Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) grew up in Frankfurt. His father was a wine merchant, his mother a singer. The political culture of his parents’ home was liberal and cosmopolitan and their life‐style was bourgeois through and through. Adorno himself later compared his own childhood and youth to the development of a “hothouse plant.” This key phrase from his Minima Moralia, a collection of aphorisms written in America during World War II and concerning how to lead a right life in a wrong one, allows autobiography to merge with a reflection of the fate of infant prodigies, such as Adorno himself, during the socialization process. Such prodigies “trouble the natural order, and malicious health revels in the danger that threatens them, while society distrusts them as the visible negation of the equation of success with effort” (Adorno 1969a, p. 17).