Between Oberrad and Amorbach 33stereotyping and standardization, was a product of his profession:
‘Man becomes a teacher through his profession. His strict pedagogical
objectives find themselves confronted by the warmth of the pupil who is
in search of something to hold on to, who has a powerful sense of self
and many demands on life.’^28
This fundamental critique of the pupil–teacher relationship must be
contrasted with Adorno’s many positive experiences during his eight
years at grammar school, in particular in his relationship with his
German teacher. This man was a committed teacher, full of pedagogical
ideals and devoted to his profession. Reinhold Zickel was a man with
literary ambitions who in addition to his teaching activities wrote
poems, dramas and novels. His ideas, which were a blend of Protestant-
ism, idealism and expressionism, made a powerful impression on the
young Theodor Wiesengrund. Although the latter strongly resisted his
teacher’s ‘impetuosity and categorical assertiveness’, Zickel
overturned the complacent liberal assumptions that had informed
my childhood. I shall never forget a conversation in which I talked
about tolerance and he countered by giving me for the first time
an idea that there could be an objective truth lying beyond a kind
of intellectual laissez-faire. He literally brought my burbling fluency
to a halt. The B+ that he gave me for an essay, instead of the A
I had come to expect, cured me of any modest ambition. In an
essay on the subject What do we expect from poetry?, I had used
the word ‘total’, and, with incorruptible love, he put his finger
on the clichéd and purely formal comment and on its amateurish-
ness. Experiencing this at the age of sixteen leaves an indelible
mark.^29In his autobiographical conversations, Leo Löwenthal says of his
school years in Frankfurt that the teachers rarely lived up to the ideal
of this German teacher, but that for the most part they were not nation-
alistic. ‘A “Wilhelmine” tone was hardly in evidence... Many of my
fellow pupils came from prosperous Jewish households. There really
was an esprit de corps among internationally orientated young people
who often, encouraged by their parents, got together after school to
read and discuss.’^30 In contrast to this, Adorno saw his own schooldays
at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium in a less rosy light, despite the
encouragement of his German teacher. This was because, as the boy
who came top of his class, he was subject from time to time to bullying
by his fellow pupils, ‘who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him
and, when he complained to the teacher, denounced him as a sneak.’
Adorno regarded such behaviour as an omen of the latent receptivity
to the ideology of National Socialism, a tendency he expected from
those of his contemporaries ‘who could not put together a correct sen-
tence but found all of mine too long. After all, did they not abolish