330 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
the Nazis and reactivated the Society for Social Research. His impres-
sions of Germany barely changed at all. ‘Forgetting and cold deceit is
the intellectual climate that works best for the heirs of the Nazis.’^6
A different aspect became clear to Adorno when he reviewed the
previous two decades as a former émigré:
The years of the fascist dictatorship do not fit into the continuity
of his [the émigré’s] life. What took place in those years scarcely
fits into his other life. If he returns, he will have aged and yet
remained as young as he was at the time of his banishment, a little
like the way in which the dead retain the age they had when you
last knew them. He imagines that he can pick up where he left off;
the people who are as old as he was in 1933 seem to be the same
age as him and yet this gives the lie to his real age, which becomes
intertwined with his new age, breaks through it and endows it with
a deeper meaning. It is as if fate had transposed those who have
this experience and who survive it into a time that is both multi-
dimensional and also riddled with holes.^7With the assistance of his cousin Franz Wilhelm Calvelli-Adorno, a
trained lawyer and Oberlandesgerichtsrat, a man with whom he enjoyed
playing piano duets, he attempted to obtain the restoration of the former
family property. His cousin was officially qualified to deal with com-
pensation cases. As Adorno wrote to Else Herzberger, when he found
himself face to face with the son of the present owner of his father’s
house in Schöne Aussicht, he experienced a ‘violent shock. It was the
only time that I lost my nerve: I called him a Nazi and a murderer,
although I am not at all sure that I had found the guilty party. But that
is how things go – it’s always the wrong ones who get caught and the
villains are always so experienced and able to cope with the real situ-
ations that they get by.’^8 The buyer of his father’s house in Seeheim
Street, which Oscar Wiesengrund had been forced to sell at far below
its market price, was evidently no enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Since
the new owners, a family called Wilhelm, paid Adorno a sum of money
by way of compensation, he and his wife renounced their claim to the
property. They had briefly thought of living in the house, but decided
finally not to, partly because of the petty bourgeois character of the old
house, but also because it had been damaged by an incendiary bomb.
The only comfortable part to survive was the ground-floor room with a
parquet floor, on which Adorno could still make out the imprint left by
his mother’s piano.^9
Of the significant writings of the period, the Frankfurter Hefte was
published by Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks,^10 who followed a strictly
democratic, pro-European course. Despite some initial success, they
failed to dominate the literary scene. The same may be said of the
Gruppe 47, which was to become so much more famous later on.^11