508 Notes to pp. 91–96
34 Ellen Delp belonged to the circle around Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer
Maria Rilke and Max Reinhardt. See R. M. Rilke, Briefwechsel mit Regina
Ullmann und Ellen Delp, p. 449.
35 See Constantin Floros, ‘Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs: Briefe und Studien’,
p. 30ff.; see also Floros, Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs: Die Geschichte einer
Liebe in Briefen.
36 Adorno, Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, p. 10.
37 Ibid., p. 30.
38 Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole, p. 161f. [Presumably from
‘daigen’, to worry. ‘Bellyaching’ might be nearer the mark; trans.]
39 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 332.
40 Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole, p. 118f.
41 Ibid., p. 123.
42 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 17f.
43 Lukács had made his name with these books. Before the First World War,
he belonged to the so-called Max Weber circle in Heidelberg, along with
such very different people as Ernst Bloch and Stefan George, Emil Lask
and Friedrich Gundolf. Despite approval and support, he failed to obtain
the Habilitation in Heidelberg. In particular, he was formally disqualified
because he was not a German national. In 1918, he joined the Hungarian
Communist Party and served as the People’s Commissar for Education
during the brief rule of the Hungarian Soviet republic. After the fall of the
republic, he settled in Vienna for the next ten years.
44 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 20.
Chapter 7 In Search of a Career1 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 24. By ‘fascism’ Adorno
meant the movement led by Benito Mussolini in Italy after the First World
War. Espousing a policy of extreme nationalism, it replaced parliamentary
democracy with a one-party state after taking over the government in
1922.
2 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Felsenwahn in Positano’, Schriften, vol. 5.1, p. 335.
3 Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, p. 33.
4 Alfred Sohn-Rethel was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, and came
from a wealthy family of art collectors. As a student of economics and
sociology in Heidelberg and Berlin, he made a thorough study of Marx’s
Capital, and this became a lifetime’s obsession. His dissertation, for which
he studied with the Austro-Marxist Emil Lederer, was concerned with
marginal utility theory. In 1936 he emigrated to Switzerland for a brief
period. From that point on, he focused on epistemological problems based
on the materialist theory of society. His own thinking was grounded on the
assumption that all theoretical knowledge was characterized by structures
that arose from the conditions of ‘intellectual labour’. These achievements
of mental abstraction were in his view not merely conscious acts, as in
Kant, but were based on the social process of ‘real abstraction’. The pre-
condition of this real abstraction was the exchange of goods as mediated
by money. As soon as exchange value had assumed sensuous form in the
shape of money, the real or exchange abstraction could be transformed