Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

By Stuart Jeffries

“Marvelously entertaining, exciting and informative.” —Guardian
“An engaging and accessible history.” —New York Review of Books

This group biography is “an exhilarating page-turner” and “outstanding critical introduction” to the work and legacy of the Frankfurt School, and the great 20th-century thinkers who created it (Washington Post).

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, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784785710

Reviews for Grand Hotel Abyss

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars
Tandem read with Joel, who was quick to question Jeffries' style, a wonky all too clever sort of exposition qua allusion. There were certainly times to grit one's teeth. I agree with others that it is a page-turner, this is a surprise given the thematics. This is an episodic chronicle of the Institute of Social Research a Frankfurt think tank tasked in its inception in 1920 with the query why wasn't the revolution successful in Germany? The book’s title refers to a musing by Lukács that the FS guys (gents only for a long time) were ensconced in a retreat from the gruesome reality they were committed to understanding, if not ending.

The book opens with the claim that the founders of the Institute were all the egg headed sons of assimilated Jews, a group of bookish sorts who uniformly deeply disappointed their fathers. Thus begins the lifelong crusade to wed Marx and Freud. Biographic stretches link this narrative, largely one of Walter Benjamin. Thoughts on the public/private, Brecht and suicide proliferate, often linking with Jeffries posturing on Beckett or Woody Allen. This becomes part and parcel of this meandering history. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas gather most of the attention. The thesis remains a social critique without any ability to explain or empower. This is very Monday-morning but it does appear rough to kick the institute for not only not explaining Germany's inability to follow Marx's historical imperative but how instead it went so horribly wrong with the advent of the National Socialist party. Adorno/Horkheimer decided after the Shoah that perhaps the Enlightenment itself and the regulation of Logos was to blame. This lead to some tricky thinking where Adorno/Horkheimer proposed that only intermittent flashes by solitary thinkers could pierce this damning delusion. Marcuse meanwhile became the Dylan of Theory (at least outside of Francophone academia) until he may or may not have collapsed under his own contradictions -- which left Habermas as carrying the fire and deciding that compassion of a religious ethic may be necessary in the pits of canine competition. This was enjoyable but somehow wanting. I do wish to embark on a further Benjamin endeavor, this time focused on Baudelaire.

[shrike58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Even though I essentially have a MS in sociology over time I mostly managed to avoid coming into serious contact with the austerely intellectual men (and they were all men) of the Institute for Social Research, but there comes a time for everything, particularly when personalities who I know aren't particularly intellectual are bandying around "The Authoritarian Personality" like it was some sort of news. What particularly makes this book is that Jeffries takes these thinkers seriously, but no more seriously than they deserve, as the vista of, essentially, a bunch of rich kids playing with revolutionary thought while at the same time never actually engaging with real proletarians is certainly laughable. That said much of this book is also as serious as death, as the great totalitarian specter is still with us, plus the fear that what makes us human is also inadequate to cope with the great systems of consumption and communication, and "security" that we've constructed. The author ends the book on a somewhat jaundiced note, as Jeffries sets aside his well-honed sense of irony, observing that as we stumble through the shattered landscape of the failing neoconservative globalist system sometimes a cold wake-up call is the best you can do; the Frankfurt School never purported to do anything more than that, but they tried to do it rigorously.

[matt.kay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good overview of the important thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

[bill.lavender · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an extremely informative analysis of the Frankfurt school, using a mix of scholarship and biography to examine in great detail the beginnings of modern critical theory.

[susanbooks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I agree with the other reviewers who note this book's strength's and flaws. I'd add that this book is painfully androcentric. For instance, in the first chapter, women belonging to men as sexual property is unproblematically mentioned and unexamined (39). Later, the author points out how odd it is that there were no prominent Franfurt School women theorists, but concludes that it's fine: a paragraph in Adorno is feminist enough (234-5). Find an intersectional book on the Frankfurt School. This one is so skewed as to be near-worthless in its unreliability.

[mattmackane · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good overview of the important thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A good popular summary of the guiding lights of the Frankfurt School. There are passages of excellent summary, such as exergeceses on Walter Benjamin's work, that are interspersed with longueurs that use biography to explain philosophy. For all that, I can't think of a better entry point into the thought and contradictions of this group.