Wiesengrund: The Jewish Heritage 23surprising turn of phrase with infinite importance. They have a
freshness as if they were being heard for the first time, as if these
particular sounds, formulaic though they are for the most part,
had never existed before; as if they were pregnant with everything
he imagined.^28In the family there were scarcely any doubts about the talented nature
of the young boy who was evidently superior intellectually to most of
his contemporaries and whose gifts were confirmed by his achievements
at school. Thus during his childhood and youth the family bonds were
confirmed by mutual admiration. Adorno’s precocious behaviour and
artistic talents seemed to confirm his mother’s expectations, and by the
same token they enabled him to develop the self-confidence to mature
into the person he wanted to be.
No doubt, the adventurous life of the father of these ‘two mothers’
would have had its place in the imaginative world of the child. His
legendary maternal grandfather, the officer in the French army from the
country of Colomba, whom the Arabs had left unscathed during his
military service in Algeria, who had wandered through the lands of
Southern Europe and who bore such a magic-sounding Italian name,
must surely have haunted the childhood dreams of the imaginative child
like the hero of a fairy-tale. The ‘two mothers’ would no doubt have
made their contribution to the story-telling about the hero in the family,
for Adorno himself spoke of his grandfather with admiration.
But what about the other grandfather, the one on his father’s side,
with whom Teddie had dealings right up to the age when he left school?
Belonging as he did to the generation of the period of the founding of
the new German Empire, he may be supposed to have identified more
with the Kaiser and the empire than the rest of the family. We do not
know whether and to what extent David Thomas still abided by the
rules governing Jewish life. But if he did, he would have done so as
a Reform Jew. In any event, he would have been the only relative in
a position to convey to Adorno an impression of the practices and
religious rituals of the Jewish people, and an idea of their uniqueness.
And he may perhaps have conveyed to his grandson in his own person
the most authentic idea of the tensions that arose from emancipation:
the conflict between the economically active citizen’s wish to assimilate
into the dominant society and his desire for freedom and enlighten-
ment, on the one hand, and the persistence of such religious traditions
as keeping the Sabbath, circumcision and the dietary laws, on the other.
The wider circle of the Wiesengrund family included, lastly, Teddie’s
various aunts and uncles, who lived mainly in haute bourgeoise circum-
stances. Among these were Alice Betty Epstein and Jenny Villinger,
who lived in Frankfurt, and the London uncle, Bernhard, whose family
played a significant part in Adorno’s life when he was forced to begin
a second course of studies in Oxford after escaping from Germany