Adorno

With his Back to the Wall 467

teaching, so far has been so pleasant to me that I am unable to

conceive of it within that opposition to free time that the current

razor-sharp classification demands from people.^87

As always, the Adornos were generous with their hospitality. There
was always a kind of jour fixe for acquaintances and friends to gather,
mainly intellectuals and artists. After the sociology seminars on Tues-
day evenings the Adornos frequently invited a small circle of guests to
dinner. Visits to the theatre and concerts were taken for granted, and
the same thing was true of important exhibitions. They regularly visited
the Documenta, the great international exhibition of the contemporary
visual arts in Kassel. Adorno was always present at the Frankfurt Book
Fair in the autumn, despite his loathing for the ‘circus’, and he regularly
attended receptions given by his publishers, Suhrkamp.^88 Readings in
bookshops, sometimes even in galleries, were a matter of course; he
enjoyed receiving invitations from the chief editors of the culture stu-
dios of the German radio stations, most of whom he knew well person-
ally. His above-average income enabled him and Gretel to lead a carefree
life financially. The fashionable hotels aside, they were relatively unin-
terested in luxury, but they liked the material security guaranteed both
by his professorial chair in Frankfurt^89 and by the fees he received from
various radio stations and other cultural bodies. In addition, there were
the royalties he received twice a year from his book publications,
although it was not until the late 1960s that these amounted to signi-
ficant sums. As for his publications, by 1969 he had over twenty book
titles to his credit.
Adorno enjoyed the rare, carefree hours he could spend in the
Palmengarten in Frankfurt, and also in Frankfurt Zoo. Despite his
reservations about the new medium, he and Gretel enjoyed watching
different series on German television. Visitors in the know were careful
not to disturb the Adornos when ZDF was screening Daktari, an Amer-
ican wild-life series with Judy the chimpanzee and Clarence the cross-
eyed lion.
Adorno had evidently succeeded in achieving a certain balance in his
life. His music, especially his love of playing duets, and conversations
with people he knew well were compensation for the onerous duties
at work and the gruelling disputes with the students and the militant
spokesmen of the student movement. When he accepted invitations, as
he frequently did, or when he acted as host, he displayed his talent for
entertaining his guests, while Gretel served the cocktails.
Some instances of his wit can be seen in the half-playful, half-
grotesque dialogues that he wrote, evidently without a particular aim
but just for his own amusement. These dialogues always had the same
two figures, Maman and Luiche. The latter name was an allusion to his
uncle, Louis Calvelli-Adorno (1866–1960). The name itself was aparodic
diminutive form of the name Louis in Frankfurt dialect.^90 Adorno would