By Stuart Jeffries
In 1923, a bunch of younger radical German thinkers and intellectuals got here jointly to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, made up our minds to give an explanation for the workings of the trendy international. one of the so much well known participants of what grew to become the Frankfurt university have been the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. not just could they alter the best way we expect, but in addition the topics we deem helpful of highbrow research. Their lives, like their principles, profoundly, occasionally tragically, mirrored and formed the shattering occasions of the 20 th century.
Grand inn Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to bare how the Frankfurt thinkers accumulated in hopes of figuring out the politics of tradition through the upward thrust of fascism. a few of them, pressured to flee the horrors of Nazi Germany, later came across exile within the usa. Benjamin, together with his final nice work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, was once arrested in Spain and dedicated suicide while threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. at the different aspect of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to turn into a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, or even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu.
After the struggle, there has been a resurgence of curiosity within the institution. From the relative convenience of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the vintage One Dimensional guy, which prompted the Nineteen Sixties counterculture and thinkers resembling Angela Davis; whereas in a sad coda, Adorno died from a center assault following confrontations with pupil radicals in Berlin.
By taking pop culture heavily as an item of study—whether it was once movie, track, principles, or consumerism—the Frankfurt tuition elaborated upon the character and trouble of our heavily produced, mechanised society. Grand inn Abyss indicates how a lot those rules nonetheless let us know approximately our age of social media and runaway intake.
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Extra resources for Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
Sample text
Crucially, then, what Benjamin was doing involved a new conception of history, one that would break with the belief in the kind of progress that capitalism took to be an article of faith. In this, he was following Nietzsche’s critique of historicism, that soothing, triumphalist, positivistic sense that the past could be scientifically apprehended as it was. In German idealist philosophy, that belief in progress was underpinned by the dialectical, historical unfolding of the Spirit. But that historicist fantasy erased elements of the past that didn’t fit the narrative.
You don’t need to be Anders Breivik to misunderstand the Frankfurt School. ’16 So wrote Ed West in the right-wing British newspaper the Daily Telegraph. In fact, nearly all the institutions West charged Cultural Marxism with undermining, the Frankfurt School sought to defend. Adorno and Horkheimer defended the institution of the family as a zone of resistance against totalitarian forces; Habermas sought out the Catholic Church as an ally for his project of making modern multicultural societies work; Axel Honneth, the Frankfurt School’s current director, stresses equality before the law as a precondition of human flourishing and individual autonomy.
The student movement and the New Left were at their height and many were convinced, wrongly as it turned out, that radical political change was imminent thanks to just such praxis. It was certainly a period of intense political turbulence. Students were revolting from Berkeley to Berlin, protests against the American war in Vietnam at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago had been attacked by the police, and Soviet tanks had recently rolled into Prague to put down the Czechoslovak experiment in ‘socialism with a human face’.