Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 331Instead, the literary climate was still in the hands of writers who had
remained in Germany during the Third Reich, writers such as Hans
Egon Holthusen, Reinhold Schneider, Ernst Jünger, Werner Bergen-
gruen, Hans Carossa, Frank Thiess and Walter von Molo. This was not
Adorno’s world.^12 He too noted with the greatest suspicion the turn
towards the seemingly unbroken tradition of a ‘cultured German nation’,
and alternatively to the idealized realm of the ‘true, the beautiful and
the good’. Many of the writers who had remained in Germany laid
claim to the title of the ‘inner emigration’ to describe their conduct in
the Third Reich, a stance which in Adorno’s view contrasted with ‘the
attitude of the intransigent avant-garde’.^13 Spokesmen such as Frank
Thiess and Walter von Molo mobilized this retreat into inwardness
against the émigrés, above all against Thomas Mann, representing it as
a respectable alternative to ‘fellow-traveller’. A writer such as Marie-
Luise Kaschnitz, who paid a visit to Adorno and Gretel in their Frank-
furt home early in 1950, had stayed in Germany with her husband,
but nevertheless criticized the attempt to whitewash the opportunism
implicit in the notion of the ‘inner emigration’. ‘What was our so-called
inner emigration supposed to have consisted in? In our listening to
foreign radios, scolding the government and occasionally shaking the
hand of a Jew one had met in the street, even if someone was looking?
Or did it consist in our having prophesied first the war, then the total
war, then the defeat and finally the end of the Party?’^14 Over the years
she developed an extremely affectionate relationship with the Adornos.
She described her first meeting with them in a letter to her husband,
Guido Freiherr Kaschnitz von Weinberg, on 26 May 1950: ‘Yesterday,
I invited Adorno to coffee. He accepted with pleasure and came with
his wife who is very thin, very intelligent and stimulating. Then Gadamer
arrived and, instead of half an hour, they stayed a full three hours.
Conversation about Joyce and his successors, religion, philosophy and
fairy tales. All very lively.’^15
The hollow pathos so disliked by Kaschnitz, Kogon, Dirks and also
Adorno was cultivated by many Germans of the immediate postwar
period, who would talk about the dignity of man and the beauty of the
soul as a kind of complement to their down-to-earth approach to tech-
nical matters. In contrast, Adorno perceived an intellectual restlessness
in his students, who were anxiously seeking ideological reorientation
after the Year Zero of 1945: a vehement curiosity about intellectual
questions which he thought was greater than in the pre-Hitler years.
Adorno had the opportunity to make the direct acquaintance of this
‘passionate interest’ on the part of the students in his seminar on ‘Kant’s
Transcendental Dialectic’, as well as in his lecture course on aesthetics.
He continued the aesthetics course in the summer semester of 1951,
together with a seminar on Hegel and another on ‘Contemporary Prob-
lems in the Theory of Knowledge’. Then, in the following semester, he
gave a course on ‘The Concept of Philosophy’^16 – which he taught in his