Adorno’s Years in California 315island of Sylt, and had walked behind him, imagining what he might say
to him.^195 Twenty-two years later, when the vicissitudes of world history
had brought him to Santa Monica, luck would have it that he was able
to meet Mann in person, in July 1943, at a large party in the house of
Max and Maidon Horkheimer. ‘I had the feeling’, he wrote shortly
after, in a letter on Mann’s seventieth birthday, ‘that for the first and
only time I was able to meet in the flesh the German tradition which
had given me everything apart from the strength to resist that tradi-
tion.’^196 This first meeting was evidently the occasion of an animated
exchange between Adorno and Mann: it was an encounter in which the
intellectual culture of the century was refracted as if through a prism.
Adorno, who was twenty-eight years younger than Mann, talked about
his Philosophy of Modern Music; Mann talked about the new novel
which he had started to write in May 1943, after intensive prepara-
tions.^197 Adorno pricked up his ears when he heard that Thomas Mann’s
intention was to incorporate the scarcely narratable story of the German
tragedy in a novel whose central theme was the history of the tragic
life of a composer of modern music. So, shortly after their meeting, he
gave Mann a copy of his book analysing the works of Berg.^198 He also
showed Mann his hitherto unpublished interpretation of the works of
Arnold Schoenberg^199 and his essay on Wagner. This led to an even
closer relationship between the two during the next four years. Music
was almost always in the foreground when they took turns to invite
each other to afternoon tea or dinner.
On 27 September 1943, Thomas Mann invited the Adornos to his
beautifully situated home on San Remo Drive and he read them
chapter 8 of his manuscript. Adorno spontaneously suggested various
objections, additions and corrections and later on put them in writing.
For the most part, Mann took Adorno’s points into account for the
earlier chapters of the novel which he was then writing. And for one
of the crucial scenes of the first third of the novel, the talk given by
the stuttering music teacher, Wendell Kretzschmar, on Beethoven’s last
piano sonata, op. 111, Mann was inspired by Adorno’s article of 1937
on ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’,^200 as well as by additional written and spoken
explanations to do with this work. Was it from gratitude to Adorno that
the music teacher explained the motif from the arietta theme in the
second movement of op. 111 by referring to ‘Wie-sengrund’? In October
Adorno and his wife reciprocated and invited the Manns to dinner in
their turn. On this occasion philosophical as well as musical topics were
discussed. In his thank-you letter for ‘yesterday’s rich evening’, Mann,
whose own musical education, as he said, ‘scarcely went beyond the
late Romantics’,^201 expressly acknowledged Adorno’s expertise: ‘I need
musical intimacy and characteristic detail, and can only obtain them
from a connoisseur like yourself.’^202
After Christmas 1945, Mann sent Adorno a detailed letter that had
every mark of a document intended for posterity, and in it he set out