Between Oberrad and Amorbach 27long periods of time preferential treatment was given to the needs of
commercial and finance capital at the expense of industrial capital. This
feature determined the future of the town for a long time, both in its
underlying economy and in its appearance. During Adorno’s childhood
there were still horse-drawn carts and hansom cabs. Public transport
had just undergone electrification: the horse-drawn coach and the steam-
driven bus gave way to the tram. Motorized transport started slowly to
develop alongside a pulsating metropolitan life. The streets were filled
primarily with businessmen and merchants, tradesmen and journeymen,
rather than factory workers. Schoolchildren poured into the twelve high
schools, eight middle schools, thirty primary schools or four private
Jewish schools. Fashionably dressed society ladies strolled along the
splendid streets wearing their Paris hats, contrasting sharply with the
housewives and also with the country folk in their traditional costume
who flocked to the city, particularly on market days. The maze of little
streets around the Römer, the Schirn and the cathedral contained many
little squares and niches where you could hear people gossiping in their
usual Frankfurt dialect.^9 Adorno had mastered the dialect over the years,
and sometimes spoke it. Building beyond the centre was on a generous
scale; the different quarters of the town each had their own particular
character. In the mornings, the iceman went round the suburbs ringing
his bell and delivering the heavy blocks of ice for the iceboxes of the
well-off. In the summer, the bilberry women from the Taunus and the
Spessart regions would cry their wares in the streets, as did the potato
sellers from the Wetterau, often in competition with the rag-and-bone
men who were skilled in drawing attention to themselves with their
cries of ‘Iron, bones, rags, bottles, paper’. Every morning, the milkman
delivered directly to the house, as did the grocer.^10
The living conditions of the Wiesengrunds were a cut above the aver-
age. They were not those of the haute bourgeoisie typical of the patrician
villas of the Westend, the villas near the Palmengarten, but the newly
built house in Seeheimer Straße with its sandstone window surrounds
was a perfect expression of the upper-middle-class standard of living of
the wine exporter. In their house the family could live in the spacious
comfort of their two-and-a-half floors, and in the summer they could
enjoy the garden behind the house in which as a child Adorno could
play and give his imagination free rein. The interior of the house may
also have stimulated his imagination since, in tune with the taste of the
time, its furnishings combined the styles of a variety of periods.
The house of the Wiesengrund family was designed with two pur-
poses in mind, as was typical of middle-class dwellings of the time: to
guarantee internal intimacy, on the one hand, and to make possible a
certain outward show, on the other. So alongside the working areas
and the kitchen, there were the private living rooms and bedrooms, and
in addition there were rooms for entertaining in public, such as the
salon with its obligatory oil paintings, with what Adorno remembered as