350 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
which he regarded as a world-wide phenomenon, with the statement:
‘Whoever still knows what a poem is will have difficulty finding a well-
paid position as a copy-writer.’^109
It was above all this essay on pseudo-culture that not only incorp-
orated his own experience but expressed the discomfort that he felt
when contemplating the American way of life.
In the US – the most advanced bourgeois country, behind which
all others hobble along – the imageless nature of existence can be
observed in its most extreme form as the social precondition of
universal pseudo-culture. Religious imagery, which endows what
exists with the colours of something greater than bare existence,
has faded; the irrational imagines of feudalism, which developed
with those of religion, are gone. Elements of non-synthetic folk-
lore that have managed to survive can no longer compete. But
existence simply liberated did not thereby become meaningful;
deprived of its magic it remained prosaic in the negative sense
of the word; a life modelled in accordance with the principle of
equivalence down to its fingertips can do no more than simply
reproduce itself, repeating its actions mechanically.^110Evidently, the old circle of friends and acquaintances in Santa Monica
had evaporated by 1952–3. Adorno had been corresponding with Thomas
Mann, and he hoped to the last moment that he would still find him
there in his house, but this was doomed to disappointment. As early as
1949 Mann had begun to think that he would leave the USA and return
to Europe. This was after Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate
of the Progressive Party and Mann’s preferred candidate, had lost to
the Democratic Party nominee, Harry S. Truman, the vice-president
who with his ‘policy of strength’ pursued intellectuals and alleged com-
munists even inside America. Mann told Adorno of his intentions in
January 1952 in the course of a description of an extended visit
to Europe.^111 Having been denounced during his absence as a ‘fellow
traveller of Moscow’, Mann did not return to Pacific Palisades but went
instead to Switzerland, where the family rented a house in Erlenbach,
near Zurich.
In his novel The Holy Sinner, which he was writing at this time and
which Adorno had devoured ‘like cake’,^112 Mann penned a sentence
that Adorno might well have written: ‘For all of us have the wish to
return to what was and to repeat it, so that if it was ill-starred, it should
now be made good.’^113
Adorno had no doubt that this second stay in America was purely
transitional, and behaved accordingly, since he wanted to return ‘to
where I had my childhood’.^114 This desire to return determined the
character of his entire correspondence with Horkheimer, which was not