Adorno

30 Part I: Origins

Enjoyment was not confined to the summer holidays in the idyllic
setting of Amorbach. The Wiesengrunds also entertained frequently at
home. Visitors were a daily occurrence and Adorno retained a clear
memory of many a house guest:

When a guest comes to stay with his parents, a child’s heart beats

with more fervent expectation than it ever did before Christmas.

It is not presents that are the cause, but transformed existence.

The perfume that the lady visitor puts down on the chest of draw-

ers while he is allowed to watch her unpacking has a scent that

resembles memory even though he breathes it for the first time.

The cases with the labels from the Suvretta Hotel and Madonna di

Campiglio are chests in which the jewels of Aladdin and Ali Baba,

wrapped in precious tissues – the guest’s kimonos – are borne

hither from the caravanserais of Switzerland and the South Tyrol

in sleeping-car sedan chairs for his glutted contemplation. And,

just as fairies talk to children in fairy-tales, the visitor talks

seriously, without condescension, to the child of the house.^20

This memory can be contrasted with a different one from his
childhood:

In early childhood I saw the first snow-shovellers in thin shabby

clothes. Asking about them, I was told they were men without

work who were given this job so that they could earn their supper.

Then they get what they deserve, having to shovel snow, I cried

out, bursting uncontrollably into tears.^21

There can be no doubt that, as an only child who was pampered
and protected by his mother and aunt, Adorno was highly sensitive.
According to his later testimony, the fact that he was given space to
develop his individuality suggests that his own experience must have
been the quintessence of a happy childhood. Leo Löwenthal recollects
that Adorno’s was ‘an existence you just had to love – if you were not
dying with jealousy of this beautiful, protected life – and in it Adorno
had gained the self-confidence that never left him his entire life.’^22
We must ask, however, how he went about internalizing the reality
principle, in other words, how did he manage to cope with growing up?
After all, that was what he aspired to, even if he was to say in later
years that the price of growing up was a loss of spontaneity and sensibil-
ity. The mature Adorno continually returned in his reflections to this
theme of the contradictory nature of the process of growing up. In the
1960s, he wrote an essay about his friend Siegfried Kracauer on the
occasion of Kracauer’s seventy-fifth birthday. He describes there what
happens when a child takes his first step into adulthood and becomes
conscious of the pain of this transition: