Adorno

58 Part I: Origins

know whether, and in what ways, the relationship between the two was
marked by a certain obsessiveness. Their letters were lost in the con-
fusion after Adorno’s early death when Gretel fell ill in the flat they
shared in Kettenhofweg in Frankfurt and required prolonged medical
attention. The couple were dependent on letter-writing since they were
separated for lengthy periods before their marriage. She lived for the
most part in Berlin, he in Frankfurt, Vienna and then London and
Oxford. In the early years they met on public holidays, at weekends and
during their travels together. Naturally enough, they saw each other
mainly in Frankfurt and Berlin. Nor did Adorno fail to introduce Gretel
to his beloved Amorbach in the Odenwald. Destinations further afield
included south Germany, the Dolomites, Italy both north and south,
and, in France, Paris and the Côte d’Azur. They also followed in the
footsteps of his grandfather in the spring of 1932, when they did a round
trip through Corsica, visiting Ajaccio and going as far as Bonifacio.
When Adorno had known Gretel for about eight years his experi-
ence of meeting her again at the station after months of separation may
have inspired him to reflections that he published in the Frankfurter
Zeitung in 1931:

A man tensely waiting for a train arriving late one evening in the

depths of winter. He thinks to himself... at long last, she really is

here, as she leaves the carriage, one of the last to emerge, a slim

figure in a fur coat walking up to the ticket barrier, past the still

steaming locomotive, with the little black hatbox in her hand,

followed by the porter in his green uniform wheeling the larger

leather suitcase: it really is her.^19

As they leave the station arm in arm, talking as they cross the square,
what makes the writer doubt whether the woman he has so longed for
really is the woman he loves above all others is the presentiment that
the yearning felt by the roving imagination threatens to evaporate with
the fact of arrival. At the same time, he plays with the idea that the
sense of yearning that feeds on the need for love is really the expression
of desires rooted in childhood experiences. Elsewhere in these Words
without Songs, he reflects on the need for fidelity to the woman he
loves, a moral commandment that has become unfashionable, just as
love relationships in general seemed scarcely able to bear external
pressure. ‘Only the best and happiest relationships succeed in reaching
the point where conflicts break out.’^20 Even though Adorno asserts that,
‘ultimately, what emerges inexorably from the inability of lovers to reach
out to each other is loneliness’, his own bonds to Gretel Karplus, and
hers to him, were strong and enduring. Tolerance was a self-evident
reality, and this explains why Adorno felt no need for secrecy about the
fact that in his frequent visits to Paris in the mid-1930s he was strongly
attracted by the famous maison de tolérance ‘Le Sphinx’, and that it was