56 Part I: Origins
friendly with Benjamin during this period, having met him through
Kracauer. He thought highly of him from the outset. Later on, Adorno
would meet Benjamin in the Café Westend on the Frankfurt Opernplatz.
They would also meet after they had both attended the seminars of
Gottfried Salomon-Delatour, who was working on the ideas of the
historian Ernst Troeltsch. ‘I would say’, Adorno recalled subsequently,
‘that we met at least once a week, probably even more often, through-
out the entire time that he lived in Frankfurt. Even after that, we saw
one another regularly, both on his visits to Frankfurt, and above all in
Berlin.’ Adorno was drawn to Berlin not just because it was a cultural
centre, but also to spend time with Gretel.
This then was the circle to which the two belonged and within which
they were perceived as a couple. In due course, Gretel Karplus started
to develop an independent relationship with a number of intellectuals
with whom Adorno was friendly. The many letters she exchanged not
just with him, but also with Benjamin, for example – he addresses her
as Felicitas, she calls him Detlef^13 – provide clear evidence of her inde-
pendent existence. A further factor in this independence was her ability
to earn her own living up to her emigration from Nazi Germany. From
1933 to the end of 1937, she managed the firm of Georg Tengler, a
workshop in Berlin manufacturing leather gloves, in which she also had
a financial stake.
Benjamin fled from Germany immediately after the Nazi takeover
or, rather, after the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933. It fell to
Gretel Karplus to rescue as many of his numerous manuscripts as she
could as well as large parts of his library. It was at this time that a
relationship of mutual trust grew up between the two. In a letter he
wrote in May 1933, at a time when he had withdrawn to Ibiza in the
Balearics for a stay of several months, he describes his highly personal,
indeed intimate, experience of smoking opium. He writes frankly about
his own day-to-day moods and plans, and he shows himself to be equally
interested in Gretel’s life in Berlin. ‘I let a little wind music sway the top
of the pine under which I am sitting, and paint a four-leaf picture of
thanks at its feet. I trust you will pluck it in exchange for your last
letter.’ In another letter Benjamin declares that he would like them to
get to know each other even better. To facilitate this he intends to use
his letters to give a more sharply delineated portrait of himself. Per-
haps, he adds, this will result in ‘a halfway adequate silhouette’. Gretel
is equally forthcoming. She complains about the problems of her work
in the leather factory, about her mental and physical well-being, and
shares with him her thoughts about the future of their mutual ‘problem
child’ (Sorgenkind), as she calls Adorno, of the value of whose resolute
activity her friend Detlev seems firmly convinced.^14
After their later marriage, Gretel supported her ‘problem child’ in a
strikingly selfless way in his work as a writer, and made sure that Adorno
could follow his pursuits relatively undisturbed by everyday chores. And