262 FRANKFURT, 21.1.1951
21 Jan. 1951
Mumma, my animal,
I think it has been an eternity since I wrote you a letter ‘of my own’, but the quotation marks enclosing this phrase at the same time express the state of affairs, namely that Gretel and I are so completely identified with each other that every word she writes to you is like my own, and that she simply sees to the technical side of the correspondence to take a little work off my hands. For you can really barely imagine how many things I have to do, and when I return home in the evening, like a real office worker, I am generally so utterly exhausted that I can hardly manage more than a few finger exercises (which I have been practising conscientiously since October) and a daft little game of 66. The institute has developed with such incredible speed in the last months, and because Max, as dean of the faculty, may be even more tied up than I am, the entire burden of current institute business, with countless conferences, dictations, the execution and monitoring of projects etc., is on my shoulders. Even my course on aesthetics, which I am enjoying a great deal, has to be virtually improvised for lack of time, that is to say I prepare each lecture the same day I give it. For the first time in my life, I have not managed to produce anything of my own in the last nine months; the only thing I wrote was the big commemorative essay1 for Walter Benjamin in the Neue Rundschau.
Nonetheless, I have so far managed to stay on top of everything, and I know that this will not always be the case. I even hope to have evaded the rather rampant influenza through a vaccination and similar things.
I am most reassured that you have now found somewhere decent to live, all the more so because I was by no means charmed by Mrs Clark, as I can tell you now, and I am not even sure whether she fed you properly, whereas everything seems to have been arranged in the most pleasing fashion with your new hosts. I do not doubt that you would be incomparably more comfortable here in Germany (it by no means has to be Amorbach) and could truly live a pleasant and honourable life. I do not want to urge you to do anything against your will, but at the same time I do ask, if you feel your health is at all up to it, that you think the matter over thoroughly once more with dear Julie. The thought that we could then see each other again soon is naturally a considerable factor in my considerations, for while it is certainly possible that I could visit you anytime, I really cannot foresee when that will be the case. My teaching success at the university, incidentally, is quite unusual: even now, approaching the end of term, my lectures on aesthetics are still as overcrowded as they were at the start. I try to imagine what you might say if Giraffe smuggled you into the university and you sat there with everyone like a true Hippo Cow. Are you not at all tempted to come to your child? If I were in your position, I would make the decision exclusively dependent on whether the doctor approved a Hippo Cow air transport after he has examined you again in March. Naturally I would not come now, during the very wet winter, but only in the spring.
On Tuesday I am to give an introductory lecture2 to Krenek’s
Orestes at the opera house here. I generally have so many invitations and offers of every kind that it is quite impossible for me to take up even a fraction of them – I turn down almost everything, and only took on the opera business thinking of the Ancient Hippo Cow.
I have just been elected by the faculty as one of the representatives of the non-professorial staff, an example of the faith that even my colleagues have in me. I am also on the committee that is formulating the new constitution for Frankfurt University. These are all things that I was not born for, and which feel to me like a masquerade, but those are precisely the things one cannot evade, and they constitute a further strain on my time.
Could you not dictate Julie a special letter to me sometime! I send her my very heartiest thanks in advance.
You know that I am always thinking of you, my animal, but today in particular.
Heartiest kisses
from your faithful Hippo King
Original: unsigned typewritten letter.
1 ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’; see GS 10.1, pp. 238–53.
2 On 23 January, in the university auditorium, Adorno gave an introduction to the work of Ernst Krenek, whose opera The Life of Orestes was premiered on 28 January in Frankfurt. No notes have survived among Adorno’s belongings; it seems likely that he spoke without a script.