The Frankfurt School
Volume 1 | Issue 7 - Theory
Article by Liam Geoghegan. Edited by Harriet Di Francesco. Additional Research by Lauren Puckey.
I had barely heard of the Frankfurt School until a few months ago. By “barely heard of” what I really mean is I’m sure it came up in some of my core module lectures as an undergrad. But either I didn’t pay attention, didn’t think it was important, or just wasn’t there. Perhaps it was the latter, and University Karma has decided to come round and bite me on the backside, because a few months ago I had information about the Frankfurt School drilled into me.
The setting was not (thank God) a postgraduate core module lecture, but my own house. My girlfriend, in her final year of a German and Spanish degree, was taking a module on Modern German thought. Cue the Frankfurt School (well, a few members of it) and cue the ever-caring and ever-helpful boyfriend aiding revision for an exam. By the end of the week, I could have happily sat the paper myself and reeled off the main theories of Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin.
It’s lucky for me that I was given this week’s intensive course however unwilling I may have been at the time. A couple of weeks later it seemed that everything I read mentioned a member of the Frankfurt School or could be related to their thought. With ideas directly following on from Marx and Hegel I was bound to find the implicit references in some of the socio-economic and political history I was reading. However, the references continued into art history, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and even Latin American poetry. I wonder now just how many times had I previously overlooked the name of an influential German thinker and relied on the context to determine the meaning?
Obviously not every historian will have the same fortunate eye-opening experience as me, so for those of you who also missed your core module lectures here’s a bit about the school: The Frankfurt School is so-named, unsurprisingly, as it was based at the University of Frankfurt. Members of the Frankfurt School were not part of an official organisation as such, but were all based at, or had affiliation with, the Institute for Social Research at the university. The institute was founded in 1923 and the most notable work of the school was completed over the next couple of decades. To some extent the original group can be described as Neo-Marxists. They were critical both of capitalism and of Soviet Russian communism but were all heavily influenced by the theories of Marx. Many of the Frankfurt School theorists were Jewish and although the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany did not directly affect their theories it did cast a shadow over the institute. As a result the members considered moving out of the country.
Theodor Adorno, born in 1903, was actually expelled by the Nazis. He travelled to Oxford and then New York in exile. Max Horkheimer, with whom he wrote a number of works, fled to Geneva and later moved to America to escape Hitler’s regime. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that something had failed in the Western World and that Reason, the result and reward of the Enlightenment, had become irrational. The rapid development of science and technology was acentral theme of theirs especially in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), where they wrote that new technology and media was being used for the benefit of the upper class and the manipulation of the lower classes.
Herbert Marcuse, also from a Jewish family, left Germany in 1933 when Hitler first came to power. He too went to the United States where he wrote his most famous works, including One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse is today championed as the Father of the New Left, having influenced a number of theorists involved in the movement. His main ideas were centred on consumer culture and commodities as an extension of the self in capitalist societies. The one-dimensional man of his book refers to people who cannot see past these extensions or what they are told.
The final thinker that I learnt about is Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was not actually a member of the Frankfurt School but was closely associated with it. He was interested in the interrelation of art and technology, history, and modern literature. Perhaps his best-known theory is that the reproduction of artworks (aided by new technologies) meant that art no longer carries the same gravitas as in the past, as there was no unique and unavailable original piece. Benjamin referred to this lost quality as the “aura” of art, the unique appearance of a distance (however physically close something may be). This concept of the aura had its roots in religious ritual, when only top religious officials were allowed to see statues and paintings of gods. However, art was later secularised as was the aura. With the loss of the aura in the 20th century, Benjamin saw the ‘commodification’ of art.
It is Benjamin’s story that has the saddest ending. In his attempt to escape Nazi Germany in 1940, Benjamin and his group were obstructed at the French border. Aged 48, he committed suicide, preferring this to being captured.