Adorno

Between Oberrad and Amorbach 51

out, for example, that every detective story ends ‘without tragedy’,
but is instead ‘combined with the sentimentality that is an aesthetic
constituent of kitsch. There is no detective novel which does not end
with the detective shedding light in the darkness and joining up all the
mundane facts in a logical fashion; and there are few which do not end
with some couple or other being united.’^86
The first product of Adorno’s interest in popular culture, the
‘Schlageranalysen’ (Analyses of Hit Songs), was published in the March
issue of the journal Anbruch in 1929. Here he made use of the concept
of the ‘shop girls’ that Kracauer had introduced in the context of his
study of white-collar workers. Furthermore, his comments on kitsch
have an unmistakable affinity with the arguments put forward in
Kracauer’s The Detective Novel. The happiness that hit tunes promised
showed them to be a form of ‘treasured kitsch’ with which the shop girls
identified and which enriched their daily lives. But the enrichment turned
out to be imaginary because, while listening to hit tunes, the shop girls
were tricked out of that promised fulfilment in the real world in which
‘the full individual is no longer alive.’^87 Adorno’s criticism of music is
unmistakably close to Kracauer’s social criticism when he writes about
a song called Valencia:

Ever since concrete reality vanished from human life, the white-

collar workers have come to resemble one another without dis-

tinction, spending six days at the typewriter and the weekend with

their girlfriend. Hence the concrete reality, without which it is not

possible to live, must be sought elsewhere.^88

This reality is introduced in the text and music of this kitschy popular
song. The very name Valencia was a mark of the exotic world that the
‘excluded, impoverished, shattered bourgeoisie’ yearned for as its mem-
bers struggled to find their feet again in the post-inflationary world.
Their desire for traditional security, for convention and for order was
encapsulated in the popular song ‘I kiss your little hand, Madame’.
‘There were plenty of people to whom it had never occurred that it was
possible to kiss anyone’s hands until they heard this song. What was
a feudal mode of showing respect was thoroughly democratized by this
hit. Except the democracy of hand-kissing... is an illusion, for the new
bourgeois only kiss a lady’s hand so that they may be thought better
than they are.’^89 But who did not want to be thought better than he
was? Could not the same thing be said of the young Wiesengrund-
Adorno who was as yet unsure which was more important, his artistic
ambitions or his philosophical interests? But quite independently of a
decision on this question, one which he basically left open his whole life
long – in no man’s land – he had yet to become the person who, apart
from being a success in music or philosophy, wished for nothing more
than to kiss the ladies’ hands.