Adorno

Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 333

senior seminar on Thursday evenings as a guest. When he could

manage it, Ronge [the novel’s hero] would be present on these

evenings among Amorelli’s students and disciples. Of course, there

were now more than twelve. They sat in a square at large tables

and on folding-chairs pulled up for the purpose, and indeed wher-

ever they could find space. In emigration, Amorelli had become

the most important cultural critic of the present; he could write

and say what he wanted; whatever he thought was broadcast and

printed. These sessions did not take place, as formerly, wherever

space could be found – it used to be in the students’ library –

but in the regular philosophy seminar. Amorelli had changed but

little; he had filled out somewhat and had a bald patch surrounded

by a light wreath of short, white hair. Behind the horn-rimmed

spectacles the large, dark, gleaming eyes were unchanged. The

ritual of the sessions too had remained the same. As he had done

twenty years before, he began each session with the question: ‘Who

is going to keep a record?’^21

In the course of the novel, there is an exchange between Amorelli and
Ronge about a highly talented, far-left former student of philosophy
and German studies who during the Third Reich had published writings
that were full of unambiguously nationalistic and anti-Semitic turns of
phrase. Amorelli sought an explanation for this transformation. ‘I do
not understand’, he said finally, ‘how a left-wing intellectual who had
helped to chase the Nazis out of the university could himself turn into a
fanatical Nazi.’^22
Since Mautz, who had studied with Adorno in the 1930s when he was
a young Privatdozent, evidently tried to incorporate genuine postwar
experiences, what happens to Amorelli may well correspond more or
less well to Adorno’s own experiences. Adorno was forced to acknow-
ledge that some of his former students had trimmed their sails accord-
ing to the wind, whether to advance their careers or for reasons of
political opportunism. And even though he had plenty of opportunity
to point to ‘the spurious nature of German democracy’,^23 this did not
deter him from urging Horkheimer yet again to continue his scholarly
work not in the USA but in Frankfurt, ‘since the intellectual climate
here has something very seductive about it’. But he also saw the danger
of being ‘pushed into the position of an intellectual confessor who is
expected to give disappointed people “something to hang on to” –
whereas in a certain sense the disaster lies precisely in that concept of
something to hang on to.’ Adorno complained about his academic work-
load and the burdens of teaching: ‘I sometimes feel like a worn-out
gramophone record, as if I kept expending myself in the wrong way.’^24
Despite the huge burden of work at the university, he was by no means
discontented. Even extra chores were not just things he passively accepted;
he entered into them with gusto. One example was his involvement in a