320 Part III: Emigration Years
preoccupied by the question of what should be done ‘with a defeated
Germany’. The two, unsatisfactory, answers in his view were: ‘First,
under no circumstances would I wish to be an executioner, or provide a
licence for executioners. Second, I should not wish to stay the hand... of
anyone who takes revenge for past misdeeds. This is a thoroughly
unsatisfactory, self-contradictory answer, one that makes a mockery of
generalization and practice. But perhaps the fault lies with the question
and not just in me.’^224
Adorno’s American nationality was anything but a matter of indiffer-
ence to him, and the decision to leave the USA so as to spend his
remaining years in Europe was by no means definitive. But he neither
could nor wished to avoid the problem of Germany. It suited his book,
therefore, that he soon had an opportunity to transform his wishes into
action and to form an impression of the country he had left fifteen years
previously. During the last days of October 1949, he made the journey
back to Germany. He travelled instead of Horkheimer, who had been
unable to accept an invitation from Frankfurt University for reasons of
health and was therefore unable to take up his post as professor of
philosophy for the beginning of the winter semester 1949–50.^225
Adorno, the former Privatdozent, did not return to Frankfurt empty-
handed. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was already available in book
form. The study on film music had been published in English. Further-
more, he had reached an agreement with the Tübingen publisher Mohr
(Paul Siebeck) that they would bring out a greatly expanded version of
the Philosophy of Modern Music. Moreover, his work over a number
of years on the Berkeley project also produced well-deserved success:
at the precise moment when Adorno was on his way to Europe, The
Authoritarian Personality appeared in print as volume 1 of the series
Studies in Prejudice. He had thus acquired fame as a scholar, and he had
also succeeded in completing two compositions: Four Songs for Voice
and Piano from Poems by Stefan George, op. 7, and Three Choruses for
Female Voices from Poems by Theodor Däubler, op. 8. Whereas, in
Adorno’s own words, the first composition ‘was based on a twelve-tone
row that is employed only in its four basic shapes, without any trans-
position’,^226 the choruses showed that it was possible to organize a musical
setting without following the rules of the twelve-tone method.
But what was on Adorno’s mind as he returned to Europe on the
Queen Elizabeth was not the question of how a free musical style would
operate in practice. He was now forty-six years old and he was deeply
moved by this first contact with European soil after the long years
of exile. When he returned to his hotel at 2 a.m., ‘walking from the
Quai Voltaire through Paris by night’, he could tell from the sound of
his own steps on the cobbles that ‘the difference between Amorbach
and Paris... is smaller than that between Paris and New York. Even
so, as a small child I remember how I thought I could see from a bench
halfway up the Wolkmann how the electric light that had just been