Soon we met a black child. We must be
close to a settlement, I said. There were a number of huts or caves
of sand or cut into the hillside. A gateway passed through one
of them. We went through and stood, overwhelmed with joy, on
the square in front of the palace in Bamberg – the ‘Chatterhole’
in Miltenberg.^134Adorno did not conceal from his parents what was for him an
exceedingly uncomfortable incident involving Ernst Bloch.^135 Bloch had
approached Horkheimer a number of times with the request for research
commissions from the institute that would give him some financial
assistance and institutional protection.^136 Horkheimer always had his
doubts about Bloch, who at the time was the famous author of The
Spirit of Utopia. These doubts had been reinforced by Bloch’s defence
of the Stalinist purges. Now, in September 1942, Bloch had turned to
Adorno, to whom he had written a heart-rending letter^137 in which he
gave a dramatic account of his acute material distress. ‘I have lost my
job washing up because I couldn’t work fast enough. I am now counting
and collecting bundles of paper, tying them up and carrying them to
a van. Eight hours a day. Counting the journey there and back and an