406 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
shall escape without being tortured, whether we shall die a natural
death... , whether we shall be driven in herds, we have seen these
things.... Whether we shall slip away at the right time, to a white bed,
or whether we shall perish in a hundredfold nuclear flash, whether we
shall succeed in dying filled with hope, remains to be seen, all that
remains to be seen.’^208
Adorno used to take long walks with Kaschnitz in the Palmengarten
in Frankfurt, which was not far from where they both lived. Kaschnitz
had lived for a long time in Rome, both before the war and in the 1950s.
In May 1961, when she was a guest of honour in the Villa Massimo,
Adorno and Gretel took the opportunity to visit her.^209 Kaschnitz was a
frequent visitor in Kettenhofweg. She was there, for example, for New
Year’s Eve 1962–3:
With Adornos before midnight. Listened to Ariadne (with Karajan
with the London Symphony Orchestra and singers from Vienna
and Salzburg), as well as Act II of Tristan. Adorno: ‘Tristan and
Manet are the two great spiders sitting in the nineteenth century.’
He was very pleased with the Tristan performance by Solti, and
played his own interpretation on the piano. A few words from the
director of the radio station... then the countdown of the last ten
seconds of the old year, like a rocket being launched, ten – nine –
eight, etc.... After that, we looked out of the windows onto the
snow-covered roofs, behind which rockets, palm fronds and stars
rose up in pillars of light surrounded by smoke.^210When Ingeborg Bachmann gave her lectures on poetics, she talked
about literature’s falling silent and about ways to overcome the silence,
a topic that Adorno was certain to approve. She was conversant with
Adorno’s Notes to Literature and with a number of his writings on the
philosophy of music.^211 Bachmann knew Paul Celan well and had made
an intensive study of the Jewish tradition. Adorno introduced her to
Gershom Scholem, who visited her in 1967 in Rome, where they went
to the former ghetto together.^212 This had been preceded by a visit to
Rome in November of the previous year, when Adorno and Scholem’s
wife called on Bachmann. Rome was one of the Italian cities that Adorno
enjoyed staying in precisely because he had good friends there – in this
instance, Franco Lombardi, Bachmann, Kaschnitz and her daughter Iris,
who subsequently married the composer Dieter Schnebel, whom Adorno
had met during the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and
who was very close to him.
Adorno knew Paris even better than Rome. Throughout his entire
life Paris had had mythic qualities.^213 He had frequently visited it from
Frankfurt before his emigration and also from London in order to
see Benjamin and to carry out various tasks for the Institute of Social
Research. As professor at Frankfurt University, he had been in touch