308 Part III: Emigration Years
desire to save, which can exercise itself only on the lost’.^168 And the fact
that Adorno remained committed to his wife Gretel despite all his affairs
was undoubtedly in his eyes ‘the test of feeling to see whether it goes
beyond feeling, through permanence, even though it be as obsession’.^169
During the month in which Adorno wrote down his aphorisms, he
visited his parents in New York, wishing to be close to them in person,
rather than just through his letters. Having spent some quiet days with
Gretel in San Francisco in July 1943, he left her there in order to be
with his parents for a while in the Pocono Mountains to the north of
Philadelphia. In February–March 1945 he was back in New York, where
he stayed mainly with his parents. Needless to say, there was much talk
of the war in Europe following the battle in the Ardennes, the largest
land battle involving American troops up to that time and one in which
they had lost 19,000 dead and 40,000 wounded. In the USA families
who had lost a relative displayed a golden star in their window.
Even before the landing of US forces in Normandy in June 1944,
Adorno was well aware that Germany was moving towards catastrophic
defeat. He, like Horkheimer, had predicted the future collapse of the
‘Greater German Empire’ after the inferno of Stalingrad, when General
Paulus disobeyed Hitler’s orders and surrendered. Around 150,000
German soldiers had fallen, and 90,000 went into Russian prisoner-of-
war camps. The fact that this was the turning point of the war was
confirmed in 1943, when the German Africa Corps capitulated in the
face of superior Anglo-American forces, and when Sicily was invaded
two months later. Then came the fall of Mussolini, and in September an
armistice was concluded with the new Italian government.
Despite the National Socialist propaganda about ‘final victory’ and
‘miracle weapons’, German morale deteriorated sharply, and this was
accentuated by the new anti-terrorist regulations, such as those against
demoralizing the military or listening to enemy radio. Russian troops
conquered Berlin in April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in the same
month, and on 8 May the general staff of the German armed forces
surrendered unconditionally. In order to end the war in the Pacific, the
US leadership deployed the most horrifying weapon at its disposal. In
August 1945, two atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Almost at the same time as this inhuman act at the close of
the Second World War, the world was suddenly confronted with the
news of systematic genocide on a scale that defied the human imagina-
tion. The foundations of civilization were shaken when the world learnt
of the barbaric consequences of the racial policies of the Nazi state.
In the German extermination camps and labour camps of Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek, the industrial murder of
millions of Jews was carried out with great technical efficiency in specially
built gas chambers and crematoria.^170
For Adorno, the meanings that accrued to the metaphor of Auschwitz
were to become the starting-point from which it would become necessary