Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

Marvelously entertaining exciting and informative. Guardian An engaging and accessible history. New York Review of Books This group biography is an exhilarating page-turner and outstanding critical introduction to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post). 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 workthe incomplete Arcades Projectin 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 studywhether it was film music ideas or consumerismthe Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.