Adorno

Between Oberrad and Amorbach 49

is no path leading out of this spiritual impasse to unambiguous truths.
It is no more possible to find refuge in obsolete religious traditions than
in substitute religious doctrines, not even of the quality of the ideas of
Stefan George or Rudolf Steiner. Nor is salvation to be found in the
messianism of the Communist Party. Admittedly, Kracauer had no wish
simply to endorse the attitudes of a principled sceptic and intellectual
desperado. He preferred at the beginning of the 1920s to make a plea
for sobriety and a lack of illusions, for the ability to ‘hold out’ and the
‘courage with which to face the terrors of the prevailing emptiness’.^81
A few weeks after his programmatic essay had appeared, Kracauer
spent the Easter holidays in Amorbach with his friend Wiesengrund-
Adorno. Perhaps the two friends went on excursions to the remoter parts
of the Odenwald. In May 1923, Kracauer had published a report of his
experiences and his impressions of the landscape in the Frankfurter
Zeitung. In this ‘sentimental suite of the Bergstraße’, he wrote, travellers
felt as if they were wandering along paths in Provence or Tuscany.

For here was the south, the genuine south. We grew into it more

and more. We were like figures in a painting in which we strutted

around wonderfully. Cool rooms, shaded by blinds, opened up

for us, and later we sat at the large table in the hotel garden,

astonished only that the waiter did not speak Italian.^82

The narrator’s companion, who like him was overwhelmed by the region
and its atmosphere, bore the Italian name Gianino. When he saw a
piano in a café, he could not ‘resist playing his beloved melodies and, to
the noisy counterpoint of clinking crockery, merriment welled up from
the black keys in a viscous flow, filling the deserted world.’^83
Since the two friends liked nothing better than arguing about philo-
sophical questions, there can be no doubt that the younger of the two
must have been familiar with the books and articles, as well as the
manuscript drafts, of his older mentor. This applies in particular to a
text by Kracauer demonstrating his interest in popular literature. The
detective novel, the subject to which he turned his attention around
1922, was rarely discussed at the time. Both he and Adorno enjoyed
reading detective novels in the evenings, but they were not just in search
of entertainment. Unusually, Kracauer looked at the genre from a philo-
sophical point of view, as the subtitle of his essay reveals: A Philosophical
Treatise. He dedicated it to ‘Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, my friend’,
who at that time had just made a start on his philosophy course and had
written those confident theatre and concert reviews already mentioned.
Kracauer focused on the interaction between the detective, the police
and the criminal. ‘Without being a work of art, the detective novel
reveals to a society stripped of reality its own face in a purer form than
it is otherwise able to see it. In such novels the agents of this society
account for themselves and their functions and yield up their hidden