Adorno

Between Oberrad and Amorbach 37

The dark brown volume of over 400 pages, printed on thick paper,

promised something of what one hopes for from medieval books,

something I had felt as a child at home, in the calf leather

Heldenschatz [Treasury of Heroes], a belated eighteenth-century

book of magic full of abstruse instructions many of which I am still

pondering. The Spirit of Utopia looked as though it had been

written by Nostradamus himself. The name Bloch had the same

aura. Dark as a gateway, with a muffled blare like a trumpet

blast, it aroused the expectation of something vast, an expectation

that quickly rendered the philosophy with which I had become

acquainted as a student suspect as shallow and unworthy of its

own concept.... I had the feeling that here philosophy had

escaped the curse of being official... Bloch’s was a philosophy

that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature;

a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resigna-

tion of methodology.... The book... seemed to me to be one

prolonged rebellion against the renunciation within thought that

extends even into its purely formal character.^44

Adorno’s reading of these books shows that, at a period when a re-
volutionary mood was widespread, he was preoccupied with the theory of
the decay of bourgeois culture as well as with the philosophical Marxism
of his age. Of course, the discussion of Marx’s philosophy of history was
in the air at the time. To anyone in Frankfurt it was impossible to
overlook the fact that the transformation of society went hand in hand
with the polarization of social living conditions.

Arousing philosophical interests in the musical soul:

Kracauer’s influence on Adorno

During this phase of social upheaval and extreme political tension
between right-wing and left-wing radicalism, Theodor Wiesengrund met
an unusual Jewish intellectual who was to turn out to be a meticulous,
sociologically trained observer of that age of far-reaching changes and
who believed that the survival of the still very young Weimar democracy,
caught as it was between an extreme individualism and a reactionary
fixation on authorities, depended on reconciling opposites.
While at the Gymnasium, Adorno, who was still almost as young as
in the photograph I have described, met Siegfried Kracauer through a
friend of his parents. This encounter made such an impact on Kracauer
that he recorded the impression it made on him in his autobiographical
novel Georg:

He wore a green jacket made from loden cloth which, together

with his red tie, was a rough cloak in which he looked like a little