Adorno

484 Epilogue

forward to the next semester as keenly as I am, we shall be able to do

some very good work.’^25

All these statements certainly amounted to something more than

whistling in the dark. Nevertheless, with hindsight there were good

reasons to put a different complexion on the situation. Dr Paul Lüth

wrote in his ‘Letter from a Country Practice’, which appeared in the

volume with reminiscences of Adorno: ‘Adorno, ground down, over-

worked... left on the planned vacation.... As we doctors know, heart

attacks do not come out of the blue. They build up carefully, collect-

ing all the frustrations and exhaustions on the way, and then strike

suddenly.’^26 Marie Luise Kaschnitz dedicated a poem to her friend after

his death:

Th. W. A.

Something opened up

Something fluid and yet firm

Crept down the meadows

Then the street

And finally reached his chest.

He died of himself

Of no longer being at one

With his youth

And all youth

His experience taught him

To hate violence

And so he was called a turncoat

No one needed

To push him into his grave

In this radiant summer.

He had long been sad

He fell.^27

The view of Adorno’s condition expressed in this poem seems to cor-

respond to the picture Gretel had formed of her husband’s physical

and mental condition a few days before his death. When close friends

offered to come to see her right after his unexpected death in the hospital

in Visp, she refused, not indeed brusquely, but quite firmly. She had

already arranged to have Adorno’s body taken back to Frankfurt.

Gretel Adorno had been a direct witness of the impact of the student

attacks on her husband, and how he had been prevented from con-

tinuing what he saw as his true task in life. As widow, she did what

she had done for her decades-long life with him; she placed herself at

the service of his work. She herself had talked of their relationship as

a symbiosis. In her heart of hearts, she was convinced that he was

committed to her despite his passionate love affair with the ‘beautiful

child’, the actress from Munich, which had ended so painfully for Adorno

Adorno_D01 484 10/5/05, 10:44 AM