42 Part I: Origins
What is notable about Adorno’s position here is not just the already
noted criticism of a self-satisfied culinary attitude towards so-called seri-
ous music, but also the youthful author’s asceticism. This may have
been based on his disapproval of a style of life that became common,
particularly in large cities like Frankfurt and Berlin after the currency
reform of 1923 and the so-called miracle of the Rentenmark.^56 Heilbrunn
recollected that ‘the delight about the recovery of the economy
expressed itself in the intensified desire to enjoy the beauties and pleas-
ures of the world. The balls and parties of the winter season allowed
people to forget the sacrifices that had been made to bring the new
order into being.’^57 Denouncing this ostentatiously happy-go-lucky
approach to life as a sign of the decadence of the bourgeois world
was very much the fashion among left-wing intellectuals. Adorno was
not alone in his disapproval when he opposed the continuation of the
classical bourgeois tradition of music for its own sake and attacked the
cult of pleasure as superficial. What he wanted from music was human
seriousness, a strict attention to form and the superseding of the old and
familiar by the techniques of atonality.
Adorno’s musical tour d’horizon as occasioned by the Chamber
Music Festival in the difficult year of 1923 remained unpublished at
the time. This should not prevent us from reading it as a testimony to
his personal perception of the contemporary intellectual situation. As
in other texts, cultural phenomena are read and judged in relation to
the circumstances of the postwar years, to the wretched condition of
Germany. At the same time, his hopes for a completely different phase
were expressed clearly enough. Adorno longed for change; his thoughts
were concerned with a radically different state of affairs, particularly in
music and literature.
Adorno’s image of himself was that of an intellectual, not necessarily
an isolated intellectual, but a mind willing to assume the personal risks
associated with being provocative. While he was still at school he already
thought of himself as belonging among those who are interested in
learning and culture, and he behaved, wrote and talked in ways appro-
priate to his image of this group of people. His self-definition as an
intellectual contrasted with a youthful tendency to snobbery which he
made no attempt to conceal. A symbol of this ‘was the fact that he
never wore a wristwatch but, as if practising to become an old uncle of
the previous generation, he would regularly take his gold repeater out
of his waistcoat pocket and listen to it chime on the hour and quarter-
hour. He would leave the lid shut since he wanted only to hear the
chime that relieved him of the necessity of reading the dial. He occa-
sionally referred to himself as Dapsul von Zabelthau, the magician in a
story by E. T. A. Hoffmann.’^58 Highly sociable by nature, he had the
cultivated manners of the middle class and was always meticulous and
polite; in other words, he had mastered the conventions of his social
milieu. It was this mastery that enabled Adorno, who regarded himself