302 Part III: Emigration Years
hour for lunch, this makes eleven hours before I get home again. Needless
to say, there is no question of doing any work of my own.’
Was it blind naivety or extreme compassion that persuaded Adorno
to take this letter literally? The truth is that Bloch had never done any
washing up or tying up of parcels. But Adorno was fully convinced that
Bloch, with whom both he and Gretel were friendly, had to be helped
without delay. After consulting Horkheimer, and independently of the
temporary assistance from the institute which he had also endorsed, he
published an appeal for Bloch in the Aufbau. In his brief explanatory
article, he not only gave a summary of the basic ideas of Bloch’s philo-
sophy (‘the overcoming of the alienation of subject and object’; ‘the
messianic end of history, the absolutely literal elimination of naturally
and socially caused suffering’), but he also wrote: ‘The theologian of
revolution could not conform and that will not be forgiven him by those
who have jobs to hand out, any more than by the intellectuals.... His
relations to paper have at last become realistic. He bundles it up for
eight hours a day, standing in a dark hole. He has escaped the con-
centration camp, but the fancy ideas will be driven out of his head
outside.... The emigration owes him a debt. It has treated him like a
scapegoat, loading its entire misery onto a man who like few others
represents a Germany that has rightly incurred Hitler’s deadliest
hatred.’^138 Bloch responded to this in an open letter to the journal,
saying that he had done nothing to inspire this article. At the same time
he wrote to Adorno, objecting to all such initiatives that appealed to
‘that false public’. He emphasized that ‘I am unable to regard myself as
a scapegoat on whom the entire emigration has unloaded its misery.
There are many thousands of people who are as badly off as I, or even
worse.’^139 This unfortunate incident resulted in a breach between Adorno
and Bloch that was to last over twenty years. In a letter to his parents
Adorno admitted the damage that his appeal and Bloch’s public response
had caused him. And he was painfully aware that he had made an
enemy of Bloch.
Adorno also told his parents about another problem. This was a love
affair that had begun in November and lasted for some months with the
actress and filmscript writer Renée Nell. He had composed an album of
poetry for Nell, whom he called his ‘Baudelairean beloved’.^140 This was
a highly erotic relationship, and he confessed as much quite openly in
his letters. It had, he said, affected him deeply, shaken him and thrown
him off course emotionally. Only his thick-skinned hippopotamus
nature had ultimately prevented him from falling victim to the utter
misery and suffering that this extravagant love brought him. As the
victim of his ‘manic-depressive nature’, he suffered in quick succession
from boundless feelings of happiness followed by violent outbursts of
despair. In this sense, and because ‘more or less nothing’ had actually
happened, he was himself ‘the scene of this entire novel’.^141 He said of
himself that ‘I probably would not have the qualities that may enable