Adorno

Éducation sentimentale 55

In the course of time, the business connection between Berlin and
Frankfurt had developed into close personal ties between the two fam-
ilies, and were fostered especially by Else Herzberger, of whom the
Wiesengrunds were particularly fond. Notably, the fifteen-year-old
Teddie even dedicated his first compositions to her. These were musical
settings of Theodor Storm’s poems Schließe mir die Augen beide (Close
Both my Eyes) and Die Nachtigall (The Nightingale) for voice and
piano.^9 The two families frequently exchanged visits. During one such
visit the eldest daughter of the Karplus family was introduced to the
son of the Wiesengrunds. This encounter was to form the basis of a
permanent relationship in the years to come.

First love and a number of affairs

The fidelity exacted by society is a means to unfreedom, but only through

fidelity can freedom achieve insubordination to society’s command.^10

We are speaking here of Margarete Karplus, or Gretel as she was gen-
erally known. She lived and studied in Berlin and, according to her own
account, was fascinated by the young Adorno’s temperament and intel-
ligence from the time of their very first meeting. He and he alone was
the man for her!^11 This self-confidence, together with a pragmatic view
of life, was typical of Gretel Karplus. Her grandfather Gottlieb Karplus
had once been an industrialist in Vienna. She was born on 10 June 1902
and, together with her slightly younger sister Liselotte, her father Joseph
and her mother Amalie, she lived in considerable middle-class style at
Prinzenallee 82, not far from the Tiergarten. Later, as a businesswoman,
Gretel Karplus lived in Berlin-Halensee, in Westfälischestraße.
When Kracauer learnt of Adorno’s love for Gretel, he wrote to him
that he was deeply pained by this new liaison, not least because it had
been kept a secret and he had known nothing about it. He had to come
to terms with it, of course, since it proved to be a long-lasting, even
symbiotic, relationship, one that was soon formalized by an engage-
ment. After fourteen years, during which they were separated geographic-
ally for lengthy periods, they were finally married in September 1937
in Britain, where Adorno’s parents and grandparents had celebrated
their weddings.
In the Berlin of the 1920s, Gretel Karplus moved in intellectual cir-
cles and was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Bertolt
Brecht. She was a sought-after, attractive and fashionably dressed woman.
At the age of twenty-three, she was awarded her doctorate in chemistry.
Her sister Liselotte later became the second wife of Egon Wissing,^12 a
cousin and friend of Walter Benjamin who was a well-known and much
admired figure among Berlin intellectuals of the day. Gretel had had
close contact with him from the mid-1920s. Adorno, too, had become