352 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
already started to do this while he was still in Frankfurt in order to have
an organ with which to reinforce the type of philosophy and sociology
that he and Horkheimer wished to promote. ‘I shall adopt the plan with
enthusiasm. I guarantee that there will be no lack of material.’^121 This
was his optimistic assertion from afar. Since he was urgently needed in
Frankfurt, on this occasion he and Gretel travelled from San Francisco
to New York by plane. He recorded his impressions on this trip, his first
by plane, in a short essay, ‘Caught in Flight’. He was struck first of all
by the evidently genuine indifference of the passengers to the adven-
ture of flying across the American continent. The passengers were not
interested in looking out of the window, not even the children. Their
dependence on the gigantic machine was very striking. ‘One makes no
contribution at all, one is nothing but an object, whether of an appar-
atus entirely independent of one’s will, or of the ministrations of the
crew.’ So even people who have long hesitated about flying do so with-
out fear.^122 From New York, the Adornos continued their journey back
to Europe on 19 August, on the Queen Elizabeth.
During their ten months’ absence, Adorno’s academic duties had
been taken over by Helmuth Plessner, while institute business had been
conducted in conjunction with Horkheimer and two young sociologists,
Dietrich Osmer and Egon Becker. Plessner had a chair at Göttingen
University. As a Jew, he had emigrated to the Netherlands, where he
had taught at the University of Groningen until the German invasion.
In Göttingen, Plessner had his own teaching duties, his publications
on philosophical anthropology and, in addition, his own sociological
research work. This meant that he was unable to invest as much time
and energy in the work of the institute as would have been necessary.^123
Nevertheless, with his young wife, who after the war had been involved
in adult education, he was active in the institute, where Friedrich
Tenbruck and Richard Wolff, as well as Heinz Mauss and Ludwig von
Friedeburg, had already started on different projects. Monika Plessner
recalls that Gretel Adorno enjoyed great respect at the institute. ‘She
was evidently everybody’s mother confessor.’^124 For his part, Horkheimer
was serving a second term as university rector, and this made huge
demands on his time, but he nevertheless made great efforts to super-
vise the orderly progress of the current empirical study of the political
consciousness of the Germans and the presentation of the study’s con-
clusions. He was very relieved when Adorno returned to Frankfurt in
the summer of 1953 and instantly plunged into work at the institute.
Since Horkheimer wanted him to produce attractive publications and
also a journal for the institute, it was necessary to bring the current
projects to a successful conclusion as briskly as possible. It was import-
ant to produce valid results that would then make publication worth-
while. Adorno thought his most pressing task was to work out his own
approach to research and to distil his findings into a social theory so as
to give his ideas the shape of a paradigm.