20 Part I: Origins
indeed to any other religion, although he flirted from time to time with
Catholicism, perhaps from sympathy with his mother.^20 The Jewish
Lehrhaus (house of learning) that was so influential in Frankfurt at the
time was always alien to him.^21 On one occasion, he referred to his
friends Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal, who were active in the
Lehrhaus, as ‘professional Jews’. And he ostentatiously kept his dis-
tance from the great Jewish scholars at the Lehrhaus, Martin Buber and
Franz Rosenzweig. Indeed, to the horror of right-thinking people he
even referred to Buber as the ‘religious Tyrolean’, or so Peter von
Haselberg reports. Wiesengrund travestied Buber’s Legends of the
Hassidim under the title ‘Stories of Rabbi Misje Schmal’. In his version
the stories took the form of pointless jokes – folksy anecdotes that
seemed like a blend of the writings of Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser
and Martin Buber.^22
In the early years of his childhood, Teddie’s relationship with his
father was marked by the latter’s great tolerance and kindness. During
adolescence Adorno may have come to regard his father as the embodi-
ment of bourgeois values, the businessman interested in nothing but
economic efficiency and profit, a man whose way of life was entirely
unconnected with his own. In this sense it is likely that he had little time
for his father and his father’s ideals. However, this did not mean that
he was lacking in respect or that he failed to recognize his father’s
achievements. Moreover, he had every reason to think highly of him.
For Oscar Alexander’s sense of loyalty to both his wife and his son
knew no bounds, and he fully sympathized with the latter’s artistic
inclinations and his early intellectual ambitions. Oscar Alexander’s pro-
verbial generosity emerges clearly from the letters he wrote to different
members of the family and from his selfless readiness to give his son
both financial and moral support right up to the time of his emigration
to the United States.
This literally uncomplicated relationship between father and son sug-
gests that Oscar Alexander did not play a dominant role in the running
of the household. As a businessman, he was not only out of the house
all day long, he also had to make numerous time-consuming business
trips. He was not only successful as an exporter; his wholesale business
found plenty of customers in Frankfurt itself. In 1912 he presented his
best wines at the Golden Jubilee Shooting Festival – bottles from the
Rhine and the Palatinate, from the Saar and the Moselle. He even
produced champagne for the marksmen. ‘Frankfurt’s wine trade had
fully justified the confidence placed in it since the numerous wines on
offer were all of outstanding quality.’^23 For Adorno as a boy, the several
floors of his father’s wine cellar were ‘spookily pleasurable’ places where
he could play ‘with school friends from the tough pub world of
Sachsenhausen’.^24 Oscar Wiesengrund’s function was to secure the
economic foundations of the family’s upper-middle-class standard of
living. This he did. In addition, he took obvious personal pleasure in the