Between Oberrad and Amorbach 31The childhood image survives in the futile and compensatory
determination to be a real adult. For it is precisely the adult that is
infantile. All the more reason for the sadness whose lament can be
heard in the mimicry, the more emphatically the smile assures us
that everything is in the best of order. For a temperament like
this, remaining a child means holding on to a way of being in
which less happens to one; the expectation, however disappointed,
that such ineradicable trust will be rewarded.^23Adorno’s expectation of living in a humane world based on mutual
respect and solidarity was frequently disappointed in the course of his
life without his ever having armed himself against potential disillusion-
ment. On the contrary, his thought was influenced from the outset
by the perceived need to face up to reality without illusions and to
anticipate its constraints.
Was this aspect of his personality the paternal inheritance of which
I have already spoken? This inheritance – ‘the earnest conduct of life’,
as Goethe phrased it – was something he had already benefited from
in school. Here too the young Adorno showed himself to be extremely
talented and of above-average intelligence. From the age of six he
attended the Deutschherren middle school, which he could easily reach
by tram. His ‘two mothers’ were concerned about him. They accompan-
ied him to the tram stop and made sure he safely caught the number 16,
which later on would also take him to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium,
to which he soon switched and where he remained from 1913 to 1921.
Once when he was in the tram he was attacked by a neighbour as he
was deep in conversation with a fellow pupil:
You goddamned little devil! Shut up with your High German and
learn to speak German right. I had scarcely recovered from the
fright Herr Dreibus gave me when he was brought home in a
pushcart not long afterwards, completely intoxicated, and it was
probably not much later that he died. He was the first to teach me
what Ranküne [from the French, meaning rancour or spite] was.^24Looking back on his youth, Adorno described his behaviour in his
early years at school as ‘well-behaved and obedient’, but as the beha-
viour of a child ‘who purchases through his compliance the freedom
to think independently and to join the opposition.’^25 His scope to do as
he pleased sprang from the fact that he was protected by the dubious
aura of precociousness. Nevertheless, at the age of forty, he recorded
his reflections on the complicated situation of the precocious child.
The early maturer finds himself oppressed by the painful compulsion to
deliver on his promise. This leads him to anticipate in the imagination
experiences that subsequently have to be laboriously lived through again
in the shape of real encounters and challenges: