170 Part III: Emigration Years
the naive hopes so characteristic of an intellectual innocent of politics
and of the confidence that a minimum of civility would still survive
under the Nazis. He might have been able to come to terms with humilia-
tions such as the withdrawal of the venia legendi, the right to givelectures.
But what finally induced him to leave Germany, in autumn 1934, was
the fact that, in addition to acts of discrimination, the authorities were
trying to silence him. Condemned to impotence! According to his own
explanation, that was the decisive reason for his emigration.
The threats he faced in Germany and the experience of expulsion
could not fail to affect him. However, in the long run his will to resist
was fortified by the arbitrary actions of the National Socialists, which
he interpreted as examples of the decay of the bourgeois order. Later,
after the four years and more in Oxford and London and the two years
he spent in New York, he finally began to settle on the west coast of
America, close to Los Angeles. There, even though the sight of the
unfolding historical catastrophe reinforced and sharpened his critique
of social irrationality, he never ceased to be an outsider.
Thus, despite being stigmatized as an émigré, Adorno was able to
preserve his integrity, and he was also adept in avoiding the pitfalls to
which exiled intellectuals frequently succumb if they let themselves be
seduced into closing their eyes to their own uprootedness. ‘Every intel-
lectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to
acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised
of it behind the tightly closed doors of his self-esteem.’^4 This process
of ruthless self-knowledge preserved Adorno from forgetting that the
exile remains rootless even when he is able to assimilate. ‘His language
has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his
knowledge, sapped.’^5 On the other hand, his reflections on his own
status as outsider enabled him to conceive of exile as the mark of an
entire epoch. In this epoch alterity was demanded even of the critic in
matters of practical living. When Adorno described himself as ‘a quasi-
professionally homeless person’,^6 he was voicing his conviction that the
bitter experience of the alien in exile was congruent with the general
experience of the intellectual as an outsider. He assumed in principle
that ‘inviolable isolation is the only path’ for the intellectual who wishes
to hold up a mirror to society.^7 ‘In other words’, he wrote to Thomas
Mann, ‘one is nowhere at home, but of course anyone who is engaged in
the business of demythologization should not complain too much about
it.’^8 Such a person is condemned to live in a state of suspension. As a
homeless person, the intellectual finds that ‘writing becomes his home’,
but the social critic is ‘not even permitted to set up house in his text’.^9
Even though Adorno procrastinated for months during the first phase
of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 before taking the decision to emigrate,
the complex situation of the exile was no novelty to him. For having
become clearer in his own mind about his own philosophical intentions,
he had become increasingly conscious that his own programme isolated