Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 401pines and olive trees, and cities, especially Lucca and Florence with
their churches and palaces, but also Rome. In these southerly regions, to
which Adorno regularly travelled from the mid-1950s, he liked the fact
that life took place in the streets and that the streets had become interiors.
‘The shop windows... seem to contain treasures. They are at the disposal
of whoever passes by.’^176 And even the autostrada, lined by countless
advertisements, cannot spoil the beauty of the Tuscan landscape.
Lastly, Adorno was enchanted by the bizarre mountain landscape and
the lakes of the Upper Engadine. Adorno and his wife were particularly
fond of the small resort of Sils Maria, situated between the fashionable
St Moritz and the Maloja Pass, with the Waldhaus and its grand hotel
style. Sils Maria had become especially well known among intellectuals
because of Friedrich Nietzsche. He had spent his summers between
1881 and 1888 in this ‘loveliest corner of the earth’, where he relaxed,
went on long walks, and wrote parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.^177
The village lies at a height of around 1800 metres with extensive
views over a huge plain to the south. It contains barely more than forty
houses, but its previous visitors include Marcel Proust, Hermann
Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Karl Kraus and Ernst Robert Curtius. And
when Adorno and his wife entered their names in the register of the
unostentatiously elegant Hotel Waldhaus, they would have seen a whole
host of well-known names of musicians, writers and other intellectuals,
including Thomas Mann, Georg Solti, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter,
Wilhelm Backhaus, Wilhelm Kempff, Alexander Mitscherlich and
Siegfried Unseld. During the four-week-long summer vacations in Sils
Maria the Adornos met literary scholars such as Peter Szondi and Hans
Mayer, philosophers such as Helmuth Plessner, Karl Löwith and Herbert
Marcuse or the Burgtheater actress Lotte Tobisch. So there were plenty
of opportunities for evening conversations over a bottle of Veltliner.
Adorno, particularly at times when he was not under excessive work
pressure, was capable of displaying a ‘carefree lightheartedness’, as Lotte
Tobisch and others have testified.^178 The conversations about music,
literature and philosophy were continued during the walks through Val
Fex to the Chasté peninsula, to the hamlet of Isloa situated directly on
Lake Sils and on to the Laret Heights: ‘From the heights the villages
look as if they had been deposited from above by light fingers, as if they
were moveable and without firm foundations. This makes them look
like toys that promise happiness to those with giant imaginations: it is as
if one could do with them as one wished. Our hotel, however, with its
disproportionate dimensions, is one of the tiny buildings crowned with
battlements like those in childhood that used to adorn the tunnels
through which the toy railway roared. Now, at long last, one has the
chance to enter them and see what is inside.’^179
Of course, Adorno also tried to find traces of Nietzsche in the old
visitors’ book. His name was listed in the Pensiun Privata. When Adorno
finally learnt that Christian Zuan, the senior manager of the local grocer’s