Adorno

Notes

Preface

1 Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 21.
2 Institute of Social Research, Soziologische Exkurse: Nach Vorträgen und
Diskussionen, p. 43.
3 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 112.

Part I Family Inheritance

1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970,
p. 255f.

Chapter 1 Adorno’s Corsican Grandfather

1 The historian François Guizot, who was prime minister under Louis Philippe,
gave what was perhaps the most succinct description of the political
programme of the Restoration and the spirit of the age: ‘Strengthen your
institutions, inform yourselves, enrich yourselves, improve the moral and
material condition of France’ (André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq, La
France des notables, p. 161). In his biography of the literary critic Sainte-
Beuve, Wolf Lepenies provides an apt summary of ‘bonapartisme industriel’:
‘This society was interested exclusively in itself, its own development, its
own advancement, its own expansion in every conceivable sense, and its
own prosperity’ (W. Lepenies, Sainte-Beuve, p. 128).
2 Prosper Mérimée, Colomba, p. 28.
3 The following information comes from an interview with Mrs Elisabeth
Reinhuber-Adorno on 15 January 1999. Adorno was a cousin of her father
and hence she is his first cousin once removed. Franz Wilhelm Calvelli-
Adorno, the father of Elisabeth, was a Frenchman by birth and a
Landgerichtsrat by profession; his mother, Martha Katz, was Jewish in origin.
After being dismissed from the civil service when the Nazis came to power,
he struggled to earn a living as a music teacher, though of course he was