Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

by Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.
Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great work--the incomplete Arcades Project--in his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu.

After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.
By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study--whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism--the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Biography, Politics, Theory, Sociology

440 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Stuart Jeffries worked for the Guardian for twenty years and has written for many media outlets including the Financial Times and Psychologies. He is based in London.

Reviews

[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

The whole is the false

In a culture that values convenience and pleasure above everything else, one task of the philosopher is to sow dissonance and make us face despair. And just in case you thought you were going to enjoy yourself today, here comes Theodor Adorno to put a damper on that plan.

But then one might also wonder if this despair isn't itself a kind of luxury, a dandified pose. Lucakcs made one of the great intellectual disses of all time when he accused Adorno and his critical theorist confreres of taking up residence in the grand hotel abyss.

By using this phrase as his title, Stuart Jeffries is recognizing the mixed legacy of the Frankfurt School. Marxists who seemed to give up on the proletariat and spent much of their time theorizing about the stupidity of the masses. Radicals who held themselves utterly aloof from the society they were supposedly trying to save. Jeffries's new book is marvelously alive to these tensions and paradoxes. Highly recommended. I'd definitely call it a page turner.

*
Some impressions on the major players:

-Adorno. The crux of it all. I'm inclined to say Critical Theory stand or falls with him. Personally I've never been able to make my mind up completely about this guy. He is at once eternally seductive and often extremely frustrating to read. Many of his writings on pop culture now seem downright embarrassing - as far as I know, no one is willing to defend his views on jazz today. At the same time, undoubtedly he was on to something with what he called the culture industry. Who could deny the awful, gnawing emptiness of our culture. Pop culture, first and foremost, is propaganda for emptiness.

Adorno was also just a great writer. Witness the snarling hatred of Minima Moralia, vivifying rage ripping through veils of illusion. This is true even when the target of his ragegrows obscure. The force of the revelation remains even when you can't paraphrase what just happened.

-Horkheimer. He now mostly seems to be known as Adorno's occasional co-author. Nothing in this book made me want to look into him more. If Adorno's specific political commitments were often dubious, Horkheimer's were just plain awful. Here we see him censoring Benjamin and Habermas, excising references to communism and revolution from their writing. After the war he refused to sign a petition against the Federal Republic acquiring nukes, then more or less banished Habermas from the Institute for signing. But the kicker came in the sixties when he came out in favor of the Vietnam war. At that point you have to wonder in what sense this guy was a leftist at all. Something has gone seriously wrong when you condemn American popular culture in the same breath as Auschwitz but then support the American firebombing of Indochina.

-Marcuse. This book contains a moving interview with his protege Angela Davis. Much more than Adorno, he took the radicals of the sixties seriously and tried to be their ally. Sounds as if he did an honorable job navigating the sometimes obnoxious behavior of the students in light of the real criminality of US cold war policy... Still, my gut feeling is that as a writer or thinker he wasn't near the stature of Adorno. A lot of his ideas now sound like dated radical chic.

-Habermas. I was used to thinking of him as a boring old pillar of the establishment, so it's a bit of a surprise to find a portrait of him here as a principled young leftist... From a theoretical perspective, I think he was entirely right to revise Adorno and Horkheimer's account of enlightenment reason as a monolithic conspiracy stretching back to the mists of time. By positing domination as so total and without remainder, a seemingly radical theory may actually a form of quietism. On the other hand, Habermas's great ideals of communication and consensus can easily become quite vacuous. What if the only thing people have to talk about and agree on is their own emptiness?

-Benjamin. Though he was a close friend and influence on Adorno, his connections with the institute were actually quite tangential. I'd put him in his own category. As a writer, he was even greater than Adorno. Various attempts to turn his work into a school of thought will always ring a bit hollow. Benjamin was a singular genius - poet, mystic, philosopher Jeffries's appropriately pays tribute to the mystery; that's all one really can do.

[Jay Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful read. Doesn't dumb down the ideas of the Frankfurt School excessively while simultaneously making complex arguments accessible to lay readers. I particularly like Jeffries's wry descriptions of the School's personalities and their various idiosyncrasies. Most enlightening!

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Tandem read with Joel, who was quick to question Jeffries' style, a wonky all too clever sort of exposition qua allusion. There were certainly times to grit one's teeth. I agree with others that it is a page-turner, this is a surprise given the thematics. This is an episodic chronicle of the Institute of Social Research a Frankfurt think tank tasked in its inception in 1920 with the query why wasn't the revolution successful in Germany? The book’s title refers to a musing by Lukács that the FS guys (gents only for a long time) were ensconced in a retreat from the gruesome reality they were committed to understanding, if not ending.

The book opens with the claim that the founders of the Institute were all the egg headed sons of assimilated Jews, a group of bookish sorts who uniformly deeply disappointed their fathers. Thus begins the lifelong crusade to wed Marx and Freud. Biographic stretches link this narrative, largely one of Walter Benjamin. Thoughts on the public/private, Brecht and suicide proliferate, often linking with Jeffries posturing on Beckett or Woody Allen. This becomes part and parcel of this meandering history. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas gather most of the attention. The thesis remains a social critique without any ability to explain or empower. This is very Monday-morning but it does appear rough to kick the institute for not only not explaining Germany's inability to follow Marx's historical imperative but how instead it went so horribly wrong with the advent of the National Socialist party. Adorno/Horkheimer decided after the Shoah that perhaps the Enlightenment itself and the regulation of Logos was to blame. This lead to some tricky thinking where Adorno/Horkheimer proposed that only intermittent flashes by solitary thinkers could pierce this damning delusion. Marcuse meanwhile became the Dylan of Theory (at least outside of Francophone academia) until he may or may not have collapsed under his own contradictions -- which left Habermas as carrying the fire and deciding that compassion of a religious ethic may be necessary in the pits of canine competition. This was enjoyable but somehow wanting. I do wish to embark on a further Benjamin endeavor, this time focused on Baudelaire.

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Grand Hotel Abyss” originally was a turn of phrase used by the Hungarian marxist theorist Georgy Lukacs to deride the so-called Frankfurter Schule.

While Jeffries is also skeptical about the revolutionary potential of the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and their fellow travellers, he does not dismiss critical theory outright but offers a balanced, insightful and well-written history of this particular strand of Western marxist thinking.

The book is both accessible and nuanced, which is no small feat given the controversial subject matter. Jeffries even manages to infuse his reading of the works of Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse with a touch of humour now and then. (Faut-le faire!)

Highly recommended to all readers with a genuine interest in critical theory. The book does an excellent job explaining how the different protagonists have contributed to our understanding of the relations between cultural production and society and also points at the limitations of their approaches.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intermittently strong, wonderfully researched book with a great thesis (and title), held back by some quirks in the execution. Jeffries seems to be trying to bridge the stylistic chasm between philosophic and pop writing, but the result is a weird mix of chatty and repetitive. The biographical information, particularly Benjamin's, held my interest more than his analysis of the Frankfurt texts, and he produces too wide a web of characters for any besides the core 4 to hold interest. Oddly riddled with typos as well - a near miss, useful for non-fanatics who are trying to get into this (depressingly relevant) era of thinkers.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine sehr gut zu lesende Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule, die auch für den Laien verständlich ist. Dabei stellenweise humorvoll und nie unkritisch. Jeffries hat so viele Zusammenhänge und Informationen aufbereitet, dass es bei einer einmaligen Lektüre dieses Buches eigentlich nicht bleiben kann.

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critical theory's founding question: why did the German working class support fascism rather than socialism is, unfortunately, acutely relevant again.
The book is not an intro to critical theory as such, it's more like a kind of (very accessible) group biography of the core Frankfurt School gang. Starting with the upper middle class Jewish German childhoods of the main cast - Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer - the book focuses on Benjamin in the 1930s, Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s and 50s (with exile guest appearances of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, among others) , Marcuse in the 60s plus a chapter on the Frankfurt School's second generation (Habermas) and contemporary third generation of Honneth and the post Global Financial Crisis interest in critical theory.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very ambitious group biography of the Frankfurt School Marxist intellectuals, specifically Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer. These were a group of strange and sometimes brilliant German-Jewish thinkers whose cloistered and privileged lives were thrown into anarchy by the rise of the Third Reich. They were completely aloof from the common people whom they (theoretically at least) sought to liberate. But from a distance, these men were able to offer cutting critiques of the degraded mass culture then just starting to rear its head in Europe and America. This crass, consumerist culture was warping the minds of the public, while cutting them off from reality and the possibility that they would experience a popular awakening to the real conditions of modern capitalism. The ultimate goal of these thinkers was to critique and dismantle this degraded mass culture, as a means of lowering the floodgates holding back socialist revolution.

The storytelling in the book is so strangely uneven and at times repetitive that it made me wonder how much this had actually been edited. Its a shame, because there a lot of gems here and there in the text. Particularly well done was the biography of Walter Benjamin. The overview of his body of work was powerful, though many of the quoted passages were bizarrely repeated throughout the book. Jeffries does a good job of conveying how odd Benjamin's life and upbringing were, as well as the way in which his family circumstances (particularly his relationship with his father) shaped his later political outlook, as it did for all the Frankfurt School thinkers. It is telling that all of them came from privileged backgrounds that they sought to explode, even though their own lives of dilettantism and freewheeling intellectual pursuit had been made possible by the capitalist labors of their parents. This is not to condemn them, but rather to understand the roots of their oppositional natures. Despite their oddness, I think that their hearts were in the right place.

A theme that emerged from both Marcuse and Benjamin's work was the realization of how much The Machine was beginning to warp the minds of its users in the modern world. The explanation of commodity fetishism in capitalism as a type of Myth of Sisyphus - a real-life phantasmagoria where objects become real and people become merely objects - was moving and evocative. The endless treadmill of capitalism, where wants are sated only to give rise to new wants on an endlessly repeated cycle that never leads to fulfillment, reminds me of a famous saying attributed to Prophet Jesus in Islam:

“The example of a person who seeks [the corporeal world] is like that of a person who drinks salt water from the ocean. The more he drinks, the thirstier he gets, until he is killed by it.”

(from a tafsir related by Ibn Kathir)

This book definitely made me want to read more of the primary source materials that it cites, particularly some of Benjamin's essays that have been republished in recent years. Overall not a bad read, though I have to say that it feels more like someone's brilliant notebook meanderings than a coherently edited volume.

[philosovamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

You would not think so from Jeffries' accessible, even goofy on occasion, tone, but Grand Hotel Abyss is a stubbornly ambitious book. Not only is at an attempt at what's always a doomed project, an intellectual biography, which tries to present the lives and the work of some intellect; not only is it a group biography, which tries to explore three generations of shockingly heterogeneous thinkers; but it is a portrait of a group who, as Jeffries acknowledges right away, is thoroughly controversial and, in some circles both left and right, irredeemable -- a portrait that Jeffries hopes redeems them for readers today.

Grand Hotel Abyss is an enjoyable read, an instructive read, and a useful read, but it does not, it seems to me, succeed at much of what it sets out to do. As an intellectual biography it is uneven; at the end we have a robust picture of Habermas' philosophy but virtually no idea of who he was as a person; we have a clear idea of the Oedipal childhoods of Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer but little idea of what that has to do with their philosophy; and of course, if you want to know either exactly what Adorno was doing in 1948, or a solid understanding of The Arcades Project, you will be left wanting. That's the difficulty of the intellectual biography.

As a group biography, GHA is also uneven, in both the biographical and intellectual details; up until Benjamin's death, this book is the Walter Benjamin Story, and our other Frankfurters circulate in the background. My cynicism tells me this is a deliberate promotional scheme from Verso to promote their line of Benjamin re-printings and the rehabilitation of everyone's favorite emo Marxist -- but enough of that. (And on this note, it's worth pointing out that GHA starts off very rockily and improves as it goes; the first chapters are in DIRE need of editing). Needless to say, other figures crop up when its convenient and languish when its not; poor Fromm primarily shows up merely as a foil to Marcuse.

And as for arguing for the relevance of the Frankfurt school today....ehhhh? The entire book reads as an exercise in Benjamin's Jewish redemption-of-the-past project as Jeffries presents it -- how do we make, for example, the curmudgeonly, pessimistic, cop-calling Adorno redeemable? On the one hand, the final chapter which presumably is supposed to solidify this argument, is shockingly flimsy -- all we get is Badiou and, erm, Occupy. On the other, this is no polemic, and Jeffries gives the Frankfurters the respect they deserve. (Which is not to say he doesn't have favorites, or doesn't poke or praise as he sees fit; Grossman and Marcuse come out unscathed as certified Praxis-Respecters). But on the third hand, which I found most important: why does the Frankfurt school need to be justified? The contradiction of the academic and pessimist, Marxist or otherwise, I think is worth embracing; not deriding, not justifying, not mollifying. I understand that's not what most leftists ordinarily prefer to do, utopian melancholics that they are, but...

I enjoyed reading Grand Hotel Abyss, especially in the latter half. I have a better idea of the Frankfurt school's thought, importance, and concerns than I did beforehand; and I think the 60s conundrum Marcuse and Adorno found themselves in is immensely instructive for today's world of campus activism and nu red guards, which Jeffries satisfyingly presents. Marcuse became the willing father figure to campus militants, though One-Dimensional Man seemed to ruthlessly scorn the idea; Adorno was relentlessly bullied by radicals while he attempted to defend exactly what it seems he should be criticizing; very relevant stuff! I also appreciated the middle chunk of the book when the Frankfurt school is fleeing fascist Europe, a terrifying and difficult prospect. There are problems with the book throughout, I think, and someone more familiar with the Frankfurt school would do much better to look at the Further Reading section, but it is a fine piece of group intellectual biography / apologism, though you may have to do some of the work yourself.

[Mikael Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty sad affair in the end. I expected more from the book. While claiming to be an intellectual biography of the Frankfurt School it ends up being a rather bland and superficial overview. It presents their ideas in quite strange ways, often wrong or at least thoroughly simplified beyond the point of recognition. The authors lacking academic background is no point against him but it seems to have been a problem as he rehashes more or less debunked or at least controversial or orthodox claims that the current scholarship has done away with. Beyond that his constant attacks or at least bitter remarks concerning the Frankfurt Scholars lacking revolutionary seal or action seem unnecessary and unwarranted in a biography. His application of Freudian theories of development, while it might echo the sentiments of some of the members, seems reductionist to say the least. In the end I, a relative novice in regards to the school came out of the book without much of a increased or deepened understanding. In the end I would hardly recommend the Grand Hotel Abyss as it appears to me as it does little to infuse the reader with something more than the absolute essentials of their thinking and even in that regard it appears as somewhat limited. It is quite a sad feeling as I would have liked to enjoy it and broaden and deepen my understanding in regards to the Institut für Sozialforschung. But in the end, "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen" and as such "there are no true biographies within a false life"

[Goatboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clearly written and very informative history of the Frankfurt School and its thinkers. Most of my exposure to the Frankfurt School authors has been through the writings of Walter Benjamin, but Grand Hotel Abyss provides a head start in understanding the writings and theories of the other players. Very much recommended if you are interested in this fascinating slice of history, especially since so much of what the Frankfurt writers had to contend with politically at the time is now, in 2017, so completely timely.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truly fun book to read, which is lucky because the subject and conclusions are overall depressing, especially in their relevance to contemporary life. For example, quoting Fukuyama:

The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide idealogical struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

What saves the book from becoming gloomy is Jeffries' use of humour which, unusually for a work of non-fiction, was almost never annoying and actually helped to make the exposition clearer.

Considering I'd never heard of the Frankfurt School before (other than confusing them with the Vienna Circle) there was plenty of new information in here. I think I now understand what the goal of critical theory is meant to be: to find ways of unravelling capitalism from within through a detailed analysis of the origin and functions of its cultural artefacts. So, not just to sound mystical and confuse people.

On the other hand, I still can't grasp what is meant to be the distinction between dialectical reason and any other kind of reason. Or rather, I can see a difference between their cartoon sketch versions: dialectic concerns interactions among evolving processes, whereas rationality is more like a static formal system of logical relations. But it seems odd to argue that there's something fundamentally non-rational about interacting processes, or that there's a way of reasoning about them that is somehow sealed off from more static types of reasoning.

Anyway, I'd be interested to look into some of these writers in the future. I was especially interested in Walter Benjamin. I think his ideas about the dialectical image and constellations are not so confusing as they're made out to be here. For example, Jeffries quotes The Arcades Project:

It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.

He mentions that the "esoteric notion has baffled Benjamin scholars". But I would argue that the spirit of what he's talking about is a familiar one to many mathematicians; the moment when the pieces suddenly come together and "in a flash" you see why something must be true, although spelling it out logically may take far longer. So perhaps I am contradicting myself about not knowing what is meant by dialectical reasoning. On the other hand, the experience I'm talking about is very definitely pre-verbal; I would struggle to agree that "the place where one encounters them is language".

[Fel P · Rating 4 out of 5]

En términos de investigación histórica y de posicionar en su contexto histórico y cultural a los principales referentes de las tres primeras generaciones de la Escuela de Frankfurt, el libro es notable. Especialmente en su contraste entre obra y praxis socio-cultural. No obstante, ese valor es al mismo tiempo una de sus mayores taras. Al hacer hincapié en la diferencia entre filosofía crítica y en qué tan crítica puede ser la vida de un grupo de filósofos burgueses, el marcador termina siempre del mismo lado: los autores de la teoría crítica, salvo Habermas, fueron todos grandes incoherentes de una elite de izquierda en la que convivía "marxismo" y una vida burguesa. Probablemente ese juicio es mucho más complicado, y es plausible que una vertiente psicoanalítica pudiese dar cuenta de ella, alternativa que por desgracia solo termina siendo esbozada en la obra (salvo para el caso de W. Benjamin, quien paradójicamente nunca fue parte formal de la Escuela). El problema de esto es que, en última instancia, el libro puede terminar leyéndose como una crítica fácil a la Teoría Crítica, cuando en realidad es una obra tributo a esta corriente de pensamiento, un intento por destacar y mostrar los orígenes un modo fundamental de pensar que hoy nos puede parecer casi natural: la sospecha y la indagación en aquello que se esconde y solo se puede vislumbrar en contraste a lo tácito.

También es importante destacar el esfuerzo del autor, en la mayoría de los casos muy bien conseguido, de presentar esquemáticamente y de un modo no demasiado complejo argumentos filosóficos reconocidamente oscuros y contraintuitivos. Esos segmentos son probablemente los mejores del libro.

[Antônio Xerxenesky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma história extremamente concisa e cômica (sim, cômica), com um poder de amalgamar informações de diferentes épocas impressionante. Tem problemas? Tem. Citações descontextualizadas (ou melhor, tiradas do contexto original e cravejadas num contexto muito díspare) e um puxa-saquismo de leve com Jürgen Habermas, o maior bostalhão da filosofia alemã. As referências pop-culturais, às vezes, parecem acrescentar pouco (3 citações a Woody Allen? sério?). Mas, de modo geral, é um livro engraçadíssimo e informativo - onde mais eu saberia do fetiche de Marcuse por hipopótamos de pelúcia?

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Frankfurt School is the first 20th-century group of German intellectuals and philosophers, in 1923, who had the interest to look at their culture and define it as the narrative of that world as it happens. Which we know now, a lot has happened. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin all played their part in this social circle, that was obsessed with the issues of Marxism, and of course, the Nazi years.

"Grand Hotel Abyss" is an excellent introduction to these authors/thinkers. Stuart Jeffries gives a detailed account of their lives, and more important, their literature. Throughout the book, there are highlights for me. For example, the troubled production of Brecht's plays with Kurt Weil and Marcuse's student/teacher relationship with Angela Davis, which was profound and sweet. The spider web that came from Adorno and others reached a large piece of 20th-century pop culture as well as the thinking of what it means to be alive in such a harsh century. For sure I'm going to check out Adorno's works because he had a remarkable interest in classical music. He hated jazz, and the author (and others) claim his criticism of that music is totally dated. Still, it will be a great interest to me.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lively and sometimes amusing history, examining the work of the Frankfurt School in each decade from 1900 to the late 1960s and beyond that to recent times, the internet, Facebook and Twitter. It is quietly critical, sometimes reprimanding, sometimes mocking, but often also supporting the school against its rivals and mockers. It has a lot that is perfectly relevant today.

The Frankfurt School is not just a body of ideas or writers, as I expected, but an autonomous academic institution which was given the resources to survive even transposition to the USA during the Nazi era by a bequest from a wealthy capitalist for the sake of his Marxist son. Its initial mission was to account for the failure of the German working class to emulate the Russians by overthrowing capitalism in a successful revolution, particularly in 1919. Using social research in the Thirties it identified an authoritarian strand to popular culture which made the German people vulnerable to the Nazi ideology, while in the USA in the Forties and Fifties it extended this work to demonstrate the role of authoritarian attitudes in a liberal democracy. Returning as an institution to post-war Germany, the mission was redefined to call for solutions that might prevent the barbarism of Nazism and in particular of the Holocaust from ever happening again. In the event, both in Europe and in the USA, its theorists encountered forms of totalitarian control over the mass of people that were no less terrifying yet were achieved by subtle and seemingly non-violent means. From discussions of the coffee house societies of Eighteenth Century Europe to the internet and Facebook, the recurring theme seems to have been very much the one concern: the seeming impossibility of ever thinking differently.

In particular, they reflected on how everyday life could become the theatre of revolution and yet in fact was mostly the opposite, involving a conformism that thwarted any desire to overcome an oppressive system. p.18

IF CRITICAL THEORY means anything, it means the kind of radical re-thinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavour. Benjamin initiated it, perhaps, but it was Max Horkheimer who gave it a name when he became the director of the Frankfurt School in 1930: critical theory stood in opposition to all those ostensibly craven intellectual tendencies that thrived in the twentieth century and served as tools to keep an irksome social order in place – logical positivism, value-free science, positivist sociology, among others. Critical theory stood in opposition, too, to what capitalism in particular does to those it exploits – buying us off cheaply with consumer goods, making us forget that other ways of life are possible, enabling us to ignore the truth that we are ensnared in the system by our fetishistic attention and growing addiction to the purportedly must-have new consumer good. p28

In his last essay, Benjamin wrote: ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ That sense of the repression of the unacceptable, the embarrassing, the awkward, of the ideological disappearing of that which doesn’t fit the master narrative, had come early to him and remained with him lifelong: barbarism, for Walter Benjamin, began at home. p30

Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions’, he [Horkheimer] wrote. ‘While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienation.’ p74.

Even though the Institute was nicknamed ‘Cafe Marx’, that scarcely captures its austere mood, which was better reflected in its architecture: the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School were modern-day monks working in retreat from a world they could not change and a politics they had no hope of influencing p91

Revolutions, thus conceived, required the proletariat to have the patience of the bus queue. They must wait for what would, inevitably, come, and then jump on board. p93

an era when it seemed to be, increasingly, a brain-numbing, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying nightmare, and the only alternative to the Marxist cogito (I work therefore I am) was the consumerist one (I shop therefore I am).

Under Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School rebelled against this orthodox German view of the value of work and in particular against the Marxist credo that we fulfil ourselves through labour. For the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, if not for Fromm who remained more faithful to Marx than his colleagues, labour is not the basic category of human realisation p136

In 1931, capitalism seemed able to defer its abolition, perhaps even indefinitely. In such circumstances, Horkheimer argued, the Institute must consider not only the economic basis of society but its superstructure. It must develop a critique of the ideological control mechanisms that held capitalism in place. p157

The insistence that the past can be transformed remains, for Marxists and others, one of Benjamin’s most appealing ideas. The critic Terry Eagleton, for instance, wrote: ‘In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.’ p197

In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply.

Certainly, the angel of history whom Benjamin invokes in thesis IX is a figure who inverts such crude historical materialism: for the angel, the past is not a chain of events but a single catastrophe and the task of any justifiable historical materialism is not to predict revolutionary future or communist utopia, but to attend to and thereby redeem the sufferings of the past.p246

Every morning, to earn my bread, I go to the market where lies are bought. Hopefully I take my place among the sellers. [Brecht] p248

Fromm distinguished between negative and positive freedom – freedom from and freedom to. The responsibility conferred on humans by having freedom from authority can be unbearable unless we are able to exercise our positive freedom creatively.p281

Fromm argued that this fear of freedom was not a peculiarly fascist one, but threatened the basis of democracy in every modern state. Indeed, at the outset of Escape from Freedom, he quoted with approval the words of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. ‘The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.’ p281

In Negative Dialectics, too, Adorno expressed better what human duty was in the wake of Auschwitz than he had a decade earlier. ‘A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.’p307

Marcuse maintained close links with his former colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer in Frankfurt, and in key respects, their critique of America is similar. For all three, the rugged individualism of US society that was pitted rhetorically against the collectivism of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War was a myth: Americans were infantilised, repressed pseudo-individuals p319

During 1952 and 1953, for instance, Adorno spent ten months in California analysing newspaper astrology columns, radio soap operas and the new medium of television, and what he had to say about them bore closely on what Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilisation. Adorno found in all these forms of mass culture a symmetry with fascist propaganda: both mass culture and fascist propaganda, he argued, meet and manipulate the dependency needs of the pseudo-individual character, ‘promoting conventional, conformist and contented attitudes’.p319

The American society, or any other civilised society for that matter, that postured in the 1950s as free and affluent was, so Marcuse argued, straitjacketed by conformity.p321

This part of Marcuse’s analysis clearly connected with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the despoilation of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment. For all three, any desirable transformation involved reuniting humans with nature rather than treating it, as it had been since Francis Bacon, as fit for nothing but domination.p325

In particular, psychoanalysis claimed that the autonomous individual is a chimera. We are not free either of our biological instincts, nor can we escape determination and domination by the social order. ‘Decisions for men as active workers are taken by the hierarchy ranging from the trade associations to the national administration’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘and in the private sphere by the system of mass culture which takes over the last inward impulses of individuals who are forced to consume what is offered to them’. The autonomous individual, the figure that Fromm needed to construct his road to sanity, was programatically denied by critical theory.p329

This attitude – that there is nothing easier than to love – has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’ In Marxist terms, society treated love as a commodity rather than realising it was an art that took time, skill and dedication to master. The beloved too became reified, an object serving instrumental purposes rather than a person. All the five types of love Fromm identified in The Art of Loving were becoming similarly debased – brotherly love by the commodification of humans; motherly love by narcissism; self-love by selfishness; love of God by idolatry; and erotic love by the absence of tenderness. The death of the tenderness in erotic love, he charged, came from the refusal of personal responsibility, the insistence on entitlement and the tendency to look outward in demand rather than inward in obligation. p332

For Habermas, the Federal Republic had accorded many fundamental rights to the West German people under its so-called Basic Law and had given them access to politics at the federal level by means of elections to the Bundestag. But, as Rolf Wiggershaus notes, the Bundestag had lost power to the executive, the bureaucracy and lobbying groups. Elections, then, seemed to confer democratic political power, but in fact made a mockery of it. p336

Adorno despaired in Europe. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’, he wrote in Negative Dialectics, the book he published in 1966p365

In order to enter into a conversation in which you might lose your prejudices, Fish argued, you would have to begin by putting aside your prejudicesp403

While Horkheimer and Adorno linked emancipation to refusing to adapt to current social reality, Habermas’s extraordinary hope is that social reality can be changed by means of creating truly democratic institutions that are capable of withstanding the corrosive effects of capitalism. p423

freedom of choice, as Habermas understood from the first generation of Frankfurt scholars, and from Marcuse in particular, was no freedom at all. p423

If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy – and its public struggle for its best form – is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems. I’m not saying we’re going to succeed in this; we don’t even know whether success is possible. But because we don’t know, we still have to try.’ Habermas. p424

Among capitalism’s losers are millions of overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) who have been driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. p439

the best writings of the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us – not least about the impossibility and the necessity of thinking differently.p441

[Steve Llano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a very easy to access narrative about the principle members of the Frankfurt School from just before the formation of the Institute for Social Research to the current institute's approach and projects. The book is very easy to read, very accessible, and has a great narrative style to it. It was pretty obviously written by someone who is used to telling stories.

For those who are researchers or know a lot about the Frankfurt School, this book might not be that valuable. The stories are nice in the context they are offered in, but the analysis of the major works is somewhat lacking. There just isn't space in a book like this to do the sort of critical analysis that you might want. There's a bit too much speculation on family relationships, and too quick a gloss on things like Freudian theory and family stories ("of course they liked Freud, they hated their dads!"). I wish there was a lot less of that and more attention to the context of certain pieces. For example, if each section was a time period and each chapter was a representative work from one of them and what it argues and how it is contextualized, that would be really ideal.

But this book really did an outstanding job of providing an intellectual, as well as political context for the work of the Frankfurt school in a very humanizing and caring style. You really get a sense of how these scholars thought about things. You also get a lot of the interaction between them and how their experiences and location influenced them. The story of the Frankfurt School as an organization of thoughtful people experiencing an incredibly difficult moment in history is well told. The critical appraisal of their work is not very good - it's like something you'd see from a journalist who is trying to appraise critical theory.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

My interest in Frankfurt School theory is quite recent--the result of an only marginally older enthusiasm for writers like Wolfgang Streeck and Slavoj Žižek--and so the foundations of my knowledge are quite weak, consisting as they do of a meagre build-up of scattered references by authors who assume the reader is as well-educated as they are. Accordingly, this book was perfect for me. Written in a highly accessible and almost colloquial manner, it nonetheless offers a deep and detailed look at the history of the school (the men as well as the ideas). I thought the writing was superb, especially when describing the lead-up to the School's exile in 1933: it feels like you're right there with Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse et al as the shadow of fascism begins to creep up on Germany. Their anguish and bewilderment--how could this be happening?--and, of course, fear is palpable in these pages. For that reason, the middle section of the book is difficult to read, though not through any fault of the author.

Great starting point for brushing up on your critical theory background. Will leave you wanting to read more.

[Yousof Mansouri · Rating 5 out of 5]

موقعی که کتاب رو شروع میکردم، تصورم این بود که با یک داستان زندگی‌نامه‌ای خیلی ساده مواجهم که توش صرفا وقایع و اتفاقاتی که برای اعضای مکتب فرانکفورت افتاده رو بیان میکنه. حالا که تموم شده نظرم کاملا تغییر کرده.
در واقع نویسنده علاوه بر شرح اتفاقات، نظریات اون‌ها رو هم با توجه به زمینه و زمانه‌ای که درش اتفاق افتاده بیان میکنه. این به فهم عمیق نظریات اون‌ها کمک زیادی میکنه.
در مجموع برای آشنایی و فهم بهتر نظریات آدورنو، هورکهایمر، بنیامین، مارکوزه و ... کتاب بسیار مفیدیه. همچنین نثر خیلی خوبی داره و خواننده رو با خودش همراه میکنه و خوشبختانه ترجمه فارسیش هم واقعا خوبه

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

My copy is an uncorrected proof, yet despite the errors the book read really easily and worked really well both as biography, historical narrative, and as a way into understanding the personalities that drove the Frankfurt School and the personal contexts informing the analysis each of the most significant players contributed. I highly recommend it if you happen to be a philosophy and history nerd, said the reader while searching for his pocket-protector and pens.

[Leila Gharavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

روند کتاب بسیار جالب است. جفریز مطالعه‌ی جامعی در زندگی و آثار اندیشمندان مکتب فرانکفورت کرده، حاصل را به صورتی داستان‌وار به رشته‌ی تحریر درآورده و مهم‌تر آن‌که سعی نکرده تا با ساده‌سازی بیش از حد ادبیات و ایده‌ها، موضوع را به ابتذال بکشاند.
تعداد کمی از فصل‌ها به‌نظر من دچار پریشانی و آشفتگی شده‌بود، اما در کل می‌توانم بگویم از خواندن مسیری که نویسنده برای قلم‌زدن انتخاب کرده، لذت زیادی بردم.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grand Hotel Abyss recounts the efforts of several social theorists--Germans and in the main Jews--to use Marx and, to a lesser extent Freud, to think their way though the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, Stalinism, the Cold War and the global domination of capitalism. Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erik Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and, latterly, Juergen Habermas were the tangential or direct beneficiaries of a rich grain merchant's desire to please his son by endowing a social research institution with a Marxist bent in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923, hence the name "the Frankfurt School," which went through many incarnations over the following decades.

Stuart Jeffries does a handsome job of intertwining biography with intellectual history, making this book enjoyable to read if, by virtue of its subject, somewhat depressing. Walter Benjamin's story glitters with imagination and tragedy; Max Horkheimer's story doesn't quite get told; Adorno's tale conveys both his brilliance and his prickliness; Fromm's heresies are entertaining; Marcuse's "solution" is even more entertaining and Habermas's life and opus ends up seeming rather pointless, despite his worldwide renown as a philosopher.

The problem all these thinkers confronted, ultimately, is whether pure thought could have any impact on the juggernaut of violence and capitalism that triumphed, if that is the right word, in the 20th century. Most of them suspected their Marxism was a dead end, in practical terms, and most of them regarded capitalism as the ultimate control mechanism. Marcuse's novel contribution was to suggest that eros might be a force wily enough to endow modern existence with a certain piquancy, if not freedom, but as Jeffries recounts, Marcuse's eros became, in the popular imagination, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and that became trapped in the commodification of ecstasy, either by promiscuity, drugs, or simple shallow-mindedness. Ultimately Marcuse viewed contemporary western life as one-dimensional, flat, constrained, and directed by an impersonal dictatorship of economic interests.

Habermas had the misfortune to be optimistic that still another way out of this No Exit scenario could be found in the realm of genuine social communication apart from the tyranny of "the system." Jeffries uses many of Habermas's skeptical critics to make him pay for this. The problem was that Habermas was a classical system-builder, someone who was determined to bring all manner of philosophical concerns together in the manner of Kant or Hegel. No one believes that's a useful proposition anymore--better to pick smaller targets of attack, make your point, and move on.

Adorno coaching Thomas Mann through musical theory as he wrote Doctor Faustus was my favorite passage in this book. Benjamin's desperate attempts to write a lot by writing a little--precisely not writing as Habermas wrote, rather by proceeding from fragment to fragment--are the book's saddest passages.

Saving "critical theory," which the Frankfurt School is credited with developing for last, I have to say Jeffries never seems to try to define it. As presented here, the proposition essentially is philosophizing within multiple dimensions of an historical moment or movement...playing that moment or movement's contradictions back to it...understanding that there is no disassociating a wrong from a right...presenting and dissecting the ambiguities of overarching forces, be they economic or related to Freudian notions of self-repression and deferred gratification, i.e. the inherent discontents of orderly social existence.

[Dariia Puhach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Це історія ідей Франкфуртської школи поруч із короткими біографічними нарисами про їхніх авторів. Джеффріс проводить нас від початку заснування Інституту соціальних досліджень у 1921-му, що прагнув відповісти на питання, чому соціалістична революція в Німеччині — на противагу Росії — не відбулась; розширений підхід до марксизму, відколи очільником Інституту у 1931-му став Горкгаймер; екзиль представників Інституту в Америці через нацистів у Німеччині — і про друге покоління школи в особі Габермаса, який наприкінці життя примудрився поєднати позитивніше, ніж у першого покоління, ставлення до Просвітництва з релігією...
Джеффріс справді вміло розказує історію Школи, вдало змінюючи своїх героїв разом із оповіддю про реалії, в яких перебували всі представники Школи. Часом він дозволяє своєму голосу звучати досить чітко, даючи оцінку, мовляв тут Адорно заганяється чи навряд чи утопії Маркузе здаються нам переконливими. Інколи він справді вдало жартує, і це освіжає текст, де інколи можна загрузнути в теоретичних пасажах.
У цілому книжка дає оглядове, але досить насичене і структуроване уявлення про історію Школи і її представників, про те, як контекст, зокрема особистий, впливав на вектор їхнього письма (наприклад, Фромм дуже добре знав англійську і найкраще з-поміж усіх адаптувався до життя в Америці, коли ж для Адорно життя там було таким стресовим, що, звісно, він прирівняв культурну індустрію в Америці до фашизму). Дуже рекомендую для всіх, хто хотіли б ознайомитися з Школою більше.

[Joe Bambridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeffries does a remarkable job introducing these challenging thinkers and their work. His chronological, quasi-biographical approach weaves between the thought of the Frankfurt School thinkers and their lives and keeps what could have been a dense and painful book enjoyable and readable. As for the subjects of the book, Jeffries does a good job of trying to explain the emergence, inspiration, and circumstances behind the development of their ideas as well as how the various thinkers differed. Perhaps the key distinction which Jeffries highlights is between those who sought to preserve a degree of optimism about the possibility of a new social order even amidst their critical approach and those, represented most by Adorno, whose negative dialectical approach came to entail a negative outlook towards revolution in general. Often described as neo-Marxists, Jeffries also makes clear how far the Frankfurt School moved away from Marxism, even in its most humanist forms, culminating in Habermas’ radical liberalism. In a world of globalised financial monopoly capitalism, where domination is now technologically-infused into and constitutive of our very being, a continued need for these works to be plied and critiqued by emancipatory thinkers is needed, though hopefully without falling into the same political impotence that they did.

[Emiel · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the beginning, this book is unclear about its aim. Is it an intellectual history of the Frankfurt School? Or is it a summary and exposition of the ideas of their primary intellectuals? Or is it an evaluation of whether or not their thought has relevance today? Ultimately the book manages only to be an embarrassment to its author and its press.

The book fails as an intellectual history for several reasons.
First, the hamfisted attempt to impose a chronological ordering on the contents. This results in a misguided and uninformative look at decades when the Frankfurt School’s leaders were children, reconstructed in no small part from Benjamin’s own later writings on this time. Although there is certainly a chronology to the Frankfurt School, especially in its exile from and return to Germany, the chronology does a disservice to a clear exposition of what they were thinking and how this can be construed systematically.

Second, the book cannot make up its mind about its dramatis personae. At times it will hyperfocus on the principal cast (Benjamin is certainly overrepresented for idiosyncratic reasons), while at others it will go on tangents about future spies who once rubbed shoulders with Horkheimer. This organization gets better during the 40s and 50s with a clearer focus on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. Of course there is so much pivotal writing in this time that it is difficult for the author to stray from this exposition. It ends with a whimper: less than a handful of pages on Axel Honneth’s work, mostly mischaracterized to make it seem restricted to legal recognition. To amplify the drama, major thinkers are played off against one another without charity (especially the 2nd and 3rd generation against the first).

Third, there is the damaging insistence on forcing a personal take on the intellectual part of the intellectual history. The reader is subjected to Oedipal analyses of Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer to the point where they might start to wonder at the author’s own Oedipal problematics (amplified in no small part by unnecessary Woody Allen references). The warning signs become blinding by the time the reader reaches Habermas (introduced some 50 pages earlier one as “a former Hitler Youth”) and realizes that without that personal shtick, the writing becomes totally thrilless and hollow, only a dull and sophomoric summary of the ideas of critical theory.

So how does the book fare as a summary? The right question to ask is why another summary was needed when we have the work of scholars like Martin Jay, Susan Buck-Morss, and so many others. This book has absolutely nothing new to offer except to further summarize and paraphrase other secondary work. On the historical side the same is true. Aside from the author’s idiosyncratic take on the circumstances, the basic facts are all to be found in the authoritative biographies of these thinkers. The exceptions are all embarrassments, such as the author’s fixation on the circumstances surrounding Benjamin’s death.

What about the evaluation of the relevance of Critical Theory today? The author begins the book by fixating on especially some members’ insistence on theory over praxis (a parody of Adorno that is never explicated). By the conclusion the reader must be begging for an answer. The simple truth is: the author does not give one, instead relying on a generic statement that books about the critique of capitalism have sold well since 2010. But what happens in the rest of the book is more revealing about the intentions of the author. At every chance, the reader encounters not an author charitable or sympathetic to the views of the Frankfurt School. Nor is their philosophy made relevant and understanding through examples found in the world around us today. Rather, at every turn the reader finds an author in sustained opposition to their ideas, ranging from obfuscation to belittlement to pure strawmen. But, infuriatingly, the author is never willing to admit to their opposition, which is of the ideological kind that the Frankfurt School would have eviscerated with ease.

So who is this book for? In the experience of our reading group, it was neither clear enough to inform the novel reader to the thought of the Frankfurt School, nor did it add much to the thinking of experienced readers who will see through the author’s feigned expertise as soon as they read a passage on their favoured Frankfurter.

Ultimately, one need look no further than the footnotes to see what this project really is: a vanity project. At every turn the author cites himself, as if hoping the reader will trawl through The Guardian archives in search of enlightenment. Angela Davis (who, we are told, after studying with Marcuse “later became an African American activist”) is not cited; she is quoted from an interview with the author.

From the minor (misspellings of major commentators’ names), to the baffling (“Homer’s epic was written about ten centuries before the European Enlightenment”), to the mischaracterizations of the Frankfurt School, to the dubious choices in pop culture allusions, to the smug tone, to the lack of true message, this book is an embarrassment.

2 stars because some of the summaries are not half bad

[Kristján Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adorno og Horkheimer eru algjörir dicks og Benjamín, Marcuse og Fromm eiga skilið knús.

[ErikWoeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sehr schöne Einführung in das Denken und Leben und Wirken der sog. 069-Schule und ihrer Weggenoss*innen

[Connie Ruoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Von Walter Benjamin bis zu Jürgen Habermas
„Ich habe ein theoretisches Denkmodell aufgestellt. Wie konnte ich ahnen, dass Leute es mit Molotow-Cocktails verwirklichen wollen?“ „Grand Hotel Abgrund.“ S. 9.

Mit diesem Zitat von Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno lässt Stuart Jeffries sein Buch „Grand Hotel Abgrund. Die Frankfurter Schule und ihre Zeit“ beginnen.

Der Titel „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
Die führenden Köpfe des Frankfurter Instituts, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann und Jürgen Habermas waren Theoretiker, die in erster Linie den Faschismus kritisierten, aber nicht der „elften These über Feuerbach“ von Karl Marx folgten.

„Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.“
Ebenda, S. 9.

Der Titel stammt ursprünglich von Georg Lukács, der den Mitgliedern der Frankfurter Schule vorwarf, dass diese in einem schönen Hotel, das „mit allem Komfort ausgestattet“ – am Rande des Abgrunds, des Nichts, der Absurdität, dem „Grand Hotel Abgrund“ residierten, dessen früherer Bewohner schon Arthur Schopenhauer war.

1969 kamen die Anführer der Studentenbewegung Rudi Dutschke und Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Sie wollten die kritische Theorie in die Praxis überführen. Der daraus abgeleitete Aufruf überstieg bei weitem die Grenzen zivilen Ungehorsams. Es war ein gewaltsam-autoritärer Aufruf zum Handeln – befreiende Aktionen. Jürgen Habermas wählte dafür die Bezeichnung „linker Faschismus“. Später zog er den Ausdruck zurück.

Lediglich Herbert Marcuse sympathisierte mit politisch militanten Aktionen und nahm in San Diego selbst an entsprechenden Aktivitäten teil.

Stewart Jeffries wagt die Vermutung, dass Walter Benjamin, der als Impulsgeber der Frankfurter Schule gilt, wenn er sich nicht in Paris 1940 das Leben genommen, sondern die Studentenbewegung noch erlebt hätte, auf Seiten, der auf die Barrikaden steigenden Studenten gewesen wäre.

Inhalt „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
Stuart Jeffries erzählt die Gründungsgeschichte des Frankfurter „Instituts für Sozialforschung“, der Menschen dahinter und die Geschichte des Gebäudes. Die Protagonisten sind Walter Benjamin, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas. Gleichzeitig lässt er den Leser an deren Leben teilhaben. Walter Benjamin, seine Flucht nach Paris und sein Tod aus verzweifelnder Angst sind genauso Teil der Geschichte, wie das Leben und Wirken der Philosophen im Exil der USA. Habermas und Horkheimer kehrten Anfang der 1950er Jahre wieder nach Deutschland zurück, während Fromm und Marcuse in den USA blieben.

Der Aufbau „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
Stuart Jeffries „Grand Hotel Abgrund“ hat sieben Teile, die zeitlich bis auf den ersten Teil 1900-1920, in Dekaden angeordnet sind.

Der Autor benennt chronologisch die Ziele der Frankfurter Schule, die Grenzen des Positivismus, des Dialektischen Materialismus und der Phänomenologie, mithilfe der kritischen Philosophie Kants, Hegels Dialektik und Marxscher Schriften zu überwinden.

Die Entstehungsgeschichte „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
Der erste Forschungsschwerpunkt war die Untersuchung sozialer Phänomene. „Studien über Autorität und Familie“ und „Die autoritäre Persönlichkeit“.

Der zweite Forschungsschwerpunkt war die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Wesen des Marxismus selbst. Daraus folgte das Konzept der kritischen Theorie, die Jürgen Habermas in den 1960er Jahren auf eine neue Stufe stellte.

Die Frankfurter Schule erstellt eine kritische Gesellschaftsanalyse, die den Zusammenhang zwischen subjektiver Vernunft und kapitalistischer Gesellschaftsordnung beleuchtet.

Die wichtigste Frage überhaupt war wohl, warum das Denken der Aufklärung, in die Barbarei des Nationalsozialismus umschlagen konnte.

Das Institut arbeitete interdisziplinär mit Psychoanalyse (Erich Fromm), Philosophie (Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno), Kulturtheorie (Walter Benjamin) und Soziologie (Leo Löwenthal) in Frankfurt und während der NS-Zeit im amerikanischen Exil an einer umfassenden Gesellschaftskritik.

„Die Dialektik der Aufklärung„
Das Hauptwerk „Die Dialektik der Aufklärung“ entstand in den 1940er-Jahren im Exil. Die Aufklärung endete in neuer Unterwerfung und Abhängigkeit, das wird auf die Vorherrschaft eines Vernunftideals zurückgeführt, dessen Ziel vollständige technische Naturbeherrschung, auch der menschlichen Natur (Bedürfnisse, Leidenschaften) war, das den Menschen überrollte. Adorno und Horkheimer zeigen ihre Theorien anhand Homers „Odyssee“.

Die Kritische Theorie „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
In der kritischen Theorie fließen die Denkrichtungen von Karl Marx – Kritik der politischen Ökonomie und der Psychoanalyse von Sigmund Freud zusammen, weshalb sie auch als Freudo-Marxismus bezeichnet wird.

Die religionsphilosophische These: Gott ist eine falsche Hypothese, Theologie ist sinnlos. Für Horkheimer und Habermas steht fest, dass Gott durch Geschichte, moderne Naturwissenschaften (Evolutionismus, Darwinismus und dogmatischen Marxismus widerlegt. Das Christentum sei eine Lüge.

Die Epoche des metaphysischen Denkens ist vergangen. Gott ist in der kritischen Theorie nur ein Phantasieprodukt der Menschen. Die „Moderne“ als Epoche des Massen-Atheismus. „Gott ist tot.“ Die Wiederbelebung des Nietschezianischen Atheismus.

Schon Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus und der christliche Schriftsteller Fjodor Dostojewski thematisieren die daraus folgenden Probleme, wie dass der absolute Bezugspunkt, die höchste Instanz fehlt, in ihren Schriften Gottes Tod. Warum sollen wir gut sein? Wenn Gott tot ist, ist alles erlaubt.

Ideologie ist eine der Grundlagen sozialer Strukturen.

Grand Hotel Abgrund Stuart Jeffries
Kritik „Grand Hotel Abgrund“
„Doch sind die Texte aus dem Kreis der Frankfurter Schule nutzbringend auch für uns, die wir gegenwärtig in einer anderen Art von Dunkel leben. Wir leben nicht in einer Hölle, die von den Denkern der Frankfurter Schule geschaffen wurde – vielmehr in einer Hölle, die sie uns helfen kann zu verstehen. Es ist also ein guter Zeitpunkt, ihre Flaschenpost zu öffnen.“
Ebenda. S. 21.

Mit diesen Worten endet das Vorwort und beginnt meine Kritik. Es könnte keinen besseren Zeitpunkt geben, die Flaschenpost zu öffnen. Unsere politische Lage ist schwierig und wir sollten uns wieder auf unsere Vernunft und unsere Werte besinnen und nicht vergessen, dass die Freiheit unser höchstes Gut ist.

Stuart Jeffries „Grand Hotel Abgrund“ liest sich genauso spannend wie ein Roman. Er stellt die Fakten dar und lässt seine Protagonisten Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse und Erich Fromm zum Leben erwachen und ihre Thesen erläutern.

Ich hatte mich mit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Aufklärungsbegriff aus der „Phänomenologie des Geistes. Kampf der Aufklärung mit dem Aberglauben“ beschäftigt. Aber während Hegel das Problem dialektisch auflöst, erklärt Adorno in „Die Dialektik der Aufklärung“, dieselbe für gescheitert.

Kann man das Projekt „Aufklärung“ überhaupt jemals als beendet betrachten oder sollten wir den Weg zur „Aufklärung“ besser als einen Habitus ansehen, den wir jeden Tag einüben müssen? Gerade in unserer Zeit

Dieser Artikel ist lediglich eine laienhafte Darstellung der Frankfurter Schule und ihrer Philosophie. Zugrunde gelegt war „Grand Hotel Abgrund“ von Stuart Jeffries. Nicht berücksichtigt wurde Jürgen Habermas Richtungswechsel zur Sprachphilosophie, die negative Kritik und „Die Befreiung der Sexualität“ und weitere. Auch diese Themen werden in vorliegendem Buch beleuchtet.

„Grand Hotel Abgrund“ gefällt mir sehr. Das liegt mit daran, dass ich vor einigen Monaten „Zeit der Zauberer“ von Wolfram Eilenberger gelesen und rezensiert habe, das die Zeit der 1920er-Jahre und Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein und Ernst Cassirer beleuchtet. Sozusagen war „Grand Hotel Abgrund“ nur ein Schritt weiter im philosophischen Weltgeschehen.

Vielleicht konnte ich im Sinne der Aufklärung – engl. Enlightment, ein wenig Licht ins Thema bringen und zum kritischen Lesen und Denken ermuntern.

„Sapere Aude! – Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen.“
Immanuel Kant.

Dieses Buch ist ein kleines Mosaikstück auf dem Weg der Aufklärung, das ich wärmstens empfehle.

[Bertrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

We hear much talk of the Frankfurt School lately, and I think an accessible book on the subject was more than warranted. Stretching over most of the XXth century, and from Leninist orthodoxy to public-sphere liberalism, the twists and turns of this current nearly preclude talks of a ‘school’.
The first half of the book leaves much room for Benjamin, whose Frankfurtness is debatable. This makes for a thrilling read, since his short but intense life has understandably inspired many novels, but leaves little space for other Marxist precursors (Lukacs most of all, is regrettably discreet). Adorno and, later on, Marcuse, get the attention they deserve, while Horkheimer at the close of the book remain a bit of a mystery. Other peripheral members such as Neumann are only brushed, but Fromm’s description might catch the attention of even hardened freudophobics like me.
It is well written, and strikes a balance between ideas and narration which I thought was very well suited to our age. There is a little gossiping or an unexpected aside every time the flow of history slows down, and as many other reviewers note, the book is a page-turner. I did not find the repetitions annoying, and I think they will be helpful reminders to readers truly unfamiliar with the subject.
While Jeffries mammoth biography does a good job at tracing the immediate context in which those thinkers were writing, notions like Adorno’s negative dialectics appear somewhat maimed because of the author’s reluctance to delve further in the XIXth century.
Neither ‘dialectical’ nor ‘materialism’ for example, get a proper treatment. While concerns of size and audience might explain this a little, I suspect that references to Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ thought juxtaposed with insistence on his material method could be quite confusing if I were not already vaguely familiar with those issues.
The cultural context however is enticingly depicted, sprinkled with occasional outings in contemporary issues, most of them relevant. I noticed a few minor mix-ups on the cultural front (I do not believe Loos was ever a member of the Bauhaus) and Adorno’s dismissal of jazz was (as ever) dismissed with a smirk, but other than that it is excellent.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A mini-boom in popularising critical theory books - including graphic guides, dictionaries, perhaps even this book - is one perverse consequence of the global capitalist crisis..."

Arguably superficial, but thoroughly engaging and accessible look at the lives and (often notoriously abstruse) ideas of all the key members of the Frankfurt School from the Institute's beginnings to its contemporary incarnation. Traces the lineage of the group's work (e.g. through Hegel, Marx, Freud, Benjamin, etc.), revealing along the way the wide variety of divergence both internally (e.g. the recurring questions of theory vs. praxis; of how to conduct social science; or of how to interpret or synthesize Freud/Marx) and externally (e.g. a bewildering variety of logical positivists, postmodernists, literary theorists, politicians, pop stars, etc.).

The biographical tidbits are sometimes wonderful (e.g. Adorno's time with Charlie Chaplin or with Thomas Mann for example), but sadly thin on the ground.

Having recently finished Reiner Stach's awe-inspiring biographical trilogy on Kafka, it was immediately apparent how impoverished Jeffrie's research was in comparison. The footnotes are almost all secondary sources, and the reports of his interviews with living people are temporizing if not condescending (e.g. he repeatedly calls Habermas a Pollyanna - but spends almost as much effort musing about his "Twitterjacking" as he does engaging with his ideas). On the other hand, this is a work of entertainment rather than dialectical analysis, and Jeffries admirably spends most of his time deftly summarizing thousands of pages of difficult writing without wasting time inflating the philosophical corpus with his own hot takes.

All in all, this account provides the reader with a good idea of the contributions and contradictions of critical theory, and shows decade-by-decade how it evolved in shifting social and political contexts from Nazi Germany to Hollywood.