Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

by Stuart Jeffries

Overview

“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 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, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784785697
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	09/26/2017
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	454,821
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Against the Current 1

Part I 1900-1920 13

1 Condition: Critical 15

2 Fathers and Sons, and Other Conflicts 33

Part II The 1920s 65

3 The World Turned Upside Down 67

4 A Bit of the Other 97

Part III The 1930s 123

5 Show Us the Way to the Next Whiskey Bar 125

6 The Power of Negative Thinking 137

7 In the Crocodile's Jaws 159

8 Modernism and All That Jazz 175

9 A New World 191

Part IV The 1940s 209

10 The Road to Port Bon 211

11 In League with the Devil 220

12 The Fight Against Fascism 247

Part V The 1950s 259

13 The Ghost Sonata 261

14 The Liberation of Eros 280

Part VI The 1960s 301

15 Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers 303

16 Philosophising with Molotov Cocktails 325

Part VII Back From the Abyss - Habermas and Critical Theory After the 1960s 351

17 The Frankfurt Spider 353

18 Consuming Passions: Critical Theory in the New Millennium 383

Further Reading 393

Notes 399

Index 429

Editorial Reviews

Marvellously entertaining, exciting and informative.”
—John Banville, Guardian (“Best Books of 2016”)

“An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School.”
—New York Review of Books

“This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner … Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“Stuart Jeffries has produced a compelling and politically pressing group portrait of the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School. Their thinking has never seemed less forbidding and more inspiring.”
—Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking

“Stuart Jeffries’s intelligent, accessible new book reminds us of the value of critical thinking.”
—Globe and Mail

“A fractious Europe, a failing currency, a challenged economy, populist parties on the rise, a divided left, migration from the east, an atmosphere of fear combined with social and sexual liberalism. The parallels between Britain today and Germany in the 1920s may well make this a compelling moment to revisit those postwar German thinkers who gathered in what was known as the Frankfurt school for social research—something akin to a Marxist thinktank, though one whose policy papers and brilliant books fed future generations as much or more than their own … Little wonder, given the history of the 20th century, that the Frankfurt school gave us intellectual pessimism and negative dialectics. Jeffries’s biography is proof that such a legacy can be invigorating.”
—Lisa Appignanesi, Observer

“There is much to provoke interest and thought, even entertain, in Jeffries’ informative account of a group of highly intelligent observers and analysts of the imprisonment of humanity, both socially and individually by the corrosive system under which it suffers.”
—Morning Star

“Attempts something rather daring … An easily accessible, funny history of one of the more formidable intellectual movements of the twentieth century … an easy, witty, pacy read.”
—Owen Hatherley, Guardian

“Jeffries moves swiftly across the decades, retracing the jagged paths from the official founding of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 1924, through its years in exile in New York in the ’30s and Los Angeles in the ’40s and its hasty return to Frankfurt in the early postwar years, up to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prized protégé Jürgen Habermas and the Institute’s legacy today.”
−Noah Isenberg, Bookforum

“Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his subjects. A rich, intellectually meaty history.”
—Kirkus

“An impressive work of popular intellectual history.”
—Open Letters Monthly

“Intriguing and provocative … Jeffries has done a great service in producing such a readable, wry and detailed introduction.”
—Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

“[Gives] a step by step insight into what they thought … A lot of that stuff they wrote about still applies.”
—Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods), Guardian

“Equally sympathetic and critical, this book is sure to gain an enthusiastic reception from academics, armchair philosophers, and fellow travelers.”
—Library Journal

“A towering work of staggering scholarship.”
—Irish Times

“A valuable introduction to the lives and ideas of an influential group of twentieth century philosophers. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why much of what passed for radical thought in academia in the late twentieth century was so obscure and depressing.”
—Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism

“Humanises some of the most austere, (philosophically) negative, and intellectually intimidating thinkers of the past century … Jeffries draws out the intense and evolving relationship between these idiosyncratic theorists and their work, and eloquently illuminates the extent to which crude contingency shaped their philosophies and output. Jeffries succeeds in making this a truly personal, truly human illumination, be it presenting Marcuse’s letters addressing Adorno ‘dear Teddy,’ or Adorno signing off his missives to his parents affectionately, with ‘heartiest kisses from your Hippo King.’”
—Neal Harris,Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

From the Publisher

01/16/2017
In his erudite group biography of the thinkers who formed the core of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, English journalist Jeffries alternates between revealing the lives of these men and recounting the development of critical theory, the Frankfurt School’s most notable contribution to philosophy. Dividing the history of the Frankfurt Institute into decades, Jeffries effectively demonstrates how the school responded to the historical challenges of the 20th century. The school was founded in 1923 as an institute devoted to the application of Marxism as a scientific methodology, and it soon turned its critical eye to the rise of fascism. Although ostensibly Marxist, its members were heterodox and had little faith in the workers’ revolution. With few exceptions, they were also pessimists who did little to put their theories into action. After WWII, its thinkers—Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, et. al.—began to challenge the culture of denial in Germany and the hegemony of post-war capitalism, an effort that, under Jürgen Habermas’s direction, turned the Frankfurt Institute into a startlingly pro-democratic institution towards the end of the century. Jeffries writes in lucid prose and offers frequent asides situating these thinkers in modern contexts and issues, but the relevance of these men’s work often speaks for itself. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/01/2016
Guardian writer Jeffries blends wit, insight, and critical sympathy in this group biography of philosophy's Frankfurt School—predominantly German, Jewish, Marxist, middle-class intellectuals who decried capitalism's commodification of culture but felt impotent to defeat it. These individuals—almost all men—were a colorful company: brilliant pessimist Theodor Adorno, radical Herbert Marcuse, street-fighting Henryk Grossman, liberal Jürgen Habermas, Proustian reveries-prone Walter Benjamin, conservative-leaning Max Horkheimer, and other lions of critical theory. They founded the leftist Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. They fused dialectical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Their psyches were rooted in Jewish culture and Oedipal strivings. Philosopher György Lukács once dubbed them "salon Bolsheviks," living in a "grand hotel" of privilege on the edge of an existential "abyss." Yet, the movement's critical rethinking of everything, Jeffries argues, is still essential today, when the working class is no longer conscious of itself as a class and when Hollywood and Silicon Valley have commodified culture like no other time in history. VERDICT Equally sympathetic and critical, this book is sure to gain an enthusiastic reception from academics, armchair philosophers, and fellow travelers.—Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut

Library Journal

2016-07-19
Life inside the 20th-century’s reigning citadel of pessimism, as told through the lives and (often conflicting) philosophies of its key thinkers.Longtime Guardian cultural critic Jeffries (Mrs. Slocombe's Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly, 2000) provides an in-depth, decade-by-decade overview of one of the 20th century’s most significant think tanks. Founded in 1923, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was the domicile of critical theory, “the kind of radical rethinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavor.” The leading lights were all about revolt, both in rejecting the bourgeois world of their parents and in breaking down traditional forms of art. Walter Benjamin latched on to Dada, surrealism, and the advent of film montage; Theodor Adorno hailed Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and Bertolt Brecht’s experimental theater. On both the political and cultural fronts, the Frankfurt School was also an ivory tower from which to observe the final collapse of capitalism, with communism rising from the ashes. History, of course, played havoc with their every plan, which didn’t mean rejecting Marxism so much as constantly subjecting it to critical review. This history of the Frankfurt School, then, becomes very much a history on the evolution of Marxism over the past century, as Frankfurt philosophers who started out trying to overthrow society soon found themselves trying to change it from within. New questions surface: what does class struggle mean when the middle class (at least) has two cars, a TV, and a mortgage? Is consumerism a new kind of enslavement altogether? By the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, one of the school’s leading figures, was a New Left hero; Adorno, by contrast, had become their villain. After 9/11, Jürgen Habermas, one of the school’s leading theorists, was actually embracing religion. Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his subjects. A rich, intellectually meaty history.

Kirkus Reviews