304 Part III: Emigration Years
than Adorno, came from Vienna and retained her Viennese accent
even in English, which Adorno evidently found charming. For a time he
looked after the Afghan hounds she had brought with her to the States.
Luli Deste acted in a number of films, including Thunder in the City
(1937), She Married an Artist (1938), South of Karanga (1940) and Flash
Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), until she turned her back on the
film industry early in the 1940s.
Before Adorno had begun to devote his main efforts to the Berkeley
project on social discrimination he published a selection of his dream
protocols and wrote the additional aphorisms in the concluding section
of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. As far as the latter were concerned,
he was just resuming the custom of writing aphoristic notes that went
back to his days in Oxford, when he started writing them shortly after
Horkheimer had published his own collection in Dawn. It can be assumed
that Adorno had added to those he had written since 1934, so that
he had assembled quite a collection of texts by the time he set about
realizing the plan of producing a substantial manuscript with diary-like
entries for Horkheimer’s birthday. In the event, he was able to present
Horkheimer with a collection of fifty aphorisms on 14 February 1945 in
honour of his fiftieth birthday, preceded by a hand-written dedication
‘In gratitude and promise’.^148 Unfortunately, Adorno could not present
Horkheimer with the gift in person, since he was in Santa Monica and
working on the anti-Semitism project from California, while Horkheimer
was in New York, attending not entirely with good grace to his obliga-
tions in the Department of Scientific Research of the AJC. However,
Adorno was able to present him with the second instalment of the
aphorisms in person for Christmas 1945. On the title page, he had written
‘For Max. On your return’. He understood the more than fifty aphorisms
of the third section that he wrote between 1946 and 1947 as part of
‘a dialogue intérieur: there is not a motif in it that does not belong as
much to Horkheimer as to him who found the time to formulate it.’^149
This remark was an allusion to the fact that, once the Dialectic of
Enlightenment had been completed and the lecture manuscripts arising
from it had been revised for publication by the Oxford University Press
under the title of Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer had been preoccupied
mainly with administrative tasks. Of course, Adorno too had to perform
his share of the ‘donkey work’ of social research, but he had more
time than Horkheimer to advance his work on the philosophical and
socio-critical ideas on which they had started out in 1942. This can be
seen in those Reflections from Damaged Life, which did not appear in
book form with this subtitle until years later, following his return to
Germany. In the letter in which he told his parents about these aphorisms
he emphasized not only their existential significance, but also their frag-
mentary form, something to which he had been inspired by a renewed
reading of Nietzsche.^150 The leitmotifs of these predominantly brief texts
were emigration and totalitarianism, individuality and psychoanalysis,