[D66] Grand Hotel Abyss: Victoria Alle 7

[J.N.]

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    Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

by Stuart Jeffries <https://www.versobooks.com/authors/2086-stuart-jeffries>
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.

Hardback <https://www.versobooks.com/books/2284-grand-hotel-abyss>, 448
pages <https://www.versobooks.com/books/2284-grand-hotel-abyss>

ISBN: 9781784785680

20 September 2016


    Reviews

  *
    “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/
    <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stuart-jeffries/grand-hotel-abyss/>

  *
    “Equally sympathetic and critical, this book is sure to gain an
    enthusiastic reception from academics, arm chair philosophers, and
    fellow travelers.”

    – /Library Journal/

  *
    “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/
    <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/023_03/16515>

  *
    “Reading Jeffries’ group biography of the Frankfurt School
    underscores just how much has changed in the climate of intellectual
    debate over the past century….Jeffries has emerged from his research
    and writing as a bit of a critical theorist himself.”

    – Hans Rollman, /PopMatters/
    <http://www.popmatters.com/column/question-everything-frankfurt-school-interview-stuart-jeffries/P0/>

  *
    “An impressive work of popular intellectual history.”

    – /Open Letters Monthly/
    <http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/patricide-deferred/>

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