Adorno E-Book

Stefan Muller-Doohm

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 1551

Beschreibung

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

List of Plates

Preface

Acknowledgements

Illustration Acknowledgements

Part I Origins: Family, Childhood and Youth: School and University in Frankfurt am Main

Family Inheritance: A Picture of Contrasts

1 Adorno’s Corsican Grandfather: Jean François, alias Giovanni Francesco

Fencing master Calvelli-Adorno in the Frankfurt suburb of Bockenheim

2 Wiesengrund: The Jewish Heritage of his Father’s Romantic Name

A generous father and two musical mothers

3 Between Oberrad and Amorbach

School experiences of a precocious youth

Arousing philosophical interests in the musical soul: Kracauer’s influence on Adorno

4 Éducation sentimentale

First love and a number of affairs

Part II A Change of Scene: Between Frankfurt, Vienna and Berlin: A Profusion of Intellectual Interests

Commuting between Philosophy and Music

5 Against the Stream: The City of Frankfurt and its University

First meeting with Max Horkheimer in the seminar on gestalt psychology

6 A Man with Philosophical Qualities in the World of Viennese Music: The Danube Metropolis

Apprenticeship with his master and teacher

7 In Search of a Career

Between philosophy and music: no parting of the ways

8 Music Criticism and Compositional Practice

Theorizing the twelve-tone method: Adorno’s debate with Krenek

9 Towards a Theory of Aesthetics

Rather more than a beginner’s foray into philosophy

10 A Second Anomaly in Frankfurt: The Institute of Social Research

Two inaugural lectures

A Privatdozent in the shadow of Walter Benjamin

The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and Adorno’s ideological critique of music

In league with Horkheimer against a second school of sociology under the same roof

The opera project: The Treasure of Indian Joe

Part III Emigration Years: An Intellectual in a Foreign Land

A Twofold Exile: Intellectual Homelessness as Personal Fate

11 The ‘Coordination’ of the National Socialist Nation and Adorno’s Reluctant Emigration

Hibernating with dignity?

12 Between Academic and Authentic Concerns: From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student in Oxford

Sticks and carrots

An abiding distaste: jazz as a tolerated excess

Setbacks…

… and personal losses

13 Writing Letters as an Aid to Philosophical Self-Clarification: Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer

A double relationship: Gretel and Max

14 Learning by Doing: Adorno’s Path to Social Research

In the Institute of Social Research on Morningside Heights

Between two stools once again: a long road from New York to Los Angeles

15 Happiness in Misfortune: Adorno’s Years in California

Messages in a bottle, or, How to create enlightenment about the Enlightenment

Merits of social research: studies in the authoritarian personality

Moral feelings in immoral times

The Privy Councillor: Adorno and Thomas Mann

Part IV Thinking the Unconditional and Enduring the Conditional

The Explosive Power of Saying No

16 Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins

Playing an active role in postwar Germany?

Back to America: horoscope analysis and TV research

Letting the cat out of the bag: Kafka, Beckett, Hölderlin

17 Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory: Adorno’s Activities in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

In the stream, but swimming against the tide

Speaking of the rope while in the country of the hangman

The crisis of the subject: self-preservation without a self

The purpose of life: understanding the language of music

Right living? Places, people, friendships

18 Eating Bread: A Theory Devoured by Thought

Bread: A Theory Devoured by Thought dispute about positivism: Via discourse to the Frankfurt School

Against German stuffiness

The fat child

What kind of a society do we live in? Adorno’s analysis of the present

19 With his Back to the Wall

Patricide deferred

The futility of defending a theory as practice

Moments of happiness, despite everything

The divided nature of art

Death

Epilogue: Thinking Against Oneself

Notes

References and Bibliography

Index

I dedicate this biography to my daughter Anna-Maximiliane because I would like my account of Adorno’s life and work to help keep alive for future generations something of the thinking that was so influential for my own intellectual orientation.

Copyright © Polity Press 2005. This book was originally published as Adorno: Eine Biographie, copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003.

The right of Stefan Müller-Doohm to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2005 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 0-7456-3108-8ISBN: 0-7456-3109-6 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

List of Figures

Figure 1 Bernhard Wiesengrund, wine wholesaler of Frankfurt am Main, extends a hearty invitation to its honoured guests

Figure 2 Programme for the charity concert in which there were performances by Agathe and Louis Calvelli-Adorno

Figure 3 Title page of the Musikblätter des Anbruch

Figure 4 Score of the song ‘Rüsselmammuts Heimkehr’, for voice and piano, by Archibald Bauchschleifer

Figure 5 A page of the Godesberger Programme of the SPD with Adorno’s annotations

Figure 6 Notice of Adorno’s funeral

Figure 7 Map of central Frankfurt showing the chief locations where Adorno lived and worked

Figure 8 Genealogy of the Wiesengrund-Adorno family

List of Plates

Plate 1 Teddie Wiesengrund, around 1910

Plate 2 Jean-François Calvelli-Adorno, around 1860

Plate 3 Maria and Oscar Wiesengrund, 1898

Plate 4 Elisabeth Calvelli-Adorno with her children, around 1878

Plate 5 View of the Schöne Aussicht, around 1903

Plate 6 The Deutschherren Middle School

Plate 7 Agathe Calvelli-Adorno, around 1920

Plate 8 One of Teddie’s favourite songs

Plate 9 Adorno with his ‘two mothers’, around 1918

Plate 10 View of the Eisengasse in the Ninth District of Vienna

Plates 11–12 Adorno after 1925

Plate 13 Siegfried Kracauer, around 1930

Plate 14 Walter Benjamin, 1932

Plate 15 Alban Berg, 1925

Plate 16 Margarete Karplus, around 1925

Plate 17 Max Horkheimer

Plate 18 A drawing by Max Horkheimer

Plate 19 Adorno on the beach at Rügen

Plate 20 Adorno at his desk, around 1943

Plate 21 The Waldhaus Hotel in Sils Maria

Plate 22 Adorno in Sils Maria, around 1963

Plate 23 Adorno with his wife Gretel, around 1967

Plate 24 Benner’s Park Hotel in Baden-Baden, around 1955

Plate 25 ‘Himself in a mirror’, Frankfurt 1963

Plate 26 Adorno playing the piano, around 1967

Plate 27 A recording session for Hessischer Rundfunk, around 1965

Plate 28 Adorno in the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt

Plate 29 Adorno, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Karl-Dietrich Wolff and Jürgen Habermas at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 1968

Plate 30 Heinrich Böll, Adorno and Siegfried Unseld at Hessischer Rundfunk, 1968

To write history is to give the dates a face.

Walter Benjamin

Preface

Curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought.1

A biography of Adorno lays itself open to the objection that he had no liking for this genre of writing and in fact had grave reservations about the wisdom of exploring writers’ lives in order to discover the key to their artistic or philosophical works. He expressed the hope that in his own case too readers would give preference to his writings rather than to the accidental facts about his life. Of course, he read and made use of biographies; the life of Richard Wagner is a case in point. But he never wearied of warning his readers not to scour musical compositions or literary texts for traces of the author’s experience, subjective intentions or impulses. However, there is a constant temptation to do just that when thinking about Adorno himself. His texts contain many autobiographical allusions to happy childhood memories or sly references to local place names in Frankfurt or the surrounding area. What Adorno thought important was not such reminiscences, but the interplay between the objective content of his work and its historical context, i.e., what he called the force field consisting of the historical situation of the authorial subject, his life and his oeuvre.

This maxim has been the guiding principle of my life of Adorno, which has been completed forty years after his death and at a point in time when he would have been a hundred years old. During the six years and more that I have been working on this book I had a quotation from Adorno standing above my desk in a frame and visible at all times: ‘Even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual life acquire meaning within given social conditions.’2

The present biography attempts to reconstruct the context of Adorno’s life with other people. It is based on the corpus of documents consisting of Adorno’s publications, his published and unpublished letters, a variety of notes and the transcripts of his lectures and talks, as well as interviews with key contemporaries. A large number of other sources and texts belonging to Adorno’s intellectual contemporaries have been consulted. Despite the sheer quantity of the material referred to, it should be borne in mind that there remain documents that have not been made available in the archives or where legal restrictions have prevented access. This applies especially to his correspondence; some letters have been blocked, in particular the highly significant correspondence with Siegfried Kracauer which is preserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Biographies are sometimes distinguished by an emotional distance from their subject. This would be inappropriate in my case. Both as a schoolboy and a student, I had the good fortune to experience directly something of the fascinating intellectual power of this protagonist of critical theory. ‘The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.’3

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the financial support of two projects by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, it was possible to establish the Adorno Research Centre at the Carl von Ossietzky University in summer 1998. Under my direction my colleagues have helped to create the framework which has made it possible to write the present biography. I wish to thank the DFG for its financial support and also for the financing of a replacement professor for the whole of the winter semester 2002/3. It was only this support that it made it possible to complete work on this manuscript.

My personal thanks go to the members of the research group: Dirk Auer, Thorsten Bonacker, Thomas Jung, Jascha Rohr and Christian Ziegler. Without their productive collaboration and vigorous assistance this book could not have been written.

A part of the research consisted of interviews that I conducted with contemporaries of Adorno who were more or less closely associated with him. These interviews were recorded on tape and then transcribed. The two extended interviews with Ute and Jürgen Habermas in their house on the Starnberger See were not only highly instructive but also warmly sympathetic to my project of writing a life of Adorno. I am indebted to both of them for their patience with my questions and for their many suggestions.

I wish to thank a number of other people with whom I was able to conduct highly informative conversations: Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Marianne Hoppe, Ludwig von Friedeburg, Lore Kramer, Elisabeth Lenk, Rudolf zur Lippe, Elfriede Olbrich, Klaus Reichert, Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Alfred Schmidt, Herbert Schnädelbach, Wolfram Schütte and Bernhard Villinger.

In order to refine my own picture of Frankfurt University in the 1960s, I took the opportunity to speak with Uta and Hans-Dieter Loeber, Christa and Walter Siebel and also Eberhard Schmidt. I would like to thank them as well as my friends, whose curiosity over the years has helped me to keep on going.

I was also able to obtain good advice from other people during my work on the biography. In particular, I wish to thank Tom Huhn, Martin Jay, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Alexander Kluge, Wolf Lepenies, Thomas Levin, Ahlrich Meyer, Klaus Neumann-Braun, Jürgen Ritsert, Hartmut Scheible, Rolf Wiggershaus, Gisela von Wysocki and Harro Zimmermann, as well as the universities of Princeton, Berkeley and Columbia (New York) for their hospitality.

This project could not have been carried out without the support of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in Frankfurt and the assistance of its director and her colleagues: Gabriele Ewenz, Christoph Gödde, Henri Lonitz and Michael Schwarz. I owe thanks also to Jochen Stollberg, the director of the Horkheimer, Marcuse and Löwenthal archives in the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main, who helped me in the friendliest way.

In addition, I was assisted in my work by the following archives, to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude: the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Archive of the Academic Assistance Council, London; the Leo Baeck Institute, New York; Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach; Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main; Thomas Mann-Archiv, Zurich; Archiv der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main; Stadtarchiv Dettelbach; and Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main.

Since I have the old-fashioned habit of writing my first drafts by hand, Elke Glos had the difficult task of transferring the text to the computer, which she did with endless patience and great understanding. Barbara Vahland made use of her great expertise in pre-editing important sections of the text.

Gertrude Meyer-Denkmann showed great understanding and competence in advising me on the sections of the biography dealing with musical matters.

Thanks to their professionalism, the editorial department of Suhrkamp Verlag headed by Bernd Stiegler have helped to ensure that the manuscript could be completed and available in the bookshops in time for the centenary of Adorno’s birth. I am especially indebted to the cooperation and exchange of ideas with Bernd Stiegler, who has meticulously edited the entire book chapter by chapter.

My increasingly close cooperation with Reinhard Pabst (our almost daily briefings provided emotional support as well as practical help) turned out to be a particular stroke of good fortune. I am indebted to him for a large number of valuable ideas as well as enthusiastic assistance in collecting the photographic materials, a task he finally took over completely.

My wife Heidi encouraged me to make the formulation of many of my ideas more comprehensible at the manuscript stage, and she generously overlooked the months during which I had retreated to my desk.

Oldenburg, April 2003

Illustration Acknowledgements

Günter Adolphs, Bonn: Plate 5

Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 11, 12, 14, 16, 20; figure 5

Archiv Günther Hörmann, Ulm: Plate 19

Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz/Tüllmann-Archiv, Berlin: Plate 28

Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach: Plates 9, 13

Deutsche Presseagentur, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 30

Historisches Archiv des Hessischen Rundfunks, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 27

Horkheimer-Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 17, 18; figure 4

Hotel Waldhaus, Sils Maria: Plate 21

Barbara Klemm, Frankfurt am Main: Plate 29

Stefan Moses, Munich: Plate 25

Reinhard Pabst, Bad Camberg: Plate 6; figure 1

Elisabeth Reinhuber-Adorno, Oberursel: Plates 2, 4; figure 2

Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main: Plates 1, 7

Lotte Tobisch, Vienna: Plate 22

Bernhard Villinger, Weissach: Plate 3

Rüdiger Volhard, Frankfurt am Main (photo: Ilse Mayer-Gehrken): Plate 23

All other illustrations come from the collection of the author or Suhrkamp Verlag.

Part I

Origins: Family, Childhood and Youth: School and University in Frankfurt am Main

Family Inheritance: A Picture of Contrasts

Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is coloured through and through by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.

Walter Benjamin1

Every human being has his own way of dealing with the chance nature of historical events. But equally, individual lives are determined by the gifts bestowed on them by the fairies, both good and wicked, operating through the culture of their time.

Thomas Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno, who was born on Friday 11 September 1903 in Frankfurt am Main, was no exception. At his cradle there was a profusion of gifts of the most varied kind. Symptomatic of this abundance was the fact that his mother, whose maiden name was Calvelli-Adorno, toyed with the idea that her son should bear the name Adorno in addition to his father’s name Wiesengrund. Thus right from the start the baby, who was baptized a Catholic, was the meeting point of two opposed cultural traditions. On the one hand, there were the Jewish origins of his grandfather and his assimilated father. Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund owned a successful wine-exporting business and identified with the open-minded, liberal values of the Frankfurt middle class. On the other hand, for Adorno, who was an only child, his mother’s view of the world was of the very first importance. Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana was a devout Catholic who believed fervently in an ideal of artistic self-realization. Before her marriage to Oscar Wiesengrund she had made a name for herself as a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court Opera. Her younger sister Agathe, to whom she remained close throughout her entire life, had made a name as a singer and pianist. She also had highly developed literary interests. Maria was the offspring of a Franco-German marriage that was itself highly unconventional for the time between the well-bred daughter of an established master-tailor in Frankfurt, who was herself musically gifted, and a roving Corsican officer and fencing master who had settled there. It is likely that Maria had something of a bohemian streak and that she was susceptible to a variety of cultural influences. For what could be more remote from the adventurous wanderings of a patriotic Corsican than the educated bourgeois outlook of a Jewish businessman who had been quietly minding his own business like his father before him in the commercial and trading metropolis on the River Main?

1

Adorno’s Corsican Grandfather: Jean François, alias Giovanni Francesco

In the nineteenth century, Corsica, the island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, was still strongly marked by its native traditions. Nor did much change under the French constitutional monarchy, when Louis Philippe, the ‘bourgeois king’, built roads on the island and launched a programme to enlarge the harbour. The same might be said of Napoleon III, the nephew of the great Napoleon, who had come to power through a coup d’état in 1851. He followed a pro-Corsican policy in the hope of gaining the allegiance of the island with its rebellious population.

Corsica, the stubborn mentality of its inhabitants and their internal feuding were looked on with fascination in the imperialistic France of the Second Empire. This emerges clearly from the writings of Prosper Mérimée, one of the most popular authors of the decade of the July Monarchy. In 1840 he published his story Colomba, which opens with the return to Corsica of Lieutenant Orso della Rebbia, ‘poor in hope, poor in money’. Back at home, he meets his sister Colomba. Her exotic appearance represents for him the true nature of the island. Although he is an upright citizen who identifies with law and order, she inveigles him into helping her to avenge the death of their father many years previously, for which they blame the Barricini brothers, a family from the same neighbourhood.

The French public of the day was fascinated by this exotic story with its vivid contrast between civilization and savagery, even though the dominant ethos of its own bourgeois industrial aristocracy was one of material gain.1 When Colomba appeared, Jean François was scarcely more than twenty years of age and was well on the way to a career like that of Lieutenant Orso della Rebbia in Mérimée’s story. There was even a certain physical resemblance between the two men. ‘His face was bronzed by the sun, he had sharp, black eyes and a frank, intelligent expression.’2 That is a description of the literary character Orso della Rebbia. But what do we know about that other Corsican, Jean François Calvelli, who, like his literary doppelgänger, tried his luck in the French army and must surely have read and valued Mérimée’s picaresque story?

I have referred to the exotic figure of Jean François not because of the evident similarity between fact and fiction, but because he is one of the grandfathers of Theodor W. Adorno.

Jean François Calvelli was born on 14 April 1820 in Afa, Corsica.3 Afa was part of the municipality of Bocognano, situated 650 metres up in the mountains. Today, it is a village surrounded by chestnut forests at the foot of Monte d’Oro, around 25 miles from Ajaccio. The inhabitants’ lives were determined by the seasons and the consequent changes in the pastures for the herds of sheep and goats. Afa was scarcely more than a paese, a collection of houses, that came together with others of the same sort to form a church parish, a pieve. By the late eighteenth century, the Calvelli clan had settled in Afa and built a torre, the visible sign of a modest material security. This little stone house was the birthplace of Jean François, the only son of the pastore, Antoine Joseph Calvelli (1787–1822), and Barbara Maria, née Franceschini (1790–1846). The birth certificate in the town hall in Afa records the name in its Italian form: Giovanni Francesco Calvelli. His parents had married thirteen years before the birth of their son. They already had a daughter, Agatha, who was two years older than her brother. Their mother, Barbara, was eighteen when she married Antoine Joseph. He came from a family of some importance regionally. Her mother-in-law, Angela Orzola Calvelli, was already a widow. Her pride in her family, which was called Boldrini, was taken for granted. She was particularly proud of what were claimed to be close connections with the family of Napoleon Bonaparte, who in 1806 had promoted her brother to the rank of captain in the French army. She was of course present at the wedding, as were other near relatives. In all probability it was a close-knit family, as was customary in Corsica, and Jean François was more dependent on it than most. For when he was only two he lost his own father, likewise a fervent Bonapartist. The death certificate does not make clear whether the 35-year-old had died of natural causes, whether he was the victim of a stabbing, or even whether he had been condemned for political reasons. At any rate, Barbara had the sole responsibility for the upbringing of the two children. Their education, however, lay in the hands of the local priest whom the French prefect had entrusted with the task of teaching the children of the community, among them the bright young Jean François.

At the age of twenty, Jean François applied, evidently with success, to join the French army in Ajaccio. He began his career as a ‘chasseur’ second class in the Second Infantry regiment. After a brief interlude as an ordinary recruit in St Omer, he was sent to Africa, in December 1845. Following the French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s, there had been a number of uprisings under Abd el Kader against the colonization of the country. Troops were sent out to the colony to suppress the rebels, among them the young Corsican Jean François Calvelli. In the years to come he was in the habit of telling anyone who would listen about his exploits at this time; his grandson, too, would hear about them in due course.

After two years’ military service in Algeria, which seems also to have resulted in a dose of malaria, Jean François was finally released from the army in Ajaccio, and in accordance with the rules prevailing at the time he was retired as an officer on half pay, just like his literary doppelgänger, Orso della Rebbia. We are also reminded of Mérimée’s dashing lieutenant in the personal description of Calvelli that was produced at the end of his seven years’ period of service. For his outward demeanour he was given the mark ‘de bonne conduite’, and the testimonial continued: ‘Height 1.66 m, oval face, broad brow, brown eyes, average nose and mouth, rounded chin, hair and eyebrows, very dark.’4

Calvelli returned home to the island to discover that his mother and sister had died shortly before. What was left to keep him in Corsica? In the following years he kept moving from one place to the next; he spent time in Italy, France and even Spain, as far as it is possible to trace his movements. He left France following the political events in Paris during the February Revolution in which Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate by the mass demonstrations and battles at the barricades in Paris. His departure was interpreted there as a sign that the Corsican Bonapartist had little liking for the revolutionary events in Paris in 1848. He doubtless felt greater sympathy for the rise to power of the despotic Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx, one of the most perceptive witnesses of these events, published a brilliant analysis of the elimination of the parliamentary republic brought about by this change of government. Once the revolutionary proletariat had left the historic scene, an account of the social and political causes of the plebiscitary dictatorship could be followed in Marx’s series of articles entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

What had happened? In December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew was elected president of the French Republic. As early as 1851, he organized a coup d’état, dissolved parliament and had himself crowned emperor. At the point in time when Calvelli turned his back on France his path might in theory have crossed that of the author of The Eighteenth Brumaire. For, when Marx was expelled from Brussels in 1848, he spent some of the February in Paris before going on to Cologne. If we imagine Calvelli laying hands on The Communist Manifesto, we can be certain that the restless Corsican would have found it quite alien. He might easily have found more to interest him in Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne, a book that Heine, who had been living in Paris ever since the July Revolution of 1830, had written specifically with French readers in mind. Not the least of Heine’s intentions was to provide a corrective to the idealized picture of Germany that had been offered by Madame de Staël. He wished to make the complex situation of German intellectuals comprehensible, but also to warn about the dangers that might result from the intellectual capture of the romantic movement by the politically conservative restoration after 1815:

If we were to compare the history of the French Revolution with the history of German philosophy, we might easily come to the conclusion that the French had requested us Germans to sleep and dream on their behalf, and that our German philosophy was nothing more than the dream of the French Revolution.5

While Heine, the champion of the Enlightenment, remained in Paris and gradually saw his hopes fade, and while the stateless Karl Marx finally saw himself forced to emigrate to Britain, the thirty-year-old Calvelli took the burdens of constant travel and change of locality upon himself in order to earn his living as a fencing master. Since he was anxious to work only for reputable and affluent families, he must have been very eager to preserve his own good name. His visiting card had to be impressive enough to open the doors of the best houses of the nobility. Just as Lieutenant Orso, a member of the nobile, had enhanced his name by calling himself ‘della Rebbia’, Jean François embellished his own surname by adding ‘della Piana’. This addition refers to a paese in Corsica that Calvelli either regarded or claimed as his original birthplace.6 But how are we to explain the further addition of ‘Adorno’? From the little information that we have, it is likely that he came across the name in Genoa or perhaps even Turin. He was fortunate enough to spend a longer period of time in one or other of these towns, where he perhaps lived in a Villa Adorno or else with an Upper Italian family of that name to whom he gave fencing lessons. However that may be, when around 1859 or 1860 he made his way to Frankfurt on the recommendation of the Russian consul, Nicholas Wertheim, whom he had met in Stuttgart, he travelled under the impressive name of Calvelli-Adorno della Piana. At that time, in the post-Napoleonic period, Frankfurt had regained its old status as a free imperial city and was therefore an autonomous political entity. This meant that, since its territory was small, it imposed correspondingly restrictive conditions of entry. This explains why Calvelli took up residence in Bockenheim, a suburb to the west of the city that was actually part of Hesse-Nassau. For most of the nineteenth century Bockenheim was an independent town that was increasingly industrial in character. Not until 1895 did it become an integral part of Frankfurt itself.

Fencing master Calvelli-Adorno in the Frankfurt suburb of Bockenheim

Calvelli’s connection with the respected Wertheim family helped him to obtain a lodging in the house of a worthy master-tailor, Nicolaus Henning (1801–71), and his wife, Maria Barbara (1801–72). Here he met their musically talented daughter Elisabeth, who was able also to speak French. Their relationship developed with a certain romantic inevitability. They fell head over heels in love. They married as early as February 1862, despite the opposition of the tailor, who was concerned for his family’s good name and who had placed all his hopes for the future on making a more advantageous match for his daughter. The official papers that Calvelli had sent for to Bocagnano proved insufficient for a wedding in Frankfurt. For this reason it was decided to celebrate the wedding in London. The marriage was registered in the district of St Pancras in the county of Middlesex. The profession of Calvelli-Adorno was given as ‘fencing master’. The witnesses were Victor Alexander and Henriette von Erlanger, who came from a reputable Frankfurt family belonging to the Jewish commercial and financial middle class. In February 1865, the registry office wedding in London was supplemented by a religious ceremony in Frankfurt Cathedral. At that time, Elisabeth had already given birth to two children, both of whom, however, had died in the year of the religious wedding. When the ceremony took place in Frankfurt, the bride was pregnant once again. In September of the same year she gave birth to her daughter Maria. The following year Louis was born. When he was baptized his parents added the name ‘Prosper’ to his French Christian name – proof that the writings of the Parisian author held a special place in the young couple’s affections.

In the years after Louis’ birth the couple continued to live in Frankfurt, which had once again become part of Prussia. They lived in what were evidently straitened circumstances and during this period Elisabeth Calvelli-Adorno gave birth to another four children. Of the four the only one to survive was Agathe, who had been given the same name as Jean François’ sister. Agathe was born in 1868 and, as if the fact of her name had a symbolical significance, a deep relationship developed with her sister Maria which lasted the whole of her life, even after the marriage of the older sister in July 1898. Providing for the daily needs of his wife and three children was no easy task for the fencing master. He only ever spoke French and Italian. In all his years in Frankfurt Calvelli was never able to earn the 5000 guilders annually that were needed to qualify for the rights of a free citizen of the city. But he worked as hard as he could to secure an income for his family befitting their standing. When the viceroy of Egypt came to take a cure in Bad Homburg, Calvelli-Adorno offered his services as a fencing master. He also submitted a petition to Louis Napoleon in 1867.7 In his letter to the emperor’s chef de cabinet, Calvelli-Adorno referred to the good relations that once obtained between his own family and the emperor’s. After describing his own unfortunate financial situation, he went on to ask for assistance. He was very willing, he wrote, to appear in person in Paris to give an account of his conduct as a French patriot. He gave the name of His Majesty’s ambassador in Italy, Monsieur Nigra, who would testify to his probity. In his letter to the emperor, who as the nephew of Napoleon I had established the Second Empire in December 1852, Calvelli-Adorno gave a detailed description of the friendly relations between the Bonaparte family and his own. He pointed out that, when the Bonapartes had found themselves in difficulties at the time of the British occupation of Corsica, they had asked the Calvellis for help and this had been freely granted. This was the basis for ever closer bonds between the two families. Calvelli claimed that after the Egyptian campaign Napoleon spent some time in Corsica and that he had promised to give the Calvelli family property and the title of count. Because his father had been a Bonapartist the whole of his life and had even been the leader of the Bonapartist faction in Corsica, Louis XVIII had decreed that after Napoleon had been captured Calvelli should be interned and sentenced to death as a supporter of the emperor. Calvelli’s letter ended with a description of his present reduced situation in Germany which compelled him to recall the contributions of which his family could rightly be proud.8

There is no evidence that a reply was ever received to this petition. Presumably, the French Empire failed to respond generously, since the circumstances of the Calvelli-Adornos remained as difficult financially as before. It is true that Elisabeth, Calvelli’s wife, played her part and attempted to improve the financial situation by giving singing lessons and by occasional engagements as a singer herself. She went on concert tours, to Brussels on one occasion, accompanied by her husband. We know this because he needed a passport which was issued by the French Consulate General in Frankfurt. The personal description records his brown eyes and skin, the greying hair and beard and a height of 1.72 m.

Calvelli was of course primarily committed to his French background. How did he react, then, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in the summer of 1870? Although – or perhaps because – his family represented a burden, an obligation and a responsibility, he resolved as a patriot to join up on the French side. The passport that he had issued to him in June 1870 contains the entry ‘Pour se rendre directement en France’. He later told his children that in order to reach the French army he had left Germany disguised as a peasant. His grandson subsequently reported that his grandfather had been a professional officer and ‘had been seriously wounded’ in 1870 near Lille.9

After the war there were still eight years of life remaining to Calvelli-Adorno. Together with his wife and children, the stubborn survivor evidently continued to battle with poverty. His methods were not always on the right side of the law. On one occasion he was found guilty by the royal court of having tapped his neighbour’s water supply. Can it have been petty problems of this sort, including perhaps difficulties in paying the rent, that explain why the family moved house eight times in Frankfurt? A number of legends grew up around the Corsican officer and ensured the survival of his name among the following generations. The story was told, for example, that he had once halted a runaway horse in the middle of Frankfurt with a smart tap of his cane. He liked whiling away the time in the Italian coffee house Milani in the city centre. This was perhaps the place where he made notes for his little booklet on the art of fencing. He had an especially close relationship with his son, Louis Prosper. While his two daughters profited from the above-average musicality of their mother and one of them was to make a name as a musician in her own right, the only son made use of his father’s connections with the Erlanger banking family. He made his career in their bank, which was subsequently taken over by the Dresdner Bank, and was thus in a position to help keep the family’s head above water. This was particularly important since his father was no longer able to provide for them. When Jean François died in May 1879 – his tombstone in Frankfurt cemetery records his Corsican birth and his captain’s rank in the French army – he had just celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday.

After her husband’s death, Elisabeth tried to improve her financial position by giving public concerts together with her children, Maria, Louis and Agathe, who were all still quite small. Newspaper reports describe them as musical prodigies whose talents would, it was hoped, continue to be fostered. In the arts section of the Frankfurter Zeitung of 21 November 1878, Maria, who was thirteen at the time, was singled out for her ‘exceptional talent as a singer’. The review highlighted her performance of ‘the revenge aria of the Queen of the Night, the Proch coloratura variations … and the rondo finale from Bellini’s La sonnambula. The young singer does indeed warrant the highest expectations for the future, for if we consider the exceptional sound of her voice … and her skill with coloratura arias we may say that she will surely earn a place among the outstanding stars of the concert hall.’ Her two siblings were also praised for their contributions. The twelve-year-old Louis ‘produced a trill at the end of his Sonnambula aria and a staccato passage from the serenade from the Barber … which would have done credit to an adult primo cantatore of the Rossini school. Agathe, too, sang an aria from Sonnambula, “Tutto è gioia”, in a very pleasing manner.’ The evening edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung of 24 February 1880 likewise contained a report of the ‘three prodigies par excellence’ and their mother, the exceptional singing teacher Calvelli-Adorno. It came as no surprise, then, that Maria Calvelli should have made a very respectable career as a singer under the supervision and guidance of her ambitious mother. The Illustrierte Wiener Extrablatt certainly thought it worthwhile to devote space to the debut of Miss Adorno in the Hof-Operntheater in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots. As a mezzo-soprano, she sang the part of the Page to the Queen of Navarre. In the edition of 14 August 1885, the newspaper reported:

The youthful novice whom we have already heard from time to time in such roles as the Shepherd in Tannhäuser or the Woodbird in Siegfried tackled the role of the Page very resolutely, and successfully navigated past the cliffs and other perils of the coloratura aria…. Miss Adorno’s voice is strong and harmonious …

She also received praise in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, at least for her singing achievements: her ‘resonant singing’ showed her to be ‘mistress of her voice’. ‘Once Miss Adorno learns how to exercise the same control over her arms and legs …, her appearance on the stage will be an even greater pleasure.’

Later on, Maria was engaged to sing at the Municipal Theatre in Riga. Here, she received enthusiastic reviews. ‘The way she moved, her fresh face and flashing eyes, everything, in short, was so expressive of youth that we could only conclude that this singer must have begun as a child to train her voice and to practise the arts of staccato, trills and the astonishing interval leaps of which she was capable.’ This extremely favourable review ends with the comment that Miss Adorno was a ‘songbird’ who aroused great expectations, since she was also very pretty.

The mother of these successful and attractive daughters survived her husband by only eighteen years. She died on 28 November 1897. In view of Maria’s strict Catholic upbringing she could contemplate marriage only after a suitable period of mourning. She waited, therefore, until the following summer before marrying Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund. She was already thirty-three years old and her prospective husband was five years younger.

2

Wiesengrund: The Jewish Heritage of his Father’s Romantic Name

The Jewish family of Wiesengrund moved from the village of Dettelbach in Franconia and settled in Frankfurt towards the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the inhabitants of Frankfurt normally drank cider, but even then the pleasure-loving citizens did not confine their enjoyment to that somewhat sour drink. They knew very well how to profit from the fact that they were surrounded, to the west and to the south-east, by two important traditional wine-producing regions that still produce wine today. The long-necked bottles brought Riesling from the Rheingau, while the slopes of the bends in the River Main around Würzburg were the source of wine from the Sylvaner grape that was sold in large-bellied bottles. It was natural for a businessman who had grown up in one of these regions to earn his living by dealing in the produce of the Riesling or Sylvaner grapes.

The Wiesengrund wine-merchant’s business was first established by Beritz David-Wiesengrund in 1822 in Dettelbach am Main, close to Würzburg with its bishopric and princely residence. He appeared on the scene in Dettelbach as a merchant together with his brother Abraham David, who was six years his senior. Jews had been actively engaged in trade in Dettelbach since before the end of the sixteenth century.1 Both brothers founded families and increased their already considerable possessions. Each owned his own house; they were actively engaged in cattle-dealing to begin with, and then in dealing in land and property. The wine-merchant business was a later addition. In 1817 the prince bishop of Würzburg decreed that the Jews of the region should change their names. The name David was now abandoned in favour of Wiesengrund.2 His first son, Bernhard, was a cooper by trade, and in 1837 he took over his father’s wine-merchant business. The younger brother, David, inherited his father’s imposing house, but soon afterwards moved to Würzburg, where he died in 1861. The well-established wine business belonging to the young merchant and master-cooper Bernhard Wiesengrund (1801–71) evidently had a bright future. However, since he was able to increase his already considerable inheritance, and had become wealthy, and since there were too many competing wine-merchants in the vicinity, he soon abandoned the small-town milieu and moved together with his wife, Caroline, née Hoffmann (1812–89), in order to set himself up in a major centre of commerce and free trade: the city of Frankfurt, with its important trade fairs. In 1864, the energetic businessman was canny enough to settle in one of the most favoured residential quarters of Frankfurt. The house, number 7, Schöne Aussicht, did its owner proud. The four-floor neoclassical building which contained both the shop and the wine cellar was extremely impressive. The Schöne Aussicht was part of the old town and hence a purely residential quarter, free from the noise made by commercial activities of whatever kind. Nevertheless, Wiesengrund was able to ply his winemerchant’s trade in this select area. The house was ideal for his purposes, since to the rear of the building there was a spacious internal courtyard, and the cellar vault was over 3 metres high. A photograph from around the turn of the century gives a picture of the shop. Standing in front of it is the owner, together with three master-coopers or cellarmen, the latter recognizable by their large leather aprons; the picture also shows two women workers and two other employees. The street ran along the north bank of the Main and was generously laid out and planted with a row of trees opposite a row of bright middle-class houses. In one of them, number 16, Arthur Schopenhauer had lived during his years in Frankfurt. Next door Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had stayed as a guest in July 1836: ‘The view really is enviable, especially now in the splendid summer weather when you can look down the River Main with its many cranes, barges and ships, and the pretty shores over on the other side.’ The houses in the Schöne Aussicht were all more or less on the same scale, but some were occupied by several families and others by only one. They were built in a modern style on neoclassical principles: three-storey rendered buildings divided horizontally by cornices, with tall, narrow windows and an attic. They were lived in for the most part by merchants, brokers, bankers and diplomats. It was slightly out of the ordinary for the house next door to the Wiesengrunds to have belonged to a painter, Friedrich Wilhelm Delkeskamp, a well-known figure at the time, whose paintings of views of Frankfurt have come down to us.