Notes to pp. 332–335 567Allies obscured the nature of Nazi Party membership, since people joined
the party from necessity and fear, as well as voluntarily from conviction.
Furthermore, it helped to create a politically dangerous community of
compromised people. Hannah Arendt, Besuch in Deutschland.
18 His report on his journey appeared on 25 September 1949 in the
New York Times Magazine under the title ‘Germany Today: A Famous
Exile’s Impression of a Ruined, Vanquished Land and Unchanging
People’. In it Mann expressed his horror at the ‘brazen nationalism’ of
the German population which had not been prepared to come to grips
with the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Thomas Mann, Essays, vol. VI,
p. 131ff.
19 Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, p. 45.
20 Ibid.
21 Kurt Mautz, Der Urfreund, p. 175.
22 Ibid., p. 180.
23 Adorno to Horkheimer, 23 December 1949, Horkheimer, Briefwechsel,
GS, vol. 18, p. 85.
24 Ibid., p. 80.
25 This was the Darmstadt study on local government that the institute
carried out at the request of the US military government between 1949
and 1952. In December Adorno was invited to a colloquium at the Tech-
nical University of Darmstadt at which he gave a talk on ‘Town Planning
and the Social Order’ (GS, vol. 20.2, p. 605). This study, on which Adorno
acted as consultant, resulted in the production of nine monographs
which exercised a significant influence on the sociology of German local
government.
26 Adorno and Mann, Briefwechsel, p. 49.
27 Adorno to his mother, 24 September 1950, Briefe an die Eltern 1939–1951,
p. 537.
28 Cf. the short essay Auf die Frage, warum sind Sie zurückgekehrt (Answer
to the Question: Why Did You Come Back?) (GS, vol. 20.1, p. 394),
in which Adorno wrote that he belonged in Europe and in Germany:
‘I am dependent on the language that I can write as my own, whereas
the English I learnt in the long years of emigration only enabled me to
write like other people. In Germany I feel no pressure from the market
and public opinion, forcing me to adjust the expression of what I have
in mind.’
29 Max Bense, ‘Hegel und die kalifornische Emigration’.
30 Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 73.
31 Horkheimer was in Frankfurt at the time. His wife told him in a letter
about Hallstein’s visit to the house in D’Este Drive and of the evening
spent with the Mann, Adorno and Dieterle families. ‘Teddie behaved
throughout so utterly narcissisticly that no one could compete with
him.... Teddie talked the whole evening.... He is the greatest narcissist
to be found in either the Old or the New World’ (Horkheimer, Briefwechsel,
GS, vol. 18, p. 37).
32 Hans-Georg Gadamer was still interested in collaborating with Adorno
and Horkheimer even after his move to Heidelberg. ‘It is a crying shame’,
he wrote to Horkheimer in March 1950, ‘that my departure from Frank-
furt has nullified, or at least made much more difficult, some very concrete