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# Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

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“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.

Review: Superb. - This is a superb book on a complex subject. The title comes from Lukacs, who suggested that the members of the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, et al. lived in a lovely hotel from whose windows they contemplated what, for them, was an abyss. The group consisted of social scientists who attempted to draw inspiration from Marx and find an alternative to capitalism. They did so during parlous times. The experiences of the ‘proletariat’ under Soviet communism and National Socialism were anything but encouraging. As we recovered from the second world war the successes of capitalism neutralized any desire for revolution; at the same time, the emoluments of capitalism helped to conceal the manner in which it could bring subtler forms of alienation. The book is organized historically and formally ends with the complex departures from Frankfurt School orthodoxy represented by the thought of Habermas. In a kind of coda the author ends with a very clever look at Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, in particular the scene in which Chip Lambert liquidates his library, selling off his collection of Frankfurt School books and more recent books of capital-T Theory. Chip needs some money to impress his new girlfriend and he has departed from the groves of academe to seek a career in screenwriting. Jeffries uses this passage as a springboard to an incisive discussion of Critical Theory in the 21st century. The reader should be wary of some of the book’s jacket blurbs and other reviews. They speak of the book as “an exhilarating page-turner,” and as “funny.” Jeffries has a great sense of the ironic and a full appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the Frankfurt School ‘project’, but this is not a leg-slapping beach book. This is serious and significant (but not ponderous or obscurantist) intellectual history. Similarly, his subtitle, “The Lives of the Frankfurt School” is spot-on but potentially misleading. It does indeed trace the various incarnations of the School and the writings of its members and it does provide trenchant anecdotes about the members’ personal lives, but this is not a Kitty Kelly exposé and it does not focus on the members’ lives to the exclusion of their work. I would say that it offers the perfect balance; every book on philosophy needs to balance out the personal experiences of a thinker with that individual’s thought. It is important to know that Hume was a genial and decent fellow who gave up professional opportunities in order to be faithful to his beliefs, just as it is important to know that Kant (like Jane Austen, e.g.) never travelled to a significant degree and whose favorite music (despite the Critique of Judgment’s vast influence on aesthetic theory) consisted of Prussian marches. The best feature of this book is the author’s balanced viewpoint. It is often said that great biography requires personal sympathy on the part of the author (though Robert Caro stands as a rather prominent exception), but that sympathy must be balanced with objectivity. Jeffries sees all of the foibles of the Frankfurt School, commenting on Benjamin in the following way: “If the Frankfurt School was the last hurrah of German romanticism, then Benjamin was its emblem, revealing the group in all its contradictions—Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would have had nothing to write about” (p. 167). At the same time he concludes with a discussion of contemporary capitalism, saying that in “such a customized culture, one that abolishes serendipity, makes a mockery of dignity and turns human liberation into a terrifying prospect, the best writings of the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us—not least about the impossibility and the necessity of thinking differently” (p. 392). While Jeffries focuses on large, global corporations, I think of a phenomenon closer to home. As I write this, reports are circulating about the University of Virginia’s desire to cut their library’s shelf space by 40-70%. If one seeks an example of an assault on serendipity, one need look no farther than what the contemporary university is doing to itself. My only reservation concerning the book is the fact that it has no illustrations, except for a wonderful picture of Adorno on the book’s spine, extending his wrist and offering a ‘thumb’s down’. Highly recommended.
Review: STIMULATING-DEPRESSING - For Rulers: Priming Political Leaders for Saving Humanity from Itself This is an outstanding presentation of the Frankfurt School and the evolution of the thinking of its main heroes, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and – one generation later -- Jürger Habermas. Shorter comments on intellectual partners, such as Bertolt Brecht, complete the emerging picture. With minor exceptions, theses thinkers avoided personal activism, provoking György Lukács to charge the members of the Frankfurt School with “taking up residence in what he called ‘the Grand Hotel Abyss.’ This beautiful hotel was, he wrote, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity… musing on the suffering of the world from a safe distance. ‘The daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments’, Lukács wrote sarcastically, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.… For Lukács, the Frankfurt School had abandoned the necessary connection between theory and praxis, where the latter means the realisation in action of the former” (p. 2). But Lukács was wrong. Taking some distance from “praxis” was, I think, essential for the high-quality thinking of the Frankfurt School. As Adorno put it “now was not the time for the easy posturing of action, but for the hard work of thinking… theory was not reactionary retreat into a Grand Hotel Abyss, but principled withdrawal into a fortress of thought, a citadel from which, periodically, radical jeremiads were issued” (p. 4). The Frankfurt School thinkers have a paradoxical and then harsh personal history, starting with dependence on money which their parents made as capitalist and continuing with escaping from Nazi Germany as refugees. This background is interestingly explored in the book, as is its impact on their reasoning. But, much more significantly, the thinking by the founding generation of the Frankfurt School, in Germany and in US exile, was shaped by five shocks, which demolished classical Marxism and much more: (1) The ease with which the proletarian supported World War One and much of German society supported Nazism. (2) Successes of Capitalism in eroding the proletariat and, in effect, made it disappear in Western countries as a potentially revolutionary class. (3) Total failure of the enlightenment in preventing the horrors of genocide and in making “reason,” in the double meanings of Vernunft (critical reason) and Verstand (instrumental reason) into a reliable grounding of compelling norms (as attempted paradigmatically by Kant). (4) The Capitalist “commodification” of humans reinforced by the “culture industry. (5) Difficulties to overcome the pessimisms of Freud in his “Civilizations and Its Discontents” essay, including misgivings about the effects of “sexual liberation.” To these must be added the growing doubts of the second generation Frankfurt School superstar Habermas on the validity of his “public sphere” paradigm, based on his belief “that through rational communication we can overcome our biases, our egocentric and ethnocentric perspectives, come to a consensus or community of reason, and develop thereby what the American philosopher George Herbert Mead… called the ‘larger self’” (p. 358). But “(towards the end of his life) “what Habermas wanted to tell us about secular reason, which he had spent most of his career extolling, and indeed about the modern secular state, was that both lack what religious authority offers the faithful – not just salvation but, he argued, virtuous lives”) p. 379). I agree that “the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us – not least about the impossibility and the necessity of thinking differently” (p. 392). This is all the more a fateful necessity taking into account emerging science and technology, which are sure to make it quite easy to end the existence of Homo sapiens as a species. Till then we should take to heart the observation that “Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy – there’s something wrong with them (p. 387). To learn to share this conclusion and struggle with its implications – pondering this book is strongly recommended. Professor Yehezkel Dror

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #246,159 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #147 in Philosopher Biographies #990 in History & Theory of Politics #3,020 in Military Leader Biographies |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 241 Reviews |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Superb.
*by R***Z on June 8, 2018*

This is a superb book on a complex subject. The title comes from Lukacs, who suggested that the members of the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, et al. lived in a lovely hotel from whose windows they contemplated what, for them, was an abyss. The group consisted of social scientists who attempted to draw inspiration from Marx and find an alternative to capitalism. They did so during parlous times. The experiences of the ‘proletariat’ under Soviet communism and National Socialism were anything but encouraging. As we recovered from the second world war the successes of capitalism neutralized any desire for revolution; at the same time, the emoluments of capitalism helped to conceal the manner in which it could bring subtler forms of alienation. The book is organized historically and formally ends with the complex departures from Frankfurt School orthodoxy represented by the thought of Habermas. In a kind of coda the author ends with a very clever look at Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, in particular the scene in which Chip Lambert liquidates his library, selling off his collection of Frankfurt School books and more recent books of capital-T Theory. Chip needs some money to impress his new girlfriend and he has departed from the groves of academe to seek a career in screenwriting. Jeffries uses this passage as a springboard to an incisive discussion of Critical Theory in the 21st century. The reader should be wary of some of the book’s jacket blurbs and other reviews. They speak of the book as “an exhilarating page-turner,” and as “funny.” Jeffries has a great sense of the ironic and a full appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the Frankfurt School ‘project’, but this is not a leg-slapping beach book. This is serious and significant (but not ponderous or obscurantist) intellectual history. Similarly, his subtitle, “The Lives of the Frankfurt School” is spot-on but potentially misleading. It does indeed trace the various incarnations of the School and the writings of its members and it does provide trenchant anecdotes about the members’ personal lives, but this is not a Kitty Kelly exposé and it does not focus on the members’ lives to the exclusion of their work. I would say that it offers the perfect balance; every book on philosophy needs to balance out the personal experiences of a thinker with that individual’s thought. It is important to know that Hume was a genial and decent fellow who gave up professional opportunities in order to be faithful to his beliefs, just as it is important to know that Kant (like Jane Austen, e.g.) never travelled to a significant degree and whose favorite music (despite the Critique of Judgment’s vast influence on aesthetic theory) consisted of Prussian marches. The best feature of this book is the author’s balanced viewpoint. It is often said that great biography requires personal sympathy on the part of the author (though Robert Caro stands as a rather prominent exception), but that sympathy must be balanced with objectivity. Jeffries sees all of the foibles of the Frankfurt School, commenting on Benjamin in the following way: “If the Frankfurt School was the last hurrah of German romanticism, then Benjamin was its emblem, revealing the group in all its contradictions—Marxists without party, socialists dependent on capitalist money, beneficiaries of a society they sniffily disdained and without which they would have had nothing to write about” (p. 167). At the same time he concludes with a discussion of contemporary capitalism, saying that in “such a customized culture, one that abolishes serendipity, makes a mockery of dignity and turns human liberation into a terrifying prospect, the best writings of the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us—not least about the impossibility and the necessity of thinking differently” (p. 392). While Jeffries focuses on large, global corporations, I think of a phenomenon closer to home. As I write this, reports are circulating about the University of Virginia’s desire to cut their library’s shelf space by 40-70%. If one seeks an example of an assault on serendipity, one need look no farther than what the contemporary university is doing to itself. My only reservation concerning the book is the fact that it has no illustrations, except for a wonderful picture of Adorno on the book’s spine, extending his wrist and offering a ‘thumb’s down’. Highly recommended.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ STIMULATING-DEPRESSING
*by Y***R on May 3, 2018*

For Rulers: Priming Political Leaders for Saving Humanity from Itself This is an outstanding presentation of the Frankfurt School and the evolution of the thinking of its main heroes, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and – one generation later -- Jürger Habermas. Shorter comments on intellectual partners, such as Bertolt Brecht, complete the emerging picture. With minor exceptions, theses thinkers avoided personal activism, provoking György Lukács to charge the members of the Frankfurt School with “taking up residence in what he called ‘the Grand Hotel Abyss.’ This beautiful hotel was, he wrote, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity… musing on the suffering of the world from a safe distance. ‘The daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments’, Lukács wrote sarcastically, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.… For Lukács, the Frankfurt School had abandoned the necessary connection between theory and praxis, where the latter means the realisation in action of the former” (p. 2). But Lukács was wrong. Taking some distance from “praxis” was, I think, essential for the high-quality thinking of the Frankfurt School. As Adorno put it “now was not the time for the easy posturing of action, but for the hard work of thinking… theory was not reactionary retreat into a Grand Hotel Abyss, but principled withdrawal into a fortress of thought, a citadel from which, periodically, radical jeremiads were issued” (p. 4). The Frankfurt School thinkers have a paradoxical and then harsh personal history, starting with dependence on money which their parents made as capitalist and continuing with escaping from Nazi Germany as refugees. This background is interestingly explored in the book, as is its impact on their reasoning. But, much more significantly, the thinking by the founding generation of the Frankfurt School, in Germany and in US exile, was shaped by five shocks, which demolished classical Marxism and much more: (1) The ease with which the proletarian supported World War One and much of German society supported Nazism. (2) Successes of Capitalism in eroding the proletariat and, in effect, made it disappear in Western countries as a potentially revolutionary class. (3) Total failure of the enlightenment in preventing the horrors of genocide and in making “reason,” in the double meanings of Vernunft (critical reason) and Verstand (instrumental reason) into a reliable grounding of compelling norms (as attempted paradigmatically by Kant). (4) The Capitalist “commodification” of humans reinforced by the “culture industry. (5) Difficulties to overcome the pessimisms of Freud in his “Civilizations and Its Discontents” essay, including misgivings about the effects of “sexual liberation.” To these must be added the growing doubts of the second generation Frankfurt School superstar Habermas on the validity of his “public sphere” paradigm, based on his belief “that through rational communication we can overcome our biases, our egocentric and ethnocentric perspectives, come to a consensus or community of reason, and develop thereby what the American philosopher George Herbert Mead… called the ‘larger self’” (p. 358). But “(towards the end of his life) “what Habermas wanted to tell us about secular reason, which he had spent most of his career extolling, and indeed about the modern secular state, was that both lack what religious authority offers the faithful – not just salvation but, he argued, virtuous lives”) p. 379). I agree that “the Frankfurt School still have much to teach us – not least about the impossibility and the necessity of thinking differently” (p. 392). This is all the more a fateful necessity taking into account emerging science and technology, which are sure to make it quite easy to end the existence of Homo sapiens as a species. Till then we should take to heart the observation that “Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy – there’s something wrong with them (p. 387). To learn to share this conclusion and struggle with its implications – pondering this book is strongly recommended. Professor Yehezkel Dror

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellent and timely study of the Frankfurt School and their studies of Germany before and after WWII.
*by L***K on January 27, 2017*

Grand Hotel Abyss is an excellent book, well written and researched. It is probably not for a beginner in Critical Theory but if you know some of the work you will find this interesting. While it focuses on Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin it gives a useful discussion of Fromm and the others. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in our current political situation. As the author takes great pains to point out they wrestled with the dilemma of the German working class supporting Hitler. Much the same could be ask d about the 2016 election.

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