498 Notes to pp. 36–38
Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Bloch wrote his chief works during his
years of emigration in the United States, though they could only be published
much later. They include Hope, the Principle (1954 and 1959) and Natural
Law and Human Dignity (1961). After his return to Germany, Bloch was
appointed to a chair at Leipzig University. Because of his political differ-
ences with the communist leadership of the German Democratic Republic
he took the opportunity created by a conference in Tübingen not to return
to Leipzig and instead to accept a guest professorship at Tübingen. Bloch
and Adorno had a lot in common, including their ‘precocious intellectuality’,
their ‘anti-academic style of writing’, their intellectual nonconformism and
their passionate interest in music and art. Adorno frankly admitted his
admiration for the older man, asserting that ‘he had never written anything
either explicit or implicit without reference to it [The Spirit of Utopia]’
(Adorno, ‘The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience’, Notes to Literature,
vol. 2, p. 212). See Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch –
Leben und Werk; Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ‘Bloch und Adorno: Bildhafte
und bilderlose Utopie’, p. 25ff.
44 Adorno, ‘The Handle, the Pot and Early Experience’, Notes to Literature,
vol. 2, p. 212.
45 Siegfried Kracauer, Georg. Schriften, vol. 7, p. 256.
46 Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist’, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 58.
47 Adorno, ‘Vierhändig, noch einmal’, GS, vol. 17, p. 303.
48 Cf. Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main,
p. 59ff. and p. 106ff.
49 Bernhard Sekles was born in 1872, the son of a Frankfurt businessman. At
the time when Adorno was a student, Sekles was the director of the High
School for Music. He was regarded as ‘a composer of quality and above all
as an excellent teacher of composition, a versatile and sensitive human
being and a capable organizer’ (Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium
in Frankfurt am Main, p. 246ff. and 257ff.). Sekles’s pupils included Rudi
Stephan, Paul Hindemith and Ottmar Gerster. It was partly owing to his
energy that by the middle of 1923 the conservatory enjoyed a recovery. He
improved the quality of the orchestra to the point where conductors such
as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Erich Kleiber were pleased to be invited to
conduct concerts for the benefit of the conservatory. He triggered a minor
scandal in 1928 when he introduced a jazz class taught by Matyás Seiber.
Does this explain why Adorno, who was no friend of jazz, adopts a rather
critical note in his reminiscences of his first composition teacher? He suggests
that Sekles was concerned to cure him of his ‘atonal whims’ by taking
advantage of what he regarded as his weak point, namely his desire to be
up to date. ‘The ultramodern, his argument ran, was no longer modern.
The stimulations I sought were already numb, the expressive figures that
excited me belonged to an outdated sentimentality, and the new youth had,
as he liked to put it, more red blood corpuscles. His own pieces, in which
oriental themes were regularly elaborated with the chromatic scale, betrayed
the ultra-subtle deliberations to be expected of a conservatory director
with a bad conscience’ (Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 218). Cahn disputes
the validity of this negative description of Sekles by his former pupil,
and conjectures that Paul Hindemith, whom Adorno always criticized,
was the true target of his comments. ‘This may explain the venom of that