Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 329delegates of the People’s Congress of the GDR, which saw itself as the
first ‘socialist state on German soil’, had been elected from a single list.
An integral part of the socialist order of society was the Communist
Party’s absolute claim to leadership. Because of this, the Western powers
and the German Federal Republic refused to recognize the GDR as a
state, and this led to increased rivalry between the two and helped to
consolidate the formation of hostile blocs.
Adorno obviously was well aware of these political developments,
but he was taken up mainly with academic matters and preparations for
his own teaching. During his first week in Frankfurt he stayed in the
Zeppelin guest house, in Bockenheimer Landstrasse 128, close to the
university. He then lived for a short time in a furnished room with a
family called Irmer, in Liebigstrasse in the Frankfurt Westend, not far
from the ruins of the Opera House. And finally, some months after
Gretel had joined him, he moved into his own apartment, likewise in
the Westend, in Kettenhofweg 123.
In Adorno’s home town in the winter of 1949–50, the devastating
effects of the war were still very much in evidence. As a result of the
bombing of the 177,000 houses in Frankfurt, only 44,000 were still stand-
ing in 1945 and a further 50,000 survived in a damaged state. The Old
Town lay in ruins. With one exception all the bridges over the River
Main, including the iron footbridge, had been destroyed by German
troops in the final days of the war. The theatre, the Opera House and
the Stock Exchange, as well as parts of the university, had been badly
damaged by the bombing. Most of the patrician houses of the Schöne
Aussicht where Adorno had spent his childhood and his father had his
business lay in ruins. In addition to witnessing the extent of the destruc-
tion, and the increase in the number of inhabitants thanks to the influx
of evacuees, refugees and expellees, Adorno also saw the first architec-
tural signs that would come to characterize the reconstruction of the
Main metropolis. Although Frankfurt had failed to become capital of
the republic, despite widespread expectations, it had re-established it-
self as a centre for banking, trade and commerce, as well as culture, and
during the time in which Adorno took up his new activities it had long
since begun to make itself noticed, with the rapid rebuilding of St Paul’s
Church and the Goethe House, and the revival of the international
book fair and a very active publishing industry. Nevertheless, during the
so-called years of ruins and of the economic miracle, and well into
the late reform phase of the 1960s, the intellectual climate was defined
by such slogans as ‘loss of the centre’, ‘existence’, ‘disaster’, and by pro-
vincialism, hypocrisy and the repression of the question of guilt.^4 Like
Horkheimer, Adorno observed that hardly anyone was interested in
asking the former émigrés for advice on political and cultural recon-
struction.^5 In spring 1949, Horkheimer was again in Germany. He took
steps to regain control of his father’s property that had been stolen by