Notes to pp. 20–26 495Briefwechsel, p. 46. What he writes on this occasion is: ‘I once imagined
that the Catholic ordo might make it possible to put to rights the world
which was so out of joint, and at that... time I was on the point of convert-
ing, an action that seemed natural since my mother was Catholic.’ Since
Adorno had been baptized a Catholic, this talk of a conversion seems
strange at first sight. In the baptism book of the Catholic parish of St
Bartholomäus, there is nothing to show that Adorno ever left the church.
21 ‘The Lehrhaus was a kind of Jewish centre for adult education; its spiritual
fathers were Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. The Lehrhaus also saw
itself as a secularized form of Jewish Talmudic study. The concept of “study”
was supposed to remind us that it represented a secularized, modern version
of Jewish teachings’ (Leo Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past, p. 21); see also
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Intellektuellendämmerung, p. 27ff.
22 [The ‘religious Tyrolean’ suggests a crass backwoodsman; trans.] See Peter
von Haselberg, ‘Wiesengrund-Adorno’, p. 12. These stories have evidently
not survived, or at least are not referred to in the Adorno Archive.
23 The festival newspaper of the XVII. Deutschen Bundes- und goldenen
Jubiläums-Schießen, no. 6, 3 August 1912.
24 This information, which derives ultimately from Adorno himself, can be
found in Andreas Razumovsky, ‘Schöne Aussicht’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 11 September 1968. [The English-speaking reader may wish to
know that the Sachsenhausen referred to in this chapter is not the infamous
concentration camp (which is near Berlin), but a district of Frankfurt just
south of the Main. It is known for its popular pubs, famous for their local
cider, and for its up-market restaurants. It can be regarded roughly as the
Frankfurt equivalent of London’s Soho (trans.).]
25 This was how Mrs Reinhuber-Adorno’s mother remembered it. She was
Helene Calvelli-Adorno, née Mommsen, who told her daughter that she
had been a frequent visitor to the house in Seeheimer Straße. Like Adorno,
she had studied piano at the Hoch Conservatory and had later married
Franz Wilhelm Calvelli, the offspring of the first marriage of Louis Prosper
Calvelli-Adorno and Martha Katz. He was said to have been a first-rate
violinist.
26 See ‘Graeculus (l)’, Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VII, pp. 22 and 34.
27 Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1936–1966, p. 602.
28 Adorno, Mahler, GS, vol. 13, p. 288.
29 Adorno, ‘Zum Problem der Familie’, GS, vol. 20, p. 307.
Chapter 3 Between Oberrad and Amorbach1 Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, p. 152.
2 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 110. It is likely that the wrong subjunctive was
‘kreechste’, from ‘kriegen’, to get [trans.].
3 Max Horkheimer, GS, vol. 3, p. 404.
4 Adorno, ‘Auf die Frage: warum sind Sie zurückgekehrt?’, GS, vol. 20.1,
p. 395.
5 As an active politician concerned with social questions – he had con-
nections with Paul Göhre and Max Weber – Friedrich Naumann had founded
a Protestant Workers’ Association as early as 1890. Later he founded the