54 Part I: Origins
relationships, but from intense, serious ones. The novel also contains
a frank episode describing the powerful attraction felt between the nar-
rator and his friend ‘Freddi’, who is fourteen years his junior. During
the travels of the two, the closeness they feel can be explored, although
the narrator is forced to confess his disappointment that the promise
of a friendship without reservation may turn out to be problematic. He
describes an episode in their modest holiday hotel in the Black Forest
in which Georg and Fred share a bed in order to chat together before
each goes to sleep in his own room.
The bed was narrow and they found it difficult keeping their
bodies from touching. Their arms felt particularly awkward since
they needed too much space. Since they couldn’t just saw off the
offending limbs, they did in fact keep coming into contact. They
tried to obscure the risks inherent in these contacts by keeping up
a lively conversation, which they both felt to be senseless. Because
of the warmth of the bed, the artificial conversation soon dried up;
the words seemed to fall asleep of their own accord, and then they
kissed. As had happened once before, Georg muttered ‘Freddi’,
to himself. As had happened once before, the forgotten name
surfaced unbidden. Fred half raised himself in the bed.
‘I must confess something to you. I wanted to tell you the whole
time, but didn’t really dare. The fact is that Margot was my lover.’^6We can only speculate whether ‘Teddie’ was present at the masked
ball ‘Timbuctu’ in the pavilion of the Zoological Garden, or at other
festivities of this sort. No doubt his experiences were like those of the
hero of Kracauer’s novel. What we do know is that he was no sad loner,
but was highly sociable. Even in later years, in the 1950s and 1960s,
when he was professor of sociology and philosophy, he enjoyed being
present at the student carnival celebrations. He would waltz with gusto,
showing that his talents were not confined to the exegesis of Hegelian
texts. And, if we can credit the discreet hints in his letters to Siegfried
Kracauer and Alban Berg, he seems to have been no stranger to the
kind of erotic adventure that his friend Friedel describes explicitly enough
in Georg. Georg’s reminiscences in the novel seem clearly to be based
on actual events, and, similarly, there can be no doubt that in 1923,
the year in which that fictional scene is set and in which Adorno went
with Kracauer to Amorbach and the Bergstraße, he had an important
encounter with a woman, though the place and the circumstances are
not known.
What we do know^7 is simply that there were business connections
between the firm of Oscar Wiesengrund and the factory of Karplus
& Herzberger, a leather-processing company that belonged jointly to
Joseph Albert Karplus and a businesswoman from Neuenkirchen, Else
Herzberger.^8