Adorno

Wiesengrund: The Jewish Heritage 19

second mother to him, are all preserved... in Adorno’s thoughts

and feelings.^15

The larger family context, too, was highly ramified, just as the back-
ground of his mother and father was many-layered. His father’s lifestyle
had an Anglo-Saxon flavour, something that had rubbed off from the
contact that was maintained with his brother Robert in London. In
addition, he himself had spent some time in Britain, having lived there
for a period before his marriage. In religious terms, he had become
assimilated, a process that was facilitated by the liberal Frankfurt tradi-
tion. But this assimilation was not without its more problematic side,
since, by detaching himself from Judaism, he surrendered an aspect of
his own identity.^16 This may explain his somewhat ostentatious aversion
to everything that was consciously Jewish. This hostility was directed in
the first instance at the so-called Eastern Jews, i.e., East European Jews
who had fled to Germany from the pogroms in Russia and Poland, and
who had settled for the most part in the eastern part of the town. His
son Teddie, too, was on his own testimony not immune to the arrogance
assimilated Jews felt towards the East European Jews.^17 Siegfried
Kracauer, who was to have considerable influence on Adorno’s intellec-
tual development later on, describes the East European Jews in hisnovel
Ginster:

Blank house façades, behind them courtyards from which the Jews

poured out. They wore kaftans and flowing beards, they talked

together in pairs as if there were four of them. They were Jews

who looked so authentic, you thought they must be imitations.^18

There was a huge gulf between the circumstances of these Jews and
the elegant lifestyle of the Frankfurt Westend with which the Adornos
identified, even though they did not live there. This sense of belonging
to a relatively affluent and socially elevated stratum of society was very
marked in the case of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, the successful
businessman. As Peter von Haselberg remembers him, ‘he was a short,
slim, determined man. It was easy to see why he might have been an
enthusiastic Anglophile, though it should be added that such enthusi-
asm was very widespread in Frankfurt before the First World War and
was even fashionable as a gentle rebuke to the Prussians.’^19 Within the
family what his father represented for Adorno was a form of individual-
ism that was typical of the commercial ethos of the city, an individual-
ism based on private means and experience of the world. The resulting
self-confidence and attitude of tolerance seems to have been absorbed
instinctively by his son. In addition, a kind of sober, secular attitude
towards everything religious, and especially everything concerned with
the Jewish religion, appears to have been transmitted from father to
son. Like his father, Adorno had no real commitment to Judaism, or