Introduction

Summary

The attempt to evade responsibility for one's residence by moving into a hotel or furnished rooms, makes the enforced conditions of emigration a wisely-chosen norm … it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.

This is Theodor W. Adorno in his 1951 collection of essays Minima Moralia, assessing the possibility of living at home, “wohnen” in a post-1945 world. As is well known, a well-housed life “after Auschwitz” is morally almost impossible for the German intellectual, but Adorno's criticism goes much farther in this eighteenth chapter of his Minima Moralia, entitled “Refuge For the Homeless.” For Adorno, the “enforced conditions of emigration” as well as the moral imperative “not to be at home in one's home” anymore are the only appropriate attitude towards developments whose beginnings go back to the later nineteenth century and about which many of Adorno's predecessors voiced similar concerns. In fact, Adorno's existential homelessness has its direct precursor in Georg Lukács's diagnosis, in his Theory of the Novel (1916), of the “transcendental homelessness” that characterizes life in the modern world, an idea that will be one of the key concepts in the following study.

If “existential homelessness” is a moral imperative for life in modernism for Adorno, a similar idea seems to have risen to the status of an aesthetic and poetic imperative for German and Austrian authors after 1900 and especially between the two world wars. Often, we find short stories and major portions of novels no longer set in the characters' homes.