The City of Frankfurt and its University 67Commuting between
Philosophy and Music
When he was seventeen, Adorno left the Gymnasium; as the best
student of his year, he was welcomed by the university with open arms.
Did this mean that his course was now set for a brilliant academic
career? Looked at topographically, his horizons were limited to the
cultural milieu of Frankfurt, the city of his birth, where he had spent
most of his first two decades. Here, in this independently minded city,
which had always maintained a certain coolness towards the Germany
of Bismarck and his successors, he experienced the tensions of tradition
and modernity, the diversity of intellectual trends and cultural forms of
life. Looked at historically, alongside the intellectually stimulating years
of childhood and youth in his parents’ house, the crucial experience of
his life had been the progressive disintegration of bourgeois values. He
was therefore unable to repress the question of whether the vestiges of
tradition deserved to be salvaged. His scepticism about traditional ways
of thought and forms of art went together with his hope for a radical
break with the continuum of history, and the expectation that some-
thing fundamentally new would assert itself in both life and culture.
Adorno’s exceptional intellectual energy and his self-confident open-
ness to the world did not seduce him into blinding himself to the tur-
moil of his age at the end of the First World War. Needless to say, the
war was not the traumatic experience for him that it had been for the
intellectuals with whom he associated and who were around ten years
his senior. This explains his relative indifference to the protests of the
youth movement and the rebellious gestures of the expressionists of the
early 1920s. He had little reason to challenge the world of the fathers.
Nor was he tempted to join the fashionable trend for escapism or to
avert his gaze from the here and now. For all his superficial melancholy
about the irrevocable passing of childhood, and despite his scepticism
about the future course of history, he not only faced up to the challenges
of his age but also grasped the opportunities it presented to him. When
he turned twenty, he finished with his philosophy studies, perhaps in the
hope that ‘He that loses his life shall save it.’^1 Scarcely had he been
awarded his academic degree than he turned his back on the university,