Éducation sentimentale 59not only Monette but also Josiane whose services he came to value.^21
The attachment that developed between Adorno and his wife-to-be was
one that sought to create a free space for spontaneity and the expres-
sion of feeling. ‘Love you will only find where you may show yourself
weak without provoking strength.’^22 Significantly, Adorno saw himself,
projected into the animal realm, as Archibald the rhinoceros, while he
thought of Gretel as a ‘modern giraffe’. The understanding between the
two of them included the respect each felt for the other’s need for
distance. ‘We always sleep separately’, Adorno the rhinoceros explained
to Max Horkheimer, whom we encounter in this bestiary as a mam-
moth. The secret meaning of these affectionate nicknames was revealed
to Horkheimer without embarrassment at the time of their wedding,
shortly before the couple moved to New York, and Adorno combined
this revelation with the request en passant that Horkheimer should find
them a place to live with two separate bedrooms.^23
The marriage remained childless. Gretel once told Benjamin that she
would like to adopt him ‘instead of the child I shall never have’.^24 In
so far as it is possible to say anything on this subject, the Adornos’
childlessness was the result of a conscious decision that was taken in the
light of the dramatic nature of contemporary events and their vision of
the future resulting from it. When Adorno sent congratulations to Ernst
Bloch on the birth of his son Jan Robert in October 1937, he wrote,
‘It is beautiful and brave to have a child at the present time, almost a
little shaming for us who do not venture to take this step because one
can never know with whom a child might have to march one day.’^25
Later on, a few months before his fiftieth birthday, in a letter to Max
Horkheimer, Adorno expressed his regret that both couples had de-
cided against having children. He linked this fact with the sentiments he
had expressed in the letter to Bloch that, throughout their entire lives,
they had never been in a position to hope that they might themselves
‘be the subjects of a form of practice that could avert the catastrophe’.^26
Even if the wedding ceremony was far from being a mere formality
wished on the couple by their parents and friends, the marriage certific-
ate was not the most important aspect of the business. They felt sceptical
from the outset about the conventions of bourgeois marriage, even
though it is ‘one of the last possibilities of forming human cells in an
inhuman universe’.^27 Adorno needed no personal experience of the tra-
ditional rules governing the relations between the sexes to enable him
to state, in the frankest of his books: ‘Marriage, living on as an abject
parody in an age that has removed the basis of its human justification,
usually serves today as a trick of self-preservation.’^28 Adorno reflected
on the position of women in love relationships as these were regulated
by convention. The femininity so admired by men was the mirror-image
of men’s specific deficiencies in a patriarchal society. This explains why
‘Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all
who possess it.’^29 And the fact that the immediate flaring up of attraction