Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 351confined to the reports he was sending him on his work in the Hacker
Foundation. In his letter of 12 November 1952, he described the prob-
lems he encountered as a result of Horkheimer’s decision to stay in
Frankfurt to attend to his duties there as rector. ‘The entire situation is
as repulsive as you predicted, although I did not demur at the time;
I only left because of force majeure and in order not to miss anything.’
His letter culminated in the appeal to concentrate his efforts on Frank-
furt in the future. ‘The risk of going to rack and ruin in every respect is
very real here, and I cannot stop thinking about it for a moment.’ He
ended the letter with a heartfelt plea: ‘Max, in the past, in hard times,
- and since 1933 I have never been so down^115 as I am now – Gretel and
I used to console each other by saying, “Go and see Mammoth”. Now
I really am coming to see Mammoth. If we did not have each other I
would not want to go on living.’^116 And in a further letter to Horkheimer,
written some four months later, Adorno urged him to plan his life so
that they would be able to work together in Germany on the crucial
philosophical questions. ‘If the world permits us to reach that point,
then let it be where we both belong.’^117 With his fiftieth birthday ap-
proaching in September, and in the light of the fact that both he and
Horkheimer were childless, the task that faced them was to achieve
what they had set out to do as philosophers, to achieve what Adorno
in that early letter from Paris had called ‘the unconditional’. ‘There is
nothing else.’^118 In his letter of March 1953, Adorno reminds Horkheimer
of the wisdom of ‘the old rule that the refugee returns to see what he
can do’. Alluding to a pub near the university, and evidently a favourite
habit, he went on to say ‘Every glass of kirsch at the Schlagbaum
has more to do with our philosophy than Riesman’s collected works.
I do not know how far I can speak for us both in what is literally a
matter of life and death... but I would rather run the risk of being
beaten to death over there than “build something up” somewhere else
or even retreat into private life.’ He ended the letter with the need to
‘create time to think and to live’, and ‘the two are one and the same
thing’.^119
This exhortation did not fall on deaf ears. Since the collaboration
with Hacker and his colleagues became more and more difficult,^120
since the two projects he had started could be finished quite quickly,
and because the shortage of staff at the institute was causing product-
ivity to suffer, the decision to return finally came in March 1953. In
fulfilment of his innermost wishes, Adorno was able to return to the
Arts Faculty in Frankfurt and to resume his work as co-director at the
institute.
During Adorno’s last months in California, Horkheimer had kept
him informed in detail about plans for the institute and about current
problems on the research front. Above all, he had urged him to take
steps to establish a journal to be published by the institute. Adorno had