Between Oberrad and Amorbach 253
Between Oberrad and Amorbach
In one’s youth many things are taken as a promise of what life has to
offer, of anticipated happiness.^1‘One evening, in a mood of helpless sadness, I caught myself using a
ridiculously wrong subjunctive form of a verb that was itself not entirely
correct German, being part of the dialect of my native town. I had
not heard, yet alone used, the endearing misconstruction since my first
years at school. Melancholy, drawing me irresistibly into the abyss of
childhood, awakened this old, impotently yearning sound in its depths.’^2
Childhood memories like these transmitted the sense of things irrevoc-
ably lost, but they also had a stimulating effect on Adorno’s mental
world. In other words, his artistic sensibility and critical mind fed on
two principal sources.
On the one hand, it is not possible to overestimate the importance of
the happiness that Adorno experienced in his parents’ house in Frank-
furt. The family in which he grew up corresponded in most respects to
the picture of the bourgeois family that Horkheimer later described in
his study Authority and the Family: ‘The development and happiness
of others is what is sought in the family. This gives rise to the conflict
between the family and a hostile reality. In this respect, the family
points the way not to bourgeois authority, but to the presentiment of a
better human condition.’^3 Adorno frequently spoke of this presenti-
ment of a better human condition during his own childhood and youth.
For example, in response to the question of why he had returned to
Germany after 1945 despite the barbarity of National Socialism and his
forced emigration, he declared,‘I wanted simply to return to the scene
of my childhood, ultimately with the feeling that what we can achieve in
life is little other than the attempt to recapture our childhood in a
different form.’^4
On the other hand, the particular social, cultural and political climate
that predominated in Adorno’s home town during this part of the 1920s
down to his forced emigration created a sense of security that seemed
self-evident, as was perhaps hinted at in his aperçu about the wrong