Éducation sentimentale 53silently past the city, as if propelled from afar. They barely brush
against the reddish quay, making a fearsome grinding noise.^2The expressionist tone of this description matched the aesthetic trends
of the period: an expressionism that Adorno viewed critically but which
predominated in literature and pervaded everyday forms of culture.
This expressionism was an amalgam of protest, yearning and an exalted
culture of the self that manifested itself as a defiant outcry against
egregious economic problems, unemployment and terrible conditions in
general, as well as a proclamation of the new that people were longing
for in the period following the currency reform. In Frankfurt, life soon
began to pulsate once more and people learned how to combine the
search for pleasure with the activity of social criticism, an activity pur-
sued enthusiastically in literature or art. This can be seen from the
numerous etchings, lithographs and oil paintings that Max Beckmann
produced during this period. ‘We live from day to day.’^3 With this sen-
tence he ended the self-portrait he had published in the Frankfurter
Zeitung in March 1923.
How did people live in the circles in which Adorno moved? Siegfried
Kracauer did not confine his activities to such intellectual matters as
the critique of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, a book he
described as ‘apotheosis philosophy’, which ‘starts with the void and
ends with the “sun in its heart”.’^4 And, for his part, Adorno did not
spend all his time preparing papers for Hans Cornelius’s philosophy
seminar on such topics as ‘Kant’s critique of rational psychology’. Both
intellectuals found ample opportunity for entertainment in Frankfurt.
An entire chapter of Kracauer’s Georg – which is principally a social
novel and a novel of personal development – is devoted to the depiction
of the excesses of the citizens of Frankfurt in their fancy-dress parties.
The first-person narrator is sucked into the garish and noisy hurly-burly,
‘and, in the midst of the roar of this swirling, glowing chaos, a mass of
human beings dances to the sounds of jazz, and carries the lanterns, the
colours and the din along with it until the entire hall whirls round
unstoppably.’^5 Georg, the autobiographical hero of the novel, plunges
into the midst of this frenzied crowd to prove to himself that he is able
to enjoy life’s pleasures despite being an intellectual remote from worldly
matters. He is fascinated by the women, whose attractions are enhanced
by their exotic disguises, whether as apache maidens, negresses, whores
or pierrots. At the end of a night of dancing, the narrator, the editor of
the most important local newspaper, concludes complacently that he
was wrong to have believed that he was too inhibited to take part. He
finds he had no difficulty in joining in wholeheartedly and feels enriched
by the experience. He now knows something of the ebbs and flows of
the erotic adventures in which he had been swept up at the masked ball.
It must be added, however, that even before this he had experienced
some of the difficulties that can arise not just from facile, superficial