ABSTRACT
The abiding image of Adorno’s sojourn in the US is of a man ill at ease in his host culture, a man who became a citizen without ever overcoming his condition of being an exile. On meeting him for the first time, Paul Lazarsfeld described Adorno as the most foreign man he had ever met. The mismatch between Adorno’s rootedness in High German Culture and the brashness of American society was by no means unique to him. Many European émigrés to the US – artists, writers and scholars – lived uneasily with the mass culture of America. Nevertheless, when subjected to closer examination, these conclusions require a degree of qualification. Adorno does affirm, in his own memoir of his American years, that the culture shock he endured on arrival in America was very great. He also acknowledges that he remained unrelentingly European; he saw the refusal to adapt and assimilate as essential to being an ‘individual’, to experiencing freedom and autonomy in a relationship of non-identity with and difference from the host culture. Nevertheless, Adorno was profoundly affected by his American experience. He learned a great deal from American culture and even expressed admiration for certain aspects of it that he felt to be superior to his own. In particular, he experienced the democratic spirit of American culture as something real and profound and he reflected on the deficiencies of his own culture of origin by comparison:
More important and more gratifying was my experience of the substantiality of democratic forms: that in America they have seeped into life itself, whereas, at least in Germany, they were, and I feel still are, nothing more than formal rules of the game. Over there I became acquainted with a potential for real humanitarianism that is hardly to be found in old Europe. The political form of democracy is infinitely closer to the people. American everyday life, despite the oft’ lamented hustle and bustle has an inherent element of peacableness, goodnaturedness and generosity, in sharpest contrast to the pent-up malice and envy that exploded in Germany between 1933 and 1945.
