494 Notes to pp. 15–205 See Günther Vogt, Frankfurter Bürgerhäuser des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 126.
6 See Evelyn Wilcock, ‘Adorno’s Uncle’, p. 335ff.
7 Information from the Saxon State Archive in Leipzig, July 2002.
8 Information from the borough of Seeheim-Jugenheim, 13 June 2002.
9 The present writer has learnt from Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno that the
Calvelli-Adorno family rarely made use of the name ‘della Piana’. However,
envelopes are said to have existed on which the additional name ‘della
Piana’ is to be found. With the emigration of the Wiesengrund family from
Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939, their papers were put into storage and
were all lost in a fire. It has therefore not been possible to confirm the facts
about their name.
10 The documents relating to the Wiesengrund family in the city archives
include the entry: ‘Stillborn child, 21 October 1900.’ The present author is
indebted to Reinhard Pabst for this information, which has been confirmed
by the Frankfurt am Main Institute for the History of the City.
11 Under the heading ‘Regressions’, Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: ‘The
sleepy child has already half forgotten the expulsion of the stranger, who in
Schott’s Song-Book looks like a Jew, and in the line “to the gate the beggar
flees” he glimpses peace without the wretchedness of others. So long as
there is still a single beggar, Benjamin writes in a fragment, there is still
myth; only with the last beggar’s disappearance would myth be appeased.’
Minima Moralia, p. 199.
12 In the biographical literature about Adorno it is sometimes claimed that
Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund was an assimilated Jew who had converted
to Protestantism, and that his son was baptized into the Protestant Church.
No evidence has been forthcoming hitherto to support either claim. Adorno
was introduced to Catholic teachings by his ‘two mothers’. During his time
at school he evidently attended either interdenominational or Protestant
religious teaching. The questionnaire of the Academic Assistance Council
which Adorno filled in before his move to Oxford in 1934 contained the
question ‘Do you agree that we should approach any religious organiza-
tions on your behalf?’. He replied: ‘Please no, I am without any touch with
“positiv” religions’ [sic]. Bodleian Library, Wiesengrund-Adorno MS SPSL
322/2, no. 49.
13 Peter von Haselberg, ‘Wiesengrund-Adorno’, p. 16.
14 Frankfurt am Main dialect for ‘south of the river’ [trans.].
15 Max Horkheimer, ‘Jenseits der Fachwissenschaft’, GS, vol. 7, p. 261.
16 In 1910, when Adorno was seven, his father announced his departure from
the Frankfurt am Main Israelite community.
17 See Adorno, ‘Im Gedächtnis an Alban Berg’, GS, vol. 18, p. 501. Adorno
confesses there, as a grown man after the Second World War, that it was
only through his friendship with Alban Berg and Soma Morgenstern
that he began to abandon his prejudice against the East European Jews.
Admittedly, this was at a time when he had just reached the ripe old age of
twenty-two.
18 Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster. In Schriften, vol. 7, p. 58.
19 Peter von Haselberg, ‘Wiesengrund-Adorno’, p. 16.
20 In a letter to Ernst Krenek on 7 October 1934, Adorno recalls that in his
later years at school he had toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism,
but had dismissed this step as ‘incurably romantic’. See Adorno and Krenek,