This brilliant group biography asks who were the Frankfurt School and
why they matter today 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.
Grand Hotel Abyss : The Lives of the Frankfurt School - Stuart Jeffries
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£10.99