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On the lives of the Frankfurt School

In the Irish Times, Andrew Gallix reviews Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries, a book that goes behind the daunting intellectual facade of figures like Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin to explore their personal lives. As Gallix writes, one of the most refreshing aspects of Jeffries’s book is the humor he finds in the idiosyncrasies and small hypocrisies of the uber-serious Frankfurt School men. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Humour (“to get dialectical for a moment”) is one of the most unexpected facets of this book devoted to hard-core German intellectuals. Benjamin’s somewhat ludicrous resemblance to Groucho Marx or Charlie Chaplin is remarked on, and a quotation from his Neapolitan peregrinations elicits the following gloss: “It’s hard to tell in this passage whether Walter Benjamin is being given directions or being propositioned. Either way, he seems to like it.” And Herbert Marcuse’s meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre (above) at La Coupole is recounted in hilarious detail.

His “group biography” is an intellectual saga. Readers looking for upskirt pictures of Hannah Arendt will be sorely disappointed: titillation in these rarefied climes is of a purely cerebral nature. The infamous Busenaktion of 1969,when Adorno was surrounded by three female students who “bared their breasts and scattered rose and tulip petals over him”, barely raises an eyebrow. A benign, possibly enviable form of protest to be faced with, in theory, but one that proved profoundly hurtful in praxis.

Commendably, Jeffries only ever adduces private matters to highlight glaring discrepancies between rhetoric and reality. A prime example is the highly conventional lifestyle led by Marcuse, despite publishing works “indicting bourgeois repression”.

The New Left darling’s fondness for a stuffed hippo is as close as we get to tittle-tattle. Yet even this cuddly-toy fetish proves significant, highlighting how some of the last century’s finest minds were also overgrown children. Incapable of making himself a cup of coffee, Benjamin was bankrolled by his parents until “well into his thirties”. Marcuse could neither cook nor drive. Adorno is described as a “child prodigy who never grew up (because he didn’t have to)”. Few of them did, given their wealthy backgrounds and the women – conspicuous by their absence at the Institute for Social Research, to give the Frankfurt School its proper name – who waited on them at home. Practice was never the school’s forte; nor, to be fair, was it ever meant to be.

Image: Theodor Adorno in Rome.

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