The German Genius

of its own “insoluble contradictions.”
    In fact, it soon became clear that, despite the activities of theoreticians like Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), it wasn’t communism that was appearing from the rubble of war in Germany, but fascism. 9 Some Marxists were so disillusioned by this that they abandoned Marxism altogether. Others remained convinced of the theory, despite the evidence. But there was a third group who wished to remain Marxists but felt that Marxist theory needed reconstructing if it were to remain credible. This group assembled in Frankfurt in the late 1920s and made a name for itself as the Frankfurt school, with its own institute—founded by a millionaire interested in Marxism—in the city. Thanks to the Nazis, the institute didn’t stay there long, but the name stuck. 10
    The three best-known members of the school were Theodor Adorno (1903–69), a man who “seemed equally at home in philosophy, sociology and music,” Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), a philosopher and sociologist, less innovative than Adorno but perhaps more dependable, and the political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who in time would become the most famous of all. Horkheimer was the director; in addition to his other talents, he was also a financial wizard who brilliantly manipulated the investments of the institute, both in Germany and afterward in the United States. In addition there were Leo Lowenthal, the literary critic, Franz Neumann, a legal philosopher, and Friedrich Pollock, who was one of those who argued—against Marx and to Lenin’s fury—that there were no compelling reasons why capitalism should collapse. 11
    In its early years the school was known for its revival of the concept of alienation but the Frankfurt school developed this idea so that it became above all a psychological entity and one, moreover, that was not necessarily, or primarily, the result of the capitalist mode of production. Alienation, for the Frankfurt school, was more a product of all of modern life. This view shaped the school’s second and perhaps most enduring preoccupation: the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism. Marcuse took the lead to begin with, though Erich Fromm wrote several books on the subject later. Marcuse regarded Freudianism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. Freud argued that repression necessarily increases with the progress of civilization; therefore, aggressiveness must be produced and released in ever greater quantities. So, just as Marx had predicted that revolution was inevitable, a dislocation that capitalism must bring on itself, so, in Marcuse’s hands, Freudianism produced a parallel, more personal backdrop to this scenario, accounting for a build-up of destructiveness—self-destruction and the destruction of others.
    The third contribution of the Frankfurt school was a more general analysis of the vital question of the day: “What, precisely, has gone wrong in Western civilisation, that at the very height of technical progress we see the negation of human progress: dehumanisation, brutalisation, the poisoning of the biosphere, and so on? How has this happened?” To try to answer this question, they looked back as far as the Enlightenment and then traced events and ideas forward to the twentieth century. They claimed to discern a “dialectic,” an interplay between progressive and repressive periods in the West. Moreover, each repressive period was usually greater than the one before, owing to the growth of technology under capitalism, to the point where, in the late 1920s, “the incredible social wealth that had been assembled in Western civilisation, mainly as the achievement of capitalism, was increasingly used for preventing rather than constructing a more decent and human society.” The school saw fascism as a natural development in the long history of capitalism after the Enlightenment, and in the late 1920s earned the respect of colleagues with its prediction that fascism would grow. The school’s scholarship most often took the form of close readings of original material, from which views uncontaminated by previous analyses were formed. This proved very creative in terms of the understanding produced, and the Frankfurt method became known as critical theory. It was, in is way, an updating of the higher criticism.
    T HE K ING OF “S ECRET G ERMANY”
     
    The Psychoanalytic Institute, the Warburg Institute, the German Institute for Politics, and the Frankfurt school