Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 347on a front and too clever to provoke others to do so.’^90 The Adornos’
apartment was ‘aesthetically unpretentious, but functional.... The
furniture was modern and not particularly comfortable; it seemed to
be arranged in a provisional way. The only item that did not fit in was
the piano, which was surrounded by a large, shiny, polished parquet
floor and looked as if it were in a different country.’^91 Evidently, the
Adornos did not want luxurious furnishings. One feature, however, was
a reproduction of Paul Klee’s famous watercolour Angelus Novus,
the original of which had belonged to Walter Benjamin, who had inter-
preted it in the ninth thesis of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of His-
tory’.^92 Adorno also owned a painting by Fritz Wotruba with a dedication
by the Viennese artist, a print by the painter Bernhard Schultze and
graphics by Picasso and Hans Hartung. Monika Plessner recalls that, on
the evening she was there, there was boiled fillet of beef (Tafelspitz)
for dinner.
Adorno served wines from the Rheingau, which were particularly
enjoyed by Helmuth Plessner and Peter Suhrkamp. The latter’s wife,
however, hastily swigged one glass after the other. The conversation
was dominated by the men, ‘by the tall Frisian [Suhrkamp], whose ear-
nest features lay in the shadows, and Helmuth and Adorno, so that the
ideas flew back and forth like ping-pong balls.’ During a tense moment
during the evening Mrs Suhrkamp’s wine glass fell over and she burst
into tears. Adorno ‘leapt over to the piano and hammered on the keys.
What music! Utter anarchy... and finished up, as if order had been
restored, with a plagal cadence.’ Later on, they were joined by Gershom
Scholem. ‘It grew very late. I just sat still and listened.’^93
After his return to Frankfurt, Adorno soon acquired a large circle of
friends and acquaintances. Apart from Max and Maidon Horkheimer,
they included the architect Ferdinand Kramer and his wife, two university
colleagues, Willy Harfner and the professor of English, Helmut Viebrock,
the education expert Hellmut Becker, the conductor Georg Solti, Adolf
Frisé and Horst Krüger, who were both writers, and the lyric poet and
story-writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz. He also re-established links with
members of the family. He learnt of the deterioration in his mother’s
health from his uncle, Louis Calvelli, his mother’s younger brother. Of
course, he had known from his visit to New York in October 1951 that
she was not well. She had been in hospital for some time, suffering from
a fractured thigh. In the last days of February 1952, when he had only
been back four months from his hectic trip to the USA, he received the
news of her death, on 23 February. Presumably the news had been
telegraphed to Frankfurt by Julia Rautenberg, who had accompanied
his parents to New York and looked after them for many years.^94 Adorno
was so shocked by his mother’s death that he felt unable to travel
to New York for the funeral.^95 One of the reasons for his inability to
talk about her death can be guessed at from a sentence from Negative
Dialectics: ‘Attempts to express death in language are futile... ; for