398 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
Adorno had attempted to provide examples of how this mystery of
integrating tradition by sublating it is to be solved, apart from in his
book on Mahler. His book on Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link,
which he wrote barely a year before his death, contained a further
illustration of how a composer can ‘elevate what was at one time incid-
ental and conventional to fundamental significance and, through con-
sistent use, transform it into the means by which – with inexorable
tenderness – convention is destroyed.’^159
Right living? Places, people, friendshipsAdorno made no secret of the fact that certain places held a special
importance for him. This included the little Bavarian town of Amorbach,
barely two hours distant from Frankfurt by train. As a child, he had gone
there regularly with his family. They always stayed in the same room,
number 3, in the Posthouse Inn, which had been in the possession of
the Spoerer family since 1772. The Wiesengrund family had long since
developed ties of friendship with the Spoerers.^160 Oscar Wiesengrund
supplied the hotel with his own wines from the Palatinate and the
Rheingau. The hotel itself had a kitchen that tried to satisfy the elevated
culinary demands of an urban clientele like the Wiesengrunds. Here
Adorno was first introduced to what would become favourite dishes,
such as Odenwald trout fried in butter or roast venison with cranber-
ries. On his walks in the nearby forests, he would come face to face with
the ‘primeval world of Siegfried’, who ‘was said to have been killed
there’. And the sound of the ferry over the Main ‘that you have to take
in order to reach... Engelberg Monastery’ conveys the feeling of a
history thousands of years old. Hiking from Amorbach via Reuenthal
and Monbrunn to Miltenberg, he imagined himself retracing the foot-
steps of Neidhard, who is said to have had his home there.^161
And lastly, he recalls the strikingly eccentric figure of the man in the
Posthouse Inn, ‘drinking his pint, with a beard and strange attire... as
if he had come straight from the Peasants’ War about which I knew
from the memoirs of Gottfried von Berlichingen that I had acquired in
the little Reclam edition from the automatic vending machine in
Miltenberg Station.’^162 Amorbach was his ‘Combray’ from Proust’s A la
recherche du temps perdu, the book which according to Adorno was
‘the autobiography of every individual’.^163 Like Proust, he knew about
the happiness felt by an adult when he hears someone mention the
names of the villages of his childhood. ‘One thinks that going there
would bring fulfilment, as if there were such a thing. Being really there
makes the promise recede like a rainbow.’ And yet, as Adorno con-
tinues in Negative Dialectics, ‘to the child it is self-evident that what
delights him in his favourite village is found only there and nowhere
else. He is mistaken; but his mistake creates the model of experience of