Grand Hotel Abyss

Author:Stuart Jeffries
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

11

In League with the Devil

Max Horkheimer moved from New York to California in April 1941 on the advice of his doctor who recommended a more temperate climate to improve his heart condition. In November that year, Adorno followed him to the West Coast. Max and his wife Maidon had enough money to build a bungalow in Pacific Palisades in the affluent westside of Los Angeles. It was spacious enough also to accommodate Max’s childhood friend (and later the dedicatee of Dialectic of Enlightenment) Friedrich Pollock, while Theodor and Gretel Adorno moved into a rented duplex in the similarly prosperous Brentwood that was large enough to house them and Adorno’s grand piano.

They were joining a growing German exile community whose other members included Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, an outpost of German civilisation on the other side of the world from their then barbarous homeland. Brecht, for his part, wrote poetry describing his new home as hell:

On thinking about hell, I gather

My brother Shelley found it was a place

Much like the city of London. I

Who live in Los Angeles and not in London

Find, on thinking about hell, that it must be

Still more like Los Angeles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.