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 such a lot renowned contributors of what grew to become the Frankfurt college have been the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. not just might they alter the way in which we expect, but additionally the topics we deem helpful of highbrow research. Their lives, like their principles, profoundly, occasionally tragically, mirrored and formed the shattering occasions of the 20th century.
Grand inn Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to bare how the Frankfurt thinkers accrued in hopes of realizing the politics of tradition through the upward push of fascism. a few of them, compelled to flee the horrors of Nazi Germany, later stumbled on exile within the usa. Benjamin, together with his final nice work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, used to be arrested in Spain and devoted suicide whilst 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 warfare, there has been a resurgence of curiosity within the tuition. From the relative convenience of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the vintage One Dimensional guy, which motivated the Sixties counterculture and thinkers corresponding to Angela Davis; whereas in a sad coda, Adorno died from a center assault following confrontations with scholar radicals in Berlin.
By taking pop culture heavily as an item of study—whether it used to be movie, tune, principles, or consumerism—the Frankfurt tuition elaborated upon the character and trouble of our heavily produced, mechanised society. Grand inn Abyss exhibits how a lot those rules nonetheless let us know approximately our age of social media and runaway intake.
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Extra info for Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
Sample text
It is a good time to open their message in a bottle. PART I: 1900–1920 1 Condition: Critical Outside, it is a wintry morning in Berlin in 1900. Inside, the maid has put an apple to bake in the little oven at eight-year-old Walter Benjamin’s bedside. Perhaps you can imagine the fragrance, but even if you can, you won’t be able savour it with the manifold associations that Benjamin experienced when he memorialised the scene thirty-two years later. That baking apple, Benjamin wrote in his memoir Berlin Childhood Around 1900, extracted from the oven’s heat the aromas of all the things the day had in store for me.
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’.
Grand Hotel Abyss is in part a group biography, one that tries to describe how the leading figures of the school influenced and intellectually sparred with each other and how their similar experiences of being raised by mostly wealthy Jewish businessmen contributed to their rejection of Mammon and embrace of Marxism. But I also hope the book recounts a narrative that stretches from 1900 to now, from the era of horse-drawn transport to the age of war by unmanned drone. It travels through the cosseted German childhoods of these thinkers as they were raised by and rebelled against their fathers, their experiences of the First World War, their exposure to Marxism in the failed German Revolution and in the neo-Marxist theory they developed to account for that failure, the intensification of mass industrial production and mass-produced culture during the 1920s, the rise of Hitler, their resultant exile to an America which nauseated and seduced them, their bitter returns to a post-Second World War Europe eternally scarred by the Holocaust, their queasy confrontation in the 1960s with youthful revolutionary euphoria, and the Frankfurt School’s struggle in the new millennium to comprehend what might stop the multicultural societies of the west from collapsing.