82 Part II: A Change of Scene
6
A Man with Philosophical
Qualities in the World of Viennese
Music: The Danube Metropolis
What were the prospects towards the end of 1924, a few months after
the inflation and the economic crisis had passed its highpoint, for a
young doctor of philosophy who had attracted some attention as a
music critic? Even for an unusually talented person, career opportun-
ities at the university were anything but rosy. After all, there had been
moments during the crisis when there was a real threat to the future of
the university. Not only might it have lost its special status as an inde-
pendent university; it might even have been forced to shut its doors for
good. Without further infusions of money it was scarcely viable. In the
event there was a concerted rescue campaign by the city, the founding
institutions and the state. This proved successful, thanks in large meas-
ure to Carl Heinrich Becker, the Prussian secretary of state at the time,
and subsequently the head of the Ministry of Education.^1 In the event,
Frankfurt University was rescued by the injection of state funds and
was still able to continue as a private foundation without having to
surrender its autonomy to central control.
Adorno was able to benefit from this continuity. Following his Abitur,
he was able to remain in Frankfurt and graduate in a relatively short
time. However, his prospects of obtaining even a modest position in
the as yet still small Arts Faculty were minuscule. The advantage of
this, Adorno wrote, was that he was protected from ‘salaried profund-
ity’ and was exempted from the need ‘to be at each moment as naive
as the colleagues on whom one’s career depended’. On the other hand,
a non-academic philosopher would be forced to adopt a bohemian life-
style that would bring him ‘too close for comfort to the world of com-
mercial art, crackpot religion and sectarian pseudo-culture’. ‘So great is
the power of the advancing organization of thought, that those who
want to keep outside it are driven to resentful vanity, babbling self-
advertisement, and finally, in their defeat, to imposture.’ But even the
philosopher’s apparent escape route of earning his living by writing is
unsatisfactory because ‘he is obliged at every moment to have some-
thing choice, ultra-select to offer, and to counter the monopoly of office
with that of rarity.’^2 Since philosophical thought had been an integral