24 Part I: Origins
following the Nazi takeover. We shall return to this phase of his life in
due course.
The family in which Adorno grew up, and which formed an import-
ant element of his mental and emotional horizon as both a youth
and an adult, can be seen to be unusually varied and stimulating: a
collection of different socio-cultural models and ideas about the world.
The test of the durability of these family links and interconnections
came three decades later when he found himself defined as being
‘of half-Jewish origin’, a verdict that condemned him to permanent
unemployment in Hitler’s Germany. He then had to place his entire
trust in this family network and rely on its selfless generosity. In later
years, looking at the bourgeois nuclear family as a sociologist, he criti-
cized it as an ‘irrational natural relation’. Nevertheless, this criticism did
not seduce him into denying the human value of this primary form of
life that was so threatened with destruction. ‘Under extreme conditions
and their long drawn-out consequences, such as we see them in the case
of refugees, for example, the family has shown itself to be strong
despite everything, and frequently to be a powerhouse of survival.’^29