260 HEIDELBERG, 15.7.1950
15 July 1950
Mumma my animal, today is E’s 50th birthday – we are celebrating together in Heidelberg at Pfälzer’s and (hopefully) with good fodder, and all three of us thinking of the Wondrous Hippo Cow Marinumba with the most faithful love. With this in mind, heartiest kisses from your faithful old child
Teddie
Dear Maria, we are thinking of you a great deal and drinking your health with a glass of Pfälzer’s fine wine. See you in New York1 Egon
Dear Hippo Cow, I am happy because E told me what a nice place you are now living in, and hopefully I can see it for myself before too long, and then tell you all about things here.
Hugs from your Gretel Giraffe
Original: picture postcard: Heidelberg. Manuscript.
1 See you in New York: EO.
261 AMORBACH, 24.9.1950
24 September 1950
Amorbach, Hotel Post
Mumma my animal,
it was not intentional, but now it does strike me as symbolic that I am spending your eighty-fifth birthday in Amorbach. It is, after all, the last trace of a homeland I still have – externally quite unchanged, and possibly even quieter than it used to be –, and it is here, if anywhere, that I feel as if you were with me as in the old days, with the Tigress. I am truly spending your grand and joyous birthday entirely with you in spirit, and can hardly imagine that these most hearty congratulations I have for you first have to travel all the way across the ocean and through the air before they reach you.
I know you will now say, with quiet reproach: so, you went to the Hotel Post? But listen: it is no longer owned by Hilde and Ludwig. It was taken from them due to their fanatical Nazism. Hilde, whom I have not yet seen (I will not make the first move, and she has not showed her face yet), lives over in the house that once belonged to the Gilloths and plays the piano furiously. Ludwig, the decent one, who was not a Nazi, died in June following a prostate operation. The hotel now belongs to the former Carlchen. He looks very much like Heinrich, is pleasant, only a little inhibited and grim. Has a wife and two children. Emmy – to continue with the family – is also here, the wife of a ghastly seventy-two-year-old hairdresser named Stöcklin, whom she had to marry; a slightly feeble-minded, worn-out creature. Willy is chief post inspector in Stuttgart, but is apparently not happy there.1
We know all this from the three Burkharths,2 who are still unchanged and pray and tell tales of noble ladies, and furthermore have rather simple notions of the justice of the world’s ways, with the good being rewarded and the evil punished. Their beer is better than ever, and a true delight to Gretel. We also know everything else from them, for example that Berthold Bührer,3 who used to be a musical child, is now the abbey organist; that Niedbauer’s idiotic son died of septicaemia because they treated a scab of his with manure, and the various other atrocities one encounters. Gretel Spörer and Josef Fischer4 are also dead. He, a prominent Zentrumsmann, was severely hounded by the Nazis, lost all his little positions, and during the last years they were very badly off. Gretel, a kind and pretty girl to whom I was very attached, died of stomach cancer. Both daughters are actresses.
We have already done a good many things in the week that we have been here. We went to Wolkmann and Schafhof, Gotthard, were in Neudorf, almost reached Boxbrunn on foot. Two big tours in a private bus. The first through the Spessart, Mespelbrunn and Rohrbrunn, to the indescribably beautiful Wertheim. Yesterday a trip through the Odenwald, Vielbrunn (do you remember?), Hainehaus (with the fehmic5 chairs, which made a great impression upon me as a child), Michelstadt, Erbach, returning via Kailbach. The chauffeur was grim and hardly answered any questions. When I asked the owner about him upon our return, I learned that it was Loisl Rossmann, the son of Max Rossmann.6 I told him who I was, and the poor fellow, who has made an utter mess of his life, showed a certain joy. Everyone here remembers you two and thinks of you.
Nonetheless, it is not the old Hotel Post, and that is down to Carl. They were on the point of bankruptcy at the start of the Nazi regime, and he wants to work his way out of decades of mismanagement, which is understandable – but he does so by saving money on the guests, on food and heating, us too, and that is foolish of him. His old largesse has disappeared and one does not feel half as comfortable any more. The weather here is bad, but until the pouring rain today we had not let it put us off, and plan, if possible, to go on another big bus tour to Rothenburg, where Gretel has not yet been. She will also like the food at Stang’s. The owner of Engel’s, Nikolaus Deufel, has a new tenant – and his name is Judas. I am not making it up: Herr Judas, from Vienna.
We are having a good and systematic rest. Something wonderful that I was not familiar with is Schloss Steinbach-Fürstenau, near Michelstadt. Laid aside all work. I only have to proof-read Minima Moralia, which will be a thick book and should still be published before Christmas by Suhrkamp. We are also trotting a great deal through the Wiesental like you and the Tigress, and we go to the Burkharths when it is time for our pre-dinner drink.
Our little present is enclosed – buy yourself something pretty with it. And celebrate your birthday as much in our spirit as we celebrate it in yours. Keep your health and your wits and keep us in your heart. My greatest wish: for us to see each other again. Who knows, maybe even in Amorbach …
My heartiest greetings to Julie, for whom this letter is also intended. We are happy about every line she writes us. If Gretel wrote more than I did of late, that was purely due to my truly excessive workload – as well as the university and institute also a pile of radio commitments. But now I am forgetting everything, apart from when Max and I discuss the most urgent institute matters on the telephone.
Heartiest kisses
from your old child
Teddie
Dear Hippo Cow,
85 years – a stately age! We will devote next Sunday entirely to birthday thoughts and be with you in everything you do. Here, the two of you – Agathe and you – are always with us.
Hugs and kisses
from your daughter-in-law
the lanky Giraffe
Original: typewritten letter with additional handwritten note from Gretel Adorno.
1 No details could be found regarding the Spoerer family, who manage the Hotel Post in Amorbach to this day.
2 These were the three sisters Marie (b. 1875), Magdalen (Lenchen) (b. 1877) and Anna Burkharth. As they remained unmarried, they were known as the three Burkharth maidens. They ran the Brauereigaststätte Burkharth on the marketplace in Amorbach, which was known for its excellent and affordable food, as well as its good beer. As an adult, Adorno went there almost daily for a pre-dinner drink.
3 The organist Berthold Bührer (1908–96), son of the sawmill-owner Rudolf Bührer (1872–1947), whose works was located in the Schneeberger Strasse, was a childhood friend of Adorno from Amorbach. On 31 January, Adorno wrote the following to Berthold Bührer: ‘I kept hearing about you, and I can well imagine how happy you must be to have the Amorbach church organ under your command now. I wish with all my heart that you might play to me upon it – play Bach – to both our hearts’ content when I am in Amorbach again. Do you think that would be possible? Please make sure to let me know. I daresay you know how strongly my own work has remained tied to music; although, in the narrow professional sense, I am defined as a philosopher and sociologist, I never stopped feeling equally like a musician. Our days together in Amorbach, even the whirring of your sawmill that I was so fond of, have remained unforgettable for me.’
4 No further information.
5 The Feme was the imperial court of justice in Westphalia until 1808.
6 Adorno remembered the painter and sculptor Maximilian Rossmann (1861–1926), who lived in Amorbach, as ‘the true rediscoverer’ of Amorbach. Rossmann fashioned the decorations for Bayreuth and ‘brought the singers of the festival ensemble’ to Amorbach (see Adorno, ‘Amorbach’, GS 10.2, p. 303).