34 Part I: Origins
German literature and replace it with their own writ?’^31 A reminiscence
of Erich Pfeiffer-Belli,^32 who was two years older than Adorno, may
throw light on the general impression made by the obviously gifted
younger boy.
He was the pampered child of his family.... At home he was
called Teddy and this nickname had somehow become known at
school.... During break the older boys would wander round slowly
in a circle, while we, the younger ones, played our boisterous
games. Teddy had a few close friends who, like him, failed to
notice that some enemy or other had stuck a piece of paper on his
back with the word ‘Teddy’ in large letters. In a trice there was
a howling mob after him shouting ‘Teddy’ at their unsuspecting
victim. At the time, Teddy was a slightly built, shy boy who simply
did not realize what was going on. We all knew that he was
Jewish. But the uproar in the playground was not an anti-Semitic
demonstration. Its target was this unique person who outshone
even the best boys in the class. It was a stupid boys’ trick, nothing
more.^33This anecdote shows that the young Wiesengrund was seen as a person
who was accustomed to live in an individual world of his own and
therefore occupied an almost exclusive position. The esteem he enjoyed
as a clever boy attracted the barely concealed hostility of the larger
group. His tendency to withdraw into himself appeared to them as
arrogance, shyness or perhaps awkwardness. It is not surprising that, in
his contribution to the school paper, Adorno was more critical of his
schoolmates than of the teachers as a group. According to the sixth-
former’s account, the pupils as a ‘plurality of human beings’ tend not
just to fail to appreciate ‘that in life the human aspect has priority over
the intellectual’, but, in addition, they end up ‘hating and condemning
the teacher without the pupil being capable of seeing him as a human
being.’ The constraints of school are converted to a mood of resistance
in the pupils that is shot through with envy and the desire for revenge.
This explains why the pupils band together against the teacher as the
many against the one, why they ‘form a community of interests in order
to oppose him – frequently under the banner of “comradeship” – in
order to destroy him psychologically.’^34 Only when a pupil grows older
will he develop some control over such psychological reactions, thanks
to an awakening ‘sense of shame’. Such an older pupil will be interested
first and foremost in the teacher’s mastery of his subject. Nevertheless,
‘the intellectual aspect of this question is... no more than a cloak that
covers the sense of shame about his original feeling.’^35
It is hard to say how much of Adorno’s own personal experience
entered into these sensitive reflections. But we can say that what he
writes evinces an acute self-consciousness. Enough indeed to give us